Part 1 – Setting the Stage
© Copyrighted by Doug Salem, 2004
In the fall of 1998, when I decided to investigate the possibilities of “mail order brides” from FSU, I was 41 years old. My now-wife Olga, who hails from the remote, (ex-Soviet) mining and steel mill center of Krivoy Rog, Ukraine, was only 20. Olga was 21 when I first visited her in June of 1999, still only 21 when she arrived in the U.S. on a K-1 visa in November of 1999, and still only 21 when we married 87 days later in Las Vegas, Nevada. Now we have been married for almost seven years. We are 28 and 48, respectively. We started out in Southern California, but recently moved to Northern California.
Everything about our cross-cultural marriage has been memorable so far. This is the first in a series of articles I wrote about a particularly interesting period of our life that began in in May of 2004. At that time, Olga and I had been married for just four-and-a-half years. We were planning a series of separate but coordinated trips to and within FSU to visit her family.
We had returned to Ukraine only twice since Olga left there on her K-1. The first visit was in August of 2000, about seven months after our stateside wedding. We stayed at Olga’s parents’ flat in Krivoy Rog, where we had a belated, epic, Russian-style wedding reception. Olga’s older brother, Andrei, his wife, Angela and her parents traveled from Novorossiysk and Krasnodar, Russia to join the festivities and meet me for the first time. The visit was a smashing success. I was enveloped by a warm and passionate extended family fold. On the way back to the U.S., Olga and I made a detour through Spain for a belated and abbreviated “honey month” (Russian “honeymoon”). But because I am an indentured American corporate slave, ours was only a “honey week”.
About a year later, Olga and I returned to Krivoy Rog for another visit. Olga went ahead of me and stayed for about a month. I joined her for two weeks and we returned together. That time it was just Olga’s parents. Like our first visit, it was also successful, serving to further narrow the chasm of our cross-cultural marriage. It is not my imagination that the closer I get to Olga’s family the closer Olga gets to me. This is an important aspect of Russian culture that should not be ignored by aspiring Western bachelors. You must pay sincere respect and attention to the parents, despite the 10,000 mile separation. You must give them your time. And not just during the courtship mind you; it’s a package deal and you’ve got to keep it up for the duration of the marriage. (Once you begin to truly absorb your Russian wife’s culture, you will come to appreciate, and even enjoy it. You may find that you had this capacity for family intimacy in you all along, but that your Western family did not really encourage it.)
Our marriage was becoming firmly cemented. Olga was adapting well to her new life in America. We had bought a house, acquired a dog, and begun nesting. For me, the domestication was unconscious, unfolding in front of me as a series of random, haphazard tacks before a prevailing wind. But with Olga, it was more of a deliberate course. She seemed to have set her sails shortly after Las Vegas, and to have somehow steered us toward a rooted existence with a higher purpose. This is another important aspect of Russian culture – the Russian woman’s ingrained, subliminal, and purely female nesting instinct. Code word “cozy home” (as advertised in their marriage agency profiles). With a Russian woman, it is as pervasive and natural as the incoming tide, and just as impossible to stem. Because of this nesting call, Olga and I decided to forgo a third trip to Ukraine during years 3 and 4 of our marriage - to focus our time, money, and energy on nurturing a family of our own.
To be continued ….
Doug Salem
