The journey of this book started with my close friend, Chan. 1 In the past, I had quite strong prejudices against online intimate relationships. I believed that only those people with difficulties in making relationships work in real life would turn to online dating sites in the hope of finding a spouse. Then, my friend Chan married a German man, John, whom she had met through an intermarriage dating site. Chan had joined the site and had maintained her membership somewhat sporadically for over a year. She paid for gold membership in order to access extra services and send some initial contacts to Western men whom she considered attractive.
Chan found Johnâs profile through the siteâs matching system after she had been a member for a year. She initiated contact by leaving a short message on his profile. After John replied, they started chatting to each other for a while via the site, and then they changed to communicating through e-mail and Skype. They talked online for four months before their first meeting in person. John went to Thailand for a monthâs holiday, which he spent with Chan and her family in her hometown. After that, he returned to his own country, Germany, and maintained contact with her through various channels, including Skype, e-mails, and phone. When he revisited Thailand, seven months after his first visit, they decided to get married. Chan told me that she had found her perfect man. John worked as an engineer in Germany and they were of a similar age. After their marriage, they took turns going back and forth to see each other until Chan became pregnant. She then decided to resign from her job in Thailand and moved to live with John in Germany.
Chanâs experiences led me to question my bias against intermarriage dating sites. Before I decided to pursue this research project, I had never turned to cyberspace to search for a partner, nor had anyone in my network of kin. I was relatively unfamiliar with the processes of online dating. I felt certain that online relationships were shallow and impossible to conduct offline, especially where cross-cultural and/or long-distance relationships were concerned. It appeared to me that these relationships tended to lack credibility and would only be pursued by shy, lonely individuals, who were possibly only interested in cybersex. Thus, when Chan first told me that she used an intermarriage dating site to find her prospective spouse, I was surprised. Chan did not fit my stereotype of people who pursued relationships online. She was a friendly, pleasant woman who enjoyed being with other people. At the same time, Chan did not fit the stereotypes of Thai women who sought Western men for reasons of economic mobility. Chan had finished her Bachelorâs degree at a prestigious public university in Thailand as well as a short training course in the USA to support her career. She was a well-educated professional in Thailand with a high income. Why would women like Chan turn to an intermarriage dating site to find a Western spouse if such a relationship was not to escape poverty? Were there other reasons behind her decision to use intermarriage dating sites to pursue cross-cultural relationships online?
Interestingly, in the first stage of her online relationship, my own stereotypes about intermarriage dating sites partly affected Chanâs behavior when she interacted with John. When I heard negative stories about women who became holiday girlfriends or victims of online romance scams, I would always tell her. At times, this made her hesitant to maintain contact with him. Nevertheless, after two months of consistently exchanging messages, chats, and thoughts with John in the virtual world, Chan felt totally committed to him. She decided to switch off her profile on the intermarriage dating site. She always called John fan chan (my boyfriend) when we talked on phone or in person. I was astonished that she believed in their âchemistryâ without any sensory input generated from actual physical contact. It seemed to me that it would not be easy to transform the ties of an online relationship into something ârealâ. Furthermore, Chan and Johnâs relationship was not only taking place online, but it was also long-distance and cross-cultural. I found it difficult to believe that she had a ârealâ boyfriend until she met him in person and then married him ten days after he arrived for his second visit. Chanâs story left me questioning why Thai women use intermarriage dating sites to find love and marriage. How do romantic love and intimacy unfold online and how is this dynamic interpreted by people from different cultural backgrounds? How are relationships initiated and developed from online to offline contexts? How do cross-cultural couples maintain their relationships across distance and time?
What I learned from Chanâs experience is that cyberspace has become an important medium for initiating, developing, and maintaining love and intimacy between people from different parts of the world. Cyberspace is a part of reality and therefore should not be viewed as diametrically opposed to actual space (Ben-Zeâev 2004). The people who engage in cross-cultural relationships online are real people who may have specific imaginings and desires that are not being fulfilled in offline contexts. As discussed in Chap. 2, women might also sometimes feel embarrassed to list themselves on intermarriage dating sites and seek love in cyberspace. However, there are several key factors at play here that motivate these women to pursue cross-cultural relationships online. Of particular importance are womenâs romantic aspirations to marry and the limitations of the local marriage market. Also crucial is their imagining of Western men as romantic and modern.
Furthermore, the story of Chan underlines the fact that the women who participate in intermarriage dating sites to search for prospective partners are not solely seeking to migrate nor to enhance their economic status as a result of poverty. Rather, a range of reasons informs decisions made by these middle-class, well-educated women to become involved in intermarriage dating websites. Chan did not turn to intermarriage dating sites due to economic pressure, or a desire to migrate overseas. In this way, Chanâs story challenges popular images of women on intermarriage dating sites. When women from economically poorer countries or regions advertise their desire to marry someone from wealthier locations, their motivation is frequently reduced to distorted stories about immigration fraud and the commodification of women from developing countries (Angeles and Sunanta 2007; Hochschild 2003; Wang and Chang 2002). The term âmail-order bridesâ is often employed to describe how these women subscribe to popular images of their own subservience and marry out of economic desperation. Women in international marriages are commonly viewed through the extremely dualistic images of a âsexual-romantic oriental dollâ and/or as a âconniving and shrewd ladyâ (Constable 2003, 13).
