Selects: How Mail Order Marriages Work
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You may not know this, but the original purpose of Stuff You Should Know was to change people's minds about mail order marriages. And we certainly did with this episode. We were so successful that we decided to keep the podcast going. I'm just kidding for those of our listeners who have trouble detecting that kind of thing. What is true is that it's a surprisingly interesting episode and it may very well change your mind about mail order marriages. I was serious just now for those of our listeners who always think I'm kidding. How about we all just enjoy this episode, shall we?
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know about mail-order marriages. The murky waters. Yeah, really. Yeah, this is one of those where we researched and researched and read and read. Yeah. And I think it's one of those deals for me that's like, and this is just my opening statement. Okay. Where it can be a positive thing, like a dating service in some ways, but there is certainly a darker side to the whole situation. I already know how you feel about it, and I feel like it's coming through clearly.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's very, it's one of those really murky things where sometimes you hear these really great stories about people that do find, are looking for love and find love with someone from another country. And it works out for everybody. Yeah. And then sometimes you hear about stories where it's sort of what the National Organization for Women's Sonia Osorio calls a softer version of human trafficking. Mm-hmm. Or even worse, occasionally someone turns up murdered. Yeah. I mean, that's the truest dark side. So that's just me level setting, and we can talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. I think that was a great level setting. I generally agree with it, but for me, the jury is still out in thinking about it as a whole because there's so little hard data on this stuff.
Almost everything is anecdotal. And when like you condemn something based on anecdotal data, what you've got there is a moral panic, not necessarily something in reality. So I'm a little hesitant to go all the way. The jury's still out for me, but I definitely recognize the same stuff you do for sure. It's definitely there. It exists. It's just for me the question is how much does it exist and does the good outweigh the bad? And I don't know. So we should probably like – Actually define what we're talking about here, because most people, I would guess, are familiar with mail order brides. They're more more recently. They've come to be called mail order marriages because they've been extended to same sex couples in the United States.
But then also, like even more generally, it's called international marriage brokerage. Right. Yeah. I mean, there's a full industry built around this with thousands of websites and agencies that are brokering these marriages. And, you know, from looking into it, it seems like there are some really above board ones that kind of act like. An international dating surface in some ways where they group, you know, match like people together.
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