I read an interesting article in the English language version of Moskovskie Novosti last week. It’s by James Scott, and it makes the unusual declaration that the author is having an affair.

Scott explains that he came to Russia around a decade ago, met a Russian girl who he “thought was my soul-mate”, married her and had a daughter. Now, however, it seems the marriage is not going so well. He says the girl’s mother, the babushka, is annoyingly intrusive. And apparently the wife herself does little other than shop.

This leads Scott on to a rumination as to whether he should have just settled down with an English girl in the first place, someone who gets his jokes, who has the same background and education as him. But instead, he tells us proudly that he is having an affair with a Siberian lady, who is also married, and that the sex is amazing. Proof, if any is needed, that we don’t get wiser as we get older. 

It’s a bit weird that Scott hasn’t told his wife he’s having an affair, but is prepared to tell the thousands (alright hundreds) of Moscow News readers. But let’s let that slide, and consider the burning question – are marriages between western expats and Russian ladies compatible?

You might think this is not a sufficiently weighty topic for a geo-political website. ‘Write about pension reform!’, I hear you cry, ‘or the proceedings of the Federation Council’. Fear not, I will cover all these topics and more at a later date. But we shouldn’t turn our noses up at an honest examination of Western male – Russian female relations. They’re an important part of the wider relationship between Russia and the West. You might say they are on the front line of this broader relationship.

I’m going to get right to the point and say I think very rarely are such relationships successful, in the sense that I judge a successful relationship.

The reason is I think both parties often have slightly shabby motives in these relationships. This means the house of their relationship (to use a metaphor) is built on uneven ground, and I suspect over the years it will fall down.

On the Russian woman’s side, I think too often the motives are material. I have several Russian female friends who are not at all materialistic, in their relationships or other aspects of their life. But I would say they are the exception. A lot of Russian girls are looking for a man to take care of them materially. They are pre-Sexual Revolution, so they still see themselves as a commodity, for which a man must ‘bid’, via flowers, gifts, meals, fur-coats, etc etc. In return, the girl sleeps with the man, and perhaps orders his domestic life for him.

On the Western man’s side, the motives are sexual and egoistic. They can get much hotter women here than they can back home usually, particularly if they are getting on in years (say over 40). Having a beautiful Russian girlfriend or wife satisfies not just their libido but also their vanity. ‘Look at my hot wife’ they say to the world. ‘Aren’t I virile?’ 

These are the bare bones of the contract. Except neither party ever really admits it. They try to pretend that they have a real connection. There’s nothing more painful listening to a western expat talk to his Russian wife and hearing the two of them putting up this pretence. Why not be honest? She’s in it for the money, he’s in it for the sex. Good luck to them. But they still pay some homage to the traditional idea of love, soul-mates, spiritual communion etc.

I believe in that idea of love. Supposedly it’s one of the highest blessings that life has to offer – real companionship, real intimacy and understanding. How great would that be? To have someone always on your side, who understood you better than anyone else, appreciated all your good points and accepted your bad points, who you in turn really looked up to and respected, and who likewise respected you. Who you connected with in a fundamental way.

But maybe I have too high hopes for love. In any case, it seems to me that so many people I know have just ‘settled’ for a pretty good relationship. Settled for comfort. I’m talking now also about my friends in the UK and US, several of whom are now getting married. They’ve said to themselves ‘well, this is a good enough relationship, I’m probably not going to find a better one, everyone else is getting married, I’m getting on, I should get married too’. That’s the attitude I often perceive –‘this is a good enough relationship’. How dismal! As one friend of mine put it, when telling me recently they were engaged: ‘what reason do I have not to marry her?’ As if it was an absence of legitimate excuses, rather than a resounding affirmation of love…

I had a serious relationship at university, with an English girl. Let me tell you a little about her, because she is in many ways an archetypal English girl, and it will help illustrate the differences between Russian and English girls. She was a London girl, quite independent, quite worldly (she’d lived and taught in Nepal for six months), she was very into humanitarian issues – she later became a human rights lawyer. We started off as best friends, in the same tutorials, hanging out a lot together. Then, we started going out too. She wasn’t exceedingly sexy or exceedingly feminine. She was more homely, she had a very kind face, and she was a very good mate (in the English sense of a good friend). As a French girl put it to me recently, ‘English girls aren’t exactly women to English men, they’re more like mates.’

There’s some truth in that, but the advantage of that is you have really good conversations, a really good laugh, they get on very well with your other friends, and you really respect them, for their values, their integrity, their sincerity.

It’s so different with most Russian girls I’ve dated here. There’s none of that meeting of minds, that connection at the level of shared values and ideals. Instead, the relationship is seen as an elaborate game, with the girl weaving a spell of enchantment and deceit, being by turns moody, inviting, distant, capricious, and this is supposed to drive the man wild with desire at the intoxicating mystery of womanhood.