As a sexual-romantic oriental doll, Asian women are likely to be perceived as examples of âexotic loveâ or the âdesirable Otherâ. Angeles and Sunanta (2007) argue that Asian women are often featured in catalogues intended for Western men, who then select and âpurchaseâ them with a view to marriage. In targeting those men searching for intimate relationships, the women are arguably advertised as more submissive and making more feminine, traditional wives while simultaneously representing the Other of modern Western women. This representation as the Other appeases these men, who tend to view modern, Western women as too aggressive, demanding, and liberal. In this context, Western men remain the active viewer or potential consumer, whereas the Asian women are seen as passive, eroticized, and sexual objects to be looked at and desired.
In constructions of conniving and shrewd females, Asian women are portrayed as manipulative and calculating, ready to take advantage of Western men of a higher economic standing as a means to better their own lives (Constable 2003). Marriage migration is often seen as a strategy for such women to extricate themselves from poverty. In some cases, economic difficulties in developing countries may push women to engage in immigration fraud because of both the high cost of international migration and the more heavily restrictive immigration policies in Western countries. Marrying a man who resides in a well-developed nation might well be the best option through which these women can achieve their desired destinations (Fan and Huang 1998).
The majority of research on cyberspace and cross-cultural relationships has remained focused on so-called âmail-order bridesâ. Many studies have pointed to newly intensified patterns of commodification and sexualization of women in cyberspace (Angeles and Sunanta 2007; Lee 1998; Lloyd 2000; Zabyelina 2009). For example, Angeles and Sunanta (2007) examine the role of intermarriage websites and cyberspace in constructing Asian women as marketable objects. Their study argues that the mail-order bride business uses cyberspace as an innovative tool to disseminate its services. The interactive nature of digital media makes the process of choosing easy and convenient for Western men. Zabyelina (2009) explores the development of the mail-order-bride industry and the impact of information and communication technology on its expansion. Her study demonstrates that mail-order bride services can be found in abundance on the Internet, where the brides featured in the catalogues clearly tend to be oriented toward pleasing male consumers. The entire industry is based on recruiting women who are ready to fulfil Western menâs expectations and requests.
Although these studies contribute to an analysis of gender and sexuality within cyberspace, they do not capture the responses of the women themselves to the social and cultural changes that occur as a consequence of technological innovations. Their explanations reflect only one side of the intermarriage websites: those in which women do not directly contact Western men on their own behalf. Instead, each stage of the relationship is arranged by the agency. As discussed in Chap. 3, the scope of services between intermarriage agency websites and intermarriage dating services is dramatically different. While intermarriage dating agencies provide a wide range of services such as creating womenâs online profiles, translating communications, and arranging trips to introduce foreign men to local women, intermarriage dating sites provide only the matching systems and the communication tools to make meeting over the Internet easier. They do not offer any services to assist customers in meeting their prospective spouses.
Thus, there are significant differences between Thai women who engage in the two different types of intermarriage websites. Intermarriage dating sites often involve better-educated, higher-class Thai women who possess more power in negotiating with their prospective Western partners and who seek to strike a balance between economic considerations and love/intimacy. In contrast, the agency-managed intermarriage pursuit typically involves less educated, lower-class Thai women who lack power in negotiating with Western men and who tend to place economic considerations before love/intimacy. These distinctions between the âagency-managedâ and the âself-managedâ pursuit of cross-cultural relationships in turn raise questions about womenâs agency and expressions of love and intimacy in cyberspace that have been largely neglected in these studies.
Some more nuanced details about cross-cultural relationships in cyberspace can be found in Constableâs (2003) study, which explores a number of underlying motivations of Filipina and Chinese women, and the occasional American man, for wanting to enter into cross-cultural relationships. Her research finds evidence of individuals falling intensely in love once they enter into a long-standing exchange. Constable infers that although womenâs decisions to correspond with and marry a foreigner are often shaped by their personal situation as well as by their ideas about life in the USA, other emotional and personal factorsâsuch as love, attraction, chemistry, respect, and practical and individual considerationsâare also important motivators. Moreover, instead of assuming that these women are passive, exploited victims, Constable aims to stress their agency as evidenced by their decision-making about who to correspond with, whether to continue that correspondence, and/or whom to meet and marry.
However, Constableâs primary focus is on the motivational forces that guide human yearning for intimacy and on womenâs agency in choosing their prospective partners. Her study lacks attention to other features in the process of developing cross-cultural relationships, both in online and offline contexts. What is missing, for example, is a consideration of the construction of love and intimacy in online contexts, the maintenance of relationships across distance, and the significance of technology in terms of transforming emotions and imagination.
My research addresses this gap by exploring the process of developing cross-cultural relationships through the experiences of 24 Thai women who have turned to intermarriage dating sites to search for Western partners. It primarily focuses on how love and intimacy between Thai women and Western men are constructed, developed, and maintained across contexts (from online to offline, and from offline to online), across distance (involving different parts of the world), across time (over the duration of the relationships), and across culture (between people belonging to different ethnic and cultural backgrounds).
This book employs the term âcross-cultural relationshipsâ to refer to relationships between Thai women and Western men. This is for two reasons. First, although many termsâsuch as cross-cultural relationships, cross-border relationships, and transnational relationshipsâcan be used to describe international relationships, 2 the primary emphasis within each of these terms is in fact different. For example, the term âcross-border relationshipsâ focuses on geographical, national, racial, class, gender, and cultural borders constructed in the hosting societies, while the term âtransnational relationshipsâ emphasizes transnational networks and spaces created by the actors themselves (Lu and Yang 2010, 25). However, both terms can be used to refer to cross-cultural relationships as well as same-culture relationships. For example, Thai (2005) examines marriages between second-generation Vietnamese-American men and Vietnamese women via arranged marriages as one type of cross-border relationship, which involves intra-ethnic marriages between individuals of the same ethnic or religious background. This phenomenon constitutes a form of âendogam...