The confessions of men who ordered mail-order brides

Most were apparently unhappy with their resulting relationships

Most mail-order brides are thought to come from Thailand, the Philippines and Romania (Getty)

The Reddit community came together to ask users who had ordered online brides what their experiences of marriage had been and many of the answers were just as depressing as you may anticipate.

User throwurboat said that he was shocked by just how explicit the falsity of the emotion had been: “It surprised me how fake it all seems. There was no emotion in anything she would do. I could always tell she was uncomfortable. It seemed like she was just doing a job.”

“She would cook, clean, offer sex, whatever. Pretty much what you want from your wife. But the passion, emotion, warmth, everything that makes a marriage actually work was lacking.”

“You could liken it to a gold digger but it was much worse. At least with a gold digger it isn’t painfully obvious, and you might actually convince yourself she likes some aspect of you.“

Another user, Sblent, wrote: “She seemed under the impression that a man was to be kept like a king and she was there for food and sex.”

He writes she would only eat food after he was asleep and insist on giving him a massage before they went to bed and said that he had to “metaphorically beat the submissiveness out of her”.

Throwaway says that realised the marriage was essentially emotionless when he found out how his wife had been sending money to: “the biggest surprise was finding out that when she was sending money “back home to her family”, it was to her husband (not “ex”) and kids in the Phillippines.”

Another user summed up the other user’s level of empathy towards those who ordered brides: “Whenever I read stories like this, my first thought isn’t to feel sorry for the guy. I just usually think, ‘Dude you can’t be seriously surprised by this’. You had to know what you were getting into.”

But the most tragic depiction possibly comes from BecameADearFriend who tells of how wife “had a ridiculous amount of humidifiers in the home so that it could be more like where she came from,” and that all she did was to “sit in a chair staring at the wall looking very depressed.”

The question put to users was: "What surprised you the most when you started living with your spouse?"