Courtship by mail leads to proposal on airport runway
In a battered car of rattling over the potholed streets of Kyiv, Yelena Grubaya clutches three red roses as she bumps toward a meeting at Borispol Airport that will change the course of her life.
Meanwhile, thousands of feet above Europe, U.S. commercial airline pilot Frank Hardy is seated in the business class section of a Lufthansa jet bound for Ukraine. He’d probably be too nervous to land this aircraft: in his breast pocket is a diamond engagement ring, fitted for the fourth finger of a woman he’s never met.
Hardy, a 46-year-old divorcee, is making the transatlantic journey on the basis of two months of written correspondence with the Ukrainian woman he plans to wed, and an unshakable faith in the desirability of Slavic wives.
‘There’s no way I’d ever contemplate marrying a Western woman,’ Hardy says. ‘They just don’t have the loyalty or the dedication. In [Eastern Europe] I found a loyalty that doesn’t exist in the U.S.’
That belief led Hardy to Encounters International, a U.S.-based marriage agency which has been introducing Western men to potential wives in the former Soviet Union for four years now. Its Kyiv branch, open for just over one year, has already arranged five marriages, and sent 25 Ukrainian women to the United States on three-month visas to meet their fiances. So far, only one has returned disappointed.
Grubaya, 30, is also divorced and has a 9-year-old son, but she is optimistic about her meeting with Hardy and has some equally flattering notions about Western men. ‘It seems to me foreign men are more intelligent, more gentle, more educated, live healthier lives,’ she says. With a job that takes him all around the world, Hardy has had ample opportunity to research his options for a bride. After corresponding with more than 10 other women from Ukraine and Russia he settled on Grubaya, then decided to fly to Kyiv to pop the question – on the tarmac. Grubaya, on the other hand, has never been far from Ukraine, and formed her opinions about Western men from the media. ‘I watch TV, I read the newspapers,’ she says. Three months after joining Encounters International, she has faith that the one man she wrote to will live up to his letters.
‘I read his letters and I really like a man of this type,’ she says. ‘He’s very manly.’
Through his letters, Hardy conducted a vigorous research campaign about his potential bride.
It ‘was a whirlwind of intense information,’ he says. ‘I drilled her, they were not romantic I-love-you letters, they were more an interrogation.’
Grubaya met with his approval. Plans for the meeting were made; what Hardy had in mind was a private introduction and proposal just off the runway, away from the other passengers, where he and his soon-to-be fiancee could act more like sweethearts than strangers.
Unfortunately, Hardy’s desire for privacy must have gotten lost in translation at the Kyiv end. Accompanying Grubaya are her parents, members of the press, another American Encounters International member and his Ukrainian fiancee, Kyiv Encounters club director Ludmila Igolkina and her daughter Renata, along to serve as a translator for the soon-to-meet couple.
At the airport, several of the party’s 10 members are getting nervous as the wait for the plane continues. Renata Igolkina is worried that her translation skills may not be up to snuff. ‘I’m better with business English,’ she whispers. ‘I don’t know all these wedding words.’ Grubaya is visibly anxious, apparently too much so to recall many details about the man she is going to meet, including where in America he is from.
‘Anyway it’s not important,’ she says. ‘His character is what matters.’ Her mother however, displays a perfect memory for Hardy’s multiple residences, in Palm Springs, Miami, the Caribbean and Pittsburgh. It is the parents who also proudly announce Hardy’s rank: a senior captain with USAir.
Yet Grubaya’s parents, who in their fur hats and coats look every inch the typical Soviet couple, are still reserving final judgement on their potential son-in-law. ‘I don’t know if I’m happy for [Yelena], I haven’t met him yet,’ says Grubaya’s mother Lyudmila. ‘But his letters are those of a decent and serious man.’
Hardy says Grubaya is welcome to choose whichever of his homes she fancies to live in, or even request a new one. He plans to find her an English tutor straight away, then has other ideas to keep her busy. Along with the ring he’s brought along a glossy wedding magazine containing a year-long ‘countdown to the wedding’ feature, with advice for the bride-to-be about choosing colors, flowers, cakes and everything in between. A Ukrainian woman might, he admits, find it all a bit overwhelming. ‘Maybe she’ll find some women friends to help her with that,’ he says. Not all mail-order bride agencies specialize in the type of lavish, traditional wedding that Hardy has in mind. Many others, Igolkina says, simply charge local women a fee to list them in magazines distributed abroad. The reputation of the thriving industry has also suffered because of the growing success of sex traffickers, who often employ such agencies to lure Eastern European women abroad to waiting jobs in brothels and sex clubs.
Nevertheless, the popularity of such marriage agencies, helped along by the Internet, has grown in Ukraine, where hard times are driving many women to seek a better life abroad, and in the West, where traditionally-minded men are seeking alternatives to independent Western women. Encounters International charges only its Western clients, and is a full-service marriage agency, helping out with translating letters, arranging visits by clients, and looking out for its women abroad up until the big day. Many couples are even married at the group’s headquarters in Maryland.
Igolkina, who gets paid a fee for each couple that reaches the altar, says Ukrainian women who fly to the United States have all travel and living expenses paid by their Western fiances. ‘Our girls are absolutely not taking a risk going to America for three months,’ Igolkina says. For her part, Grubaya is not worried about the future. ‘It’s good to take risks, I’m that kind of person,’ she says.
The plane from Frankfurt has finally landed and taxied in. While the passengers are shunted out through a walkway, Hardy is expected to appear through a separate exit. The door opens, the obliging airport guard produces a passenger like a rabbit out of a hat. It’s the wrong one. Turning his back on the beaming woman at the bottom of the steps, the man disappears.
The second time it’s Hardy, eyes masked by mirrored sunglasses, hugging a huge white teddy bear, and more than a little disconcerted by an unexpectedly large reception committee.
Later, Hardy says he puzzled long and hard over how to greet Grubaya. ‘All the way over, I was thinking, do I kiss her or not?’ he recalls. ‘I thought, you’re going to marry this woman, of course you kiss her, but at the same time, it will be the first time I ever meet her.’ As the pair awkwardly hug and kiss, it is indeed a strange moment. Then there are the introductions to the parents, to Igolkina, with daughter Renata struggling to translate expressions of goodwill.
Hardy has corresponded by e-mail with Larry Prokop, the other American Encounters member present on the tarmac, and their greeting is more relaxed, with much hand-wringing and back-slapping.
‘This is my fiancee Svetlana,’ says Prokop with obvious pride.
‘And this is my soon-to-be wife,’ Hardy replies. The two get down to a brief discussion of business – when and how to take the two women back to the United States. ‘I’m going to get her back as soon as I can,’ Hardy says. ‘She’s my girl.’
At last, the moment for the ring is at hand. ‘I wanted to give it to her then and there because I knew we had only a very short period of time together,’ Hardy says later. ‘I had to get her to say Yes. A lot of other men come over, go to different places to meet several different women and then decide. I’m not like that. If she had said No I’d probably have been on that same flight back.’
She doesn’t say No. ‘I’m so happy,’ she says in Russian, practically in tears, a huge diamond sparkling on her finger.