I personally find this very irritating. How is it meant to be intoxicating, when you’ve made plans to do something with a girl, and she cancels on some made-up excuse, just to make herself seem mysterious and unavailable? If anything, it makes me respect them less, because it doesn’t seem honest to me, but immature, and a bit pathetic. As soon as they start playing these games, I find myself going off such girls. But unfortunately, almost all Russian girls I’ve dated play these games, they seem to think it’s essential to winning their man. And if you eventually get tired of their moods and aloofness, and leave them alone, then they run after you, ply you with texts, beg you to see them. Perhaps I’ve just had bad luck with the girls I’ve dated…

I respect a girl who is doing something with her life, who’s a strong independent personality, whose identity isn’t purely an elaborate act put on for the sake of men. But I fear quite a few Russian women do live their lives that way. They are dolls. And it seems many Western men like that, because it’s less complicated, and flattering to their masculinity. But it doesn’t help them develop as men, and it doesn’t help their partners develop as women. Instead, they’re both trapped in these artificial roles – man as money-maker, woman as doll.

Anyway, besides that relationship with the girl at university, I would say that most of my close connections have been with men. I don’t mean in a gay sense, I mean in terms of mutual understanding, good conversations, humour, comradeship etc – the pleasure of feeling you understand each other quite deeply and enjoy each other’s company. In my experience so far in life, at the age of 28, I would say that friendship has provided me with the richest experiences of companionship, with the possible exception of that girl at university.

Now all these mates are getting married. My brother is getting married in a few months, my best friend is getting married, another best friend has just been staying as a guest with me…with his girlfriend who he’s about to marry.

And when a mate gets married, he effectively dies. Something else is born in its place, a kind of diluted version of your friend. Instead of ‘Jim’, there is ‘Jim and Deborah’. Instead of ‘Richard’, there is ‘Richard and Jessica’. And whenever you see them, you almost invariably see them with their partners, so your relationship is no longer with them, it’s with the couple. And you might not like the girl particularly. I mean, they’re OK but you don’t really want to see them all the time. So you’ve lost your mates. A good reason to marry, I guess. There’s finally no other bachelors to hang out with!

However, I still believe in the possibility of a true, deep communion with a girl, deeper than friendship with a man, because it has the physical, sexual element to it, plus the ability to create life together, and the deep tenderness and care which I hear is what love feels like. I still believe in that, and hope I will one day find it.

But the expats and Russian girls I know, they seem to have given up on that idea. They’ve let materialism – either the need for money or the need for sex and the vain desire to look virile – come before it. And I think that’s really sad. It’s even worse that they pretend they have a real communion. It makes you feel you live in a cheap and tacky world.

The worst example of this, of course, is these marriages set up by dating agencies and web-sites, like www.bride.ru, which has three categories of women, 18-20, 22-25, and 25-30; or www.russianbrides.com, where you can pick out a lady, then send her flowers, chocolate or even cash gifts direct through the website.

I was once in a hotel in Kiev, and I heard an English man conducting a business negotiation with a Ukrainian girl, who he’d obviously met through one such service. She was crying in the corridor. I was trying to sleep. ‘You don’t love me do you?’ he said. ‘Yes, I do, I do’, she sobbed. ‘Do you?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Yes, please…please’. There was something so seedy, so cold and calculating in the way he asked her, like he knew he was in the stronger material position, he had the money and the house and car in Britain, and he was going to make this girl swear her love to him. I went out of the room to have a look at them and try and make them quieten down, so I walked past the couple…and the man was this old, shady looking guy, a real jerk, that was obvious. And the girl was 21, beautiful, upset. I found it sickening, I really felt ashamed of my country, that this horrible man was going to get this beautiful girl, just because that was the world we lived in, where money was everything.

Another time, I was on a plane, and I overheard a couple behind me, who had also obviously met through a marriage service. He was this really incredibly boring guy from Yorkshire, in his forties, really dull, and she, in her late twenties, barely said a thing. And he chattered on to her, trying to pretend they had some sort of connection, like ‘you remember that restaurant we went to…darling? You remember, where you threw a scene’. It sounded like she threw a lot of scenes. She threw one right behind me, starting to cry, and the boring Yorkshire man sounding helpless and saying ‘now then, no need to be like that, come on now’. Then they both got up and went to the loo together, so I guess they came to an understanding.

So those were the two worst occasions, but I see hints of them in so many relationships between expats and Russian girls. For example, there used to be a guy in my football team, who had a Russian wife, about ten years younger than him, a pretty blonde from the Urals. We were at a football social event, and they left the table and went to the loo, and the guy came back with this grin, doing up his fly ostentatiously. Can you believe the vanity and vulgarity of that? The girl was a real handful, really spoilt and ‘high maintenance’, but I guess he thought it was worth it.

They moved back to England, which is I think when expat-Russian relations really get put to the test, because the girl misses her family, and finds it difficult to get on with English girls (who probably see her as a gold-digger and a threat), and the guy begins to realise quite how different they are, and begins to get tired of the girl’s moods and capriciousness.

The exoticism of the foreign – what often draws western men and Russian women together – can get pretty annoying pretty quickly. Sooner or later, you’re faced with the fact that your wife or husband is practically a stranger, their moods and behaviour a mystery. 

I do have friends who have successful relationships with Russian girls. But usually, the men are partly Russian themselves as well. In general, I think it’s much easier to marry girls from your own cultures, with whom you have the same background, the same language, the same humour, the same values. I believe in Russia and the West gradually forging a successful relationship together, but at the moment, I think our values and histories are simply too different for the majority of relationships between Russian women and western men to be anything more than convenient arrangements.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

July 24, 2006