Email romance: Couple finds true love doesn't always live up to Cyberspace expectations
Carmen, a single mother of two daughters, was surviving on a small income from a juice stand in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, Mexico, in 2001 when she signed up with Mexicanladies.com.
The Internet service arranged marriages between Mexican women and American men.
Internet marriage brokers, the digital, globalized incarnation of the old mail-order bride business, have proliferated during the last decade with the growth of the Internet. Though Mexicanladies.com is now defunct, an estimated 500 agencies arrange relationships between American men and foreign women, typically in Latin America, southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union.
Sites such as goodwife.com, ilovelatins.com and bridebymail.com feature photographs and profiles of thousands of foreign women for American men looking for ``an alternative to North American women,'' in the words of one Mexico-based site.
Many companies offer ``romance tours.'' A Peruvian-based broker promises that for $1,095, would-be grooms can meet scores of prospective brides and take in Inca ruins at Machu Picchu on the side.
Last year, the State Department issued 35,000 ``K-1,'' or fiancee visas, up from 3,500 in 1987. Not all foreign women who meet American men through the Internet rely on such visas to enter the country. The visas are temporary, and women who get them must apply for a permanent visa after marriage.
Carmen, who learned of ``Mexicanladies'' through an advertisement in a newspaper, said because she was in her 30s and had children, she didn't think she had a good chance of finding a long-term relationship with a local man. The opportunity to move to the United States and have a better life for herself and her children also was a draw, she said.
Five hundred miles north, David, a private-school teacher living outside Santa Fe, was in the dating doldrums. A single father with primary custody of his children from a previous marriage, he felt overwhelmed by his job and child-rearing responsibilities. ``My kids were getting sick, I was missing work. I was a typical single parent,'' he said.
David said he ``was anxious to have some help and to have a partner,'' but that local women weren't going for it.
``Being a single dad isn't exactly a selling point to get a date,'' he said.
``And then when you tell them, `my kids come first,' well, who wants to deal with that?''
A friend who was, at the time, married to a Mexican woman recommended he try to do the same.
``He said he didn't think I would have as much trouble with a Mexican woman,'' David recalled.
David said Mexicanladies.com didn't contain the cheesecake photos of bikini-clad women featured on many sites.
Neither, he says, did the service tout Mexican women as subservient as do some sites such as Guadalajara-based mexicanmatchmakers.com, which claims Mexican women, unlike their American counterparts, ``do not feel compelled to compete with men or constantly complain about how unfair the world is to them.''
David perused the photographs and profiles of women on
Mexicanladies.com but said Carmen's was the only one he found appealing. He paid $15 for her e-mail address. A click of the mouse charged his credit card to send her bouquets of flowers. Another click translated his love letters to her into awkward Spanish.
Some sites also provide links to immigration lawyers who arrange fiancee visas.
Down in Hermosillo, Carmen's e-mail box was filling up with love letters from dozens of men.
But she said David was the one who appealed to her. ``I thought because I had children and he was a father, we would have that in common,'' she said.
During a four-month e-mail courtship, which David estimates cost him ``a couple of hundred dollars,'' she quizzed him on his stances on monogamy and religion while he described Santa Fe lyrically, as a ``city of artists and poets.''
``I knew she was interested in getting a green card, but we didn't talk about it that way,'' he said. ``I knew though, that if I had been, say, from Colombia, she wouldn't have been interested in me.''
David and Carmen arranged to meet in Agua Prieta, across the border from Douglas, Ariz.
Their first meeting was described in a 2002 article in Cambio, a Mexican magazine, which described the popularity of Internet marriage brokers among Mexican women.
``We hugged each other so tightly,'' she told the magazine. ``It was as if we had been waiting for each other always.''
A few months later, Carmen moved to Santa Fe with her children and set up house with David and his kids. They married and had a daughter of their own. Neither could speak the other's language, so they relied on a computer software program to communicate.
Four years later, it's difficult for either Carmen or David to remember their initial passion.
The couple has filed for divorce and is battling over custody of their 2-year-old daughter. She has accused him of psychological abuse and forcing her to go to work as a housekeeper after he left his teaching job.
David said Carmen was ``insanely jealous,'' considered his fine-art photographs of nudes pornographic, made false accusations of abuse against him and brought her relatives from Mexico to Santa Fe for him to help support.
``He promised me the moon, the stars,'' Carmen said ruefully. ``But really what he wanted was a servant.''
``I came with illusions, but now I don't think the American dream exists. I ended up working as a maid and taking care of his kids. What kind of dream is that?''
David also is regretful. ``I felt like I was in love with her. Later I was like, `who is she?' ''
Neither entirely blames Mexicanladies.com for the ill-fated relationship. Carmen said her sister, who also registered with the agency, is happily married to an engineer from Houston. ``I don't think (the Internet) is bad, but I got a bad person,'' she said.
For David, remembering his e-mail courtship with Carmen, the computer was ``like a window,'' allowing him access to an ``exotic'' world, one that let fantasy rule over reality.
``I guess I should have known better,'' he said. ``It seemed like a good trade-off, but in the end, it didn't work.''
Contact Barbara Ferry at 995-3817 or bferry@sfnewmexican.com.
