I am not sure if there are statistics out there to show if marriages between American men and Russian/Ukrainian women have increased in recent years, but it is certainly a fascinating and widespread trend.

I know many intercultural couples where the wife is from Russia or another Russian-speaking post-Soviet country and the husband is American. It is fairly common for the wife in such marriages to struggle with the English language, and it is also somewhat typical for these couples to have a significant age difference.

Why would an American man be interested in marrying a Russian woman? The most obvious answer, of course, is that Russian women are beautiful and that American women generally don’t marry older men (the average age difference in the U.S. is 2.3 years).

Still, there is something deeper going on than just the desire of American men to search the globe for an attractive and possibly younger woman who may not even speak the same language.

My theory is that there are many men in the United States who want to be men, and they don’t feel that their society is allowing them to express their manhood. They want a woman who will appreciate what they have to provide, for whom the man can be somewhat of a hero, and who will want a traditional home and family. These men are unable to find what they are looking for in the United States, and as a result they search elsewhere, with Russia and Ukraine being prime destinations.

Some of these men are expats who work abroad or even tourists or visitors to Russia and surrounding areas. Others use Russian and Ukrainian dating websites to find a potential match. Whatever venue is used, it seems that many American men find in Russian women something that isn’t available to them in the United States.