gavinmac

Depends what you mean by "a lot better than Lisa." Good looking thirty-something year old sane American women aren't trawling Nigerian online dating sites looking for husbands.

So we have learned that Geoffrey is one of those "My girlfriend can't have any male friends" guys. Not a surprise. Why would a guy go to an online dating website featuring Russian women seeking American partners, and then connect with a Russian woman on the site, and call her his girlfriend, and fly all the way to Russia to see her, just to immediately start berating her about being a green card scamming whore who is just looking for a ticket to America?

I assume so. Nikki was younger, no kids, prettier, spoke better English. She could have even played the field and landed one of the rare good looking American guys in his 20s or early 30s on one of the international online dating websites.

He only communicates with her through the love scam website, where he had to pay $1-$5 a message and she gets a cut of that. And the fact that she has never given him any other way to contact him should have been a major red flag that she has no interest in ever meeting him. Oh, that and the fact he visited Ukraine three times before and she didn't show up.

We've discussed this on the episode-specific threads. Rose can buy an unlocked used smartphone in the Philippines for $20-$30. Then she can buy a prepaid 5GB data card for about $5 that will last her two months. It's only in the USA that we pay $75+ per month for mobile data.

I did a lot of traveling all over the world as a middle aged white guy, with particular emphasis on Southeast Asia. There's just a much bigger "hooker scene" geared towards white tourists in Thailand and the Philippines than there is in Russia. I've been to Russia 7 times, I'm not sure I ever met or saw a hooker. In the Philippines and Thailand, I would encounter dozens every night in certain parts of certain cities. There used to be a saying among "expats" in Thailand: "There are two types of Thai women, hookers and women who would never talk to a white man." That saying was probably never totally accurate, and certainly isn't accurate now with the advent of Facebook, globalization, etc. But if I met a guy like David who told me "I went to a bar last month and met a much younger Thai woman and now she's my girlfriend" then I would certainly be very comfortable betting a large sum of money that she was a hooker. Davids in Thailand don't meet proper younger Thai women, and if they do, the proper young Thai women run from them.

That must be it. They want to minimize the Geoffrey controversy and not have him shown on Pillow Talk with other cast members saying "Did you see how angry he got at Varya for not staying at his hotel he seems a bit controlling hahahaha"

I agree. There's a much classier way to ask a woman to take and STD test. You don't say "I notice you have 4,000 Facebook friends, and I assume you're a skank who has f*cked most of them, so for my protection, I want you to take an STD test." You just say "I think it would be smart for both of us to get tested before being physical." He said he didn't want to do the test there, which was either a cop out, or he's one of these idiot Americans who thinks he'll get the AIDS from a dirty needle if he gets a blood test outside the USA. In which case, he should have brought his own recent test results. Even Pole got tested in Brazil, didn't he?

It's a fair question. She's very poor. She was impregnated out of wedlock in a very Catholic country by a man who did not want a relationship with her. She dates unattractive older American men online. She stayed at his hotel the night they met without shame. I saw she has at least one tattoo, and there is a strong correlation in the Philippines and Thailand between tattooed women and hookers. Her response to him insulting her was not just to cry and be sad, she looked at him with eyes full of rage, like she might get violent. She comes across to me as very "street." Geoffrey did not like being interrogated by women. That offended him. I also find it bizarre that he meets Varya on an "international dating website" and then gets angry when he learns that she has chatted with American guys online.

You can buy a used smartphone for $30 in the Philippines and buy a SIM card for $1 and get 1 GB of data for about $1. Yet in the USA most of us have to pay $50-$75 a month for a phone plan.

No. Here are the stats for K-a visas issued in 2017. Something like 20-25% of all K-1 visas issued worldwide are issued but the US embassy in the Philippines. Vietnam is a very, very distant second. Think about that for a moment. Filipinos make up about 1.5% of the non-American world population, but they get 20+% of the K-1 visas. https://rapidvisa.com/k1-visa-report/ 1 Philippines 6,909 2 Vietnam 1,980 3 Dominican Republic 1,678 4 Mexico 1,617 5 United Kingdom 1,221 6 China 1,189 7 Colombia 970 8 Haiti 933 9 Brazil 875 10 Canada 868 11 India 791 12 Ukraine 767 13 Nigeria 728 14 Thailand 616 15 Russia 589 I think, off the top of my head, we have had 90 day fiance contestants from all of these 15 countries except Vietnam, China, and Canada. My guess is that a Canadian + American couple would be too boring for the show. And I also think a lot of the Vietnamese and Chinese K-1 visa holders marry Vietnamese-Americans and Chinese-Americans, so there's less "culture clash" in the relationship and that makes such couples less interesting.

Yeah, and only an idiot stands in a market in the Philippines holding an open wallet full of cash like that. She was doing the guy a favor.

