Divorced, single and in his mid-30s, Sam Baar wasn’t comfortable with the bar scene or nightclubs. Yet the Phoenix computer technician still longed to meet someone and settle down.
So Baar went online and did what hundreds of other spouse-seeking men have done: He pursued a relationship in another country, and he found a wife.
Last November, Baar went to Cartagena, Colombia, with Phoenix-based A Foreign Affair, one of the largest international marriage brokers in the United States. On the first day, Baar said, he found the love of his life, and four days later he proposed.
On Aug. 25, he and his fiancée, Lucy, were married. “I wasn’t expecting this,” said Lucy Baar, 10 years his junior. “But I wanted to have a family and get married . … For me, everything is perfect.”
Sam Baar is among thousands of American men who have turned to a booming marriage-broker industry that uses the Internet to promote international romance tours. Over the past decade, the number of such brokers nationwide has grown from a handful to roughly 600, said Lynn Visson, a New York author and former professor who has studied the business.
Visson, who considers the method a superficial way to find a mate, said finding a foreign bride has become much easier because the Internet has allowed virtually anyone to open an agency online in a largely unregulated business.
Women’s rights groups and some Congress members are raising concerns about the foreign marriage-broker industry. The harshest critics point to the deaths of two mail-order brides in Washington state in 1995 and 2000 as examples of abuse. Proposed legislation would require the U.S. spouse to disclose information if he or she has a violent history or previous marriage.
“The women are the product, and they are treated like chattel,” said Layli Miller-Muro, executive director of the Tahirih Justice Center in Falls Church, Va., which helped craft the legislation. “The way many international marriage brokers operate is they are an easy conduit for predatory abusers to find the next victims.”
John Adams, president of A Foreign Affair, and his partners say their international dating service is as harmless as a “high school dance.” Each year, up to 12,000 American men find wives through for-profit international marriage brokers, say sponsors of the congressional legislation. Visson said the men are typically between 35 and 45, divorced or never married, and many are in the computer business. Most earn $50,000 to $80,000 a year, she said.
“They (men) have been very busy, completely zonked out or devoted to work, and they are too old for the bar scene,” Visson said. “So, where do you find someone?”
A Foreign Affair was among the pioneers in the industry when it began in February 1995. The company’s website has about 40,000 profiles of women from around the world who are looking for husbands, and the firm sells their addresses to men.
Adams estimates A Foreign Affair’s customers have up to an 80 percent marriage-success rate, compared with the 50 percent divorce rate in America.
Miller-Muro points to A Foreign Affair’s magazines, where many women are dressed in bikinis, low-cut tops and short skirts. A Foreign Affair advertises through word of mouth, plus on adult websites and in Penthouse magazine.