I think there are three reasons why they always meet at the airport looking and smelling all sweaty and disgusting. 1. They're on a TV show that requires them to meet at the airport for dramatic effect. 2. The Americans on this show are not "suave" and smooth enough to know they will make a better impression after a nap. 3. (Perhaps most importantly). The Americans on this show are not sophisticated international travelers and could easily run into difficulty getting from international airport to their hotel alone. Years ago, oil companies flying workers into airports in Nigeria used to take extreme security measures so that their workers didn't get kidnapped at the airport. Like the workers were told "A Nigerian contact will greet you holding a sign with your name on it, but don't go with him unless he also says this secret password, so you can be sure your contact wasn't murdered by thugs who stole his sign with your name on it so they could greet you at the airport and kidnap you." I recall meeting an Australian guy who worked for DHL in Nigeria who said "If you don't have someone to meet you at Lagos airport, you're f*cked." I've only taken a taxi from Benin to Lagos Airport, not from Lagos Airport, but it would be terrifying for a white American redneck lady to just land there and try to get a taxi on her own to the hotel. At a minimum, she'd want a hotel car/shuttle to pick her up. But some dude could see her in the arrivals hall and say "Your hotel car is this way, follow me" and then she'd end up getting fleeced/robbed. Moscow and Manila airports also aren't free from scammers and dodgy characters. These naive, socially inept Americans who are prepared to propose marriage to people they haven't met need a lot of handholding should not be allowed out of foreign airports alone.

He may not have permanent residency in Australia? Mauritius is a nice place, but not a ton of job opportunities there.

Right. The Filipinas have more modest expectations. How long would Anfisa or Varya stick around with a Larry after getting a green card? Not long. And it didn't take party girl Aleksandra too long to cuckold that nice Mormon boy.

I agree, but I think that's a difference between the green card hunting Asian women and the green card hunting Russian women. The Filipinas are dreaming of marrying an older American guy and having a house and stable life for their kids. The Russian women are dreaming of marrying an older American guy and divorcing him after two years and living their own lives in the USA. Varya and Anfisa (and the Nigerian/Tunisian men) would love to be single and independent in the USA. Rosemarie and Hazel would be much more terrified by that prospect.

Come on, if we're going to say short, fat, no neck Ed is batting out of his league with a young Filipina, why are people comparing Varya to Hollywood actresses? She has attractive features, but that very lazy eye is significant drawback that is going to be a deal breaker for many men.

Oh, she's very interested in moving to the USA. She's ambitious. That's why she moved from Siberia to Western Russia. Still, an average worker in Ryazan may only earn $600 - $800 a month. She's not content to live in Ryazan the rest of her life and have kids and raise them in depressing Russia. Statistically speaking, there's a good chance any Russian she married would be an alcoholic, and the life expectancy of Russian men is only 64 years. She's past her prime to land a rich, successful guy from Moscow. She does come across as happy and well dressed and intelligent and cosmopolitan but she may be living in a cramped, run down Soviet-style apartment with her mom. My guess is if we saw her living conditions, her intentions would make more sense.

It's the nature of being poor and living in a developing country that staying in a hotel room is such a once in a decade treat (and so unaffordable) that one idea for a "party" is that 6 friends/family chip in $5 each to rent a $30 a night hotel room just so they can enjoy that experience. It doesn't mean "orgy."

When Geoffrey said "Varya's not staying the night. . . and I don't know how I feel about that" he said it exactly like Paul Staehle.

Yeah, that's sort of what I mean, I shouldn't have used the term "no decent guy" would be interested in her. Her options in the Philippines as an average looking impoverished single mom are to marry a guy who is very poor or older or who has his own issues. She can't get a normal middle class Filipino guy. Her options online are to marry guys like Ed or older or poorer than Ed or from less desirable countries than the USA. Ed is not batting out his league here. She's really far down the international dating totem pole.

I agree with that. For what it's worth, I'm active on a lot of immigration advice forums, and it's incredibly common for people to chat online and "fall in love" and then one goes to meet the other and they usually shack up together from day one. I don't get it, maybe I'm a prude. Like every day there are hundreds of foreign women arriving in the USA to meet "online boyfriend" American dudes, and their plan is to stay with the guy in his apartment for three weeks and they have no backup plan at all. Doesn't seem very safe to me.

I don't see him as batting out of his league. In the Philippines, no decent man would be interested in Rosemarie. She's impoverished, likely undereducated, she looks malnourished, she's not all that pretty, and she's got a kid.

He's a professional photographer. He's got access to neck filters the rest of us can only dream of.

Geoffrey looked like he would have choked her right in the car if that pesky camera hadn't been rolling. In his defense though, if she led him to believe she would stay with him, then he would have been justifiably surprised and annoyed that she was going to drop him in a provincial Russian city where no one speaks English while she then went 100 miles back to Moscow. She should have told him that was the plan beforehand.