Fifteen years ago, when I began studying the international dating industry, most people treated the subject as a joke. The phrase “mail-order bride” was a shorthand for a dated stereotype: lonely men in the United States finding spouses from Eastern Europe, Asia or elsewhere. That image feels familiar today, even if the actors and language have changed.
In 2025 some men travel internationally and call themselves “passport bros,” sharing their travels on social media. This rebranding masks a long-running pattern: as social and economic conditions shift, people reshape how they seek intimacy and reassert gender expectations across borders. These shifts are central to my book Economies of Gender (2025).
Historical continuities
The idea of arranging or advertising for brides is not new. In the 19th century, so-called frontier brides answered notices and migrated west to marry men they had not met. After the Civil War, some women viewed these marriages as paths to security. That narrative persisted in novels and films.
The contemporary international matchmaking industry began taking shape in the 1970s, when catalogs featuring Filipino women’s photos and contact details were marketed to American men. Pen-pal exchanges sometimes led to men traveling overseas to meet potential partners. Scholars differ in how to characterize these practices—some emphasize coercion and trafficking risks, while others focus on migration, desire and choice.
Those catalogs appeared as more U.S. women entered paid work and claimed economic independence. Some men, confronting the prospect that a partner might prioritize a career, sought women abroad whom they believed would accept more conventional domestic roles. Over time, declines in stable manufacturing jobs and other economic changes also affected some men’s sense of being providers.
Digital expansion and commercialization
By the 2010s the catalog model had largely moved online, creating a large, diverse market. Men commonly pay for messaging or access on websites and apps, while women often use these platforms without paying. Agencies continue to organize in-person tours and offer high-end personalized matchmaking for wealthier clients. Estimates once placed the industry’s global revenue in the billions.
Reality TV played a major role in normalizing cross-border romance. Programs such as TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé, which debuted in 2014, turned the K-1 fiancé-visa process and international courtships into a ratings generator. The show follows couples racing to marry within 90 days of a foreign partner’s arrival in the U.S. Some couples meet serendipitously; others met online. Episodes frequently dramatize accusations that foreign partners are pursuing U.S. residency rather than love. Beyond entertainment value, these storylines often mirror wider patterns: relationships formed across starkly uneven economic circumstances, where women’s domestic and emotional labor is exchanged—explicitly or implicitly—for financial stability.
The emergence of “passport bros”
A recent iteration of cross-border romance is the so-called passport-bro movement. Compared with earlier commercial clients, passport bros tend to be younger, often men of color, and more likely to travel independently rather than hiring agencies. They use mainstream, often free apps like Tinder and travel to countries such as Colombia, Brazil and the Dominican Republic to meet local women.
Passport bros often describe seeking partners they perceive as more traditionally gendered than those available in the United States. In interviews conducted between 2010 and 2022, many American men expressed frustration that U.S. women’s career orientations seemed to challenge their ideal of male breadwinning. Fieldwork in Ukraine, Colombia and the Philippines suggests these men are motivated by more than exotic curiosity. They are responding to a changing economic landscape in which women’s growing financial autonomy unsettles familiar masculine roles. Traveling overseas becomes a strategy for reclaiming dignity and finding relationships that validate a traditional masculine identity.
Across interviews, men described feeling marginalized in the U.S. dating market yet empowered abroad by the relative value of their money and social status. One man I interviewed on a romance tour in Ukraine in 2012 said bluntly, “I am here to exchange my financial stability for some Ukrainian woman’s youth and beauty, and I am OK with that.” Such frank statements show how material inequality, desire and gender ideals intersect in cross-border matchmaking.
Why tradition appeals
The larger pattern I observe is that uncertainty often produces a turn toward traditional roles. What appears to be a revival of the past is frequently an adaptation to contemporary anxieties. Romance tours, reality-TV portrayals and passport-bro travel all reveal how intimate relationships can be used to navigate economic instability. For many, gendered roles promise an orderly script: a dependable male provider and a devoted homemaker.
Economic pressures help explain why this script regains appeal. Two decades of rising costs, stagnant wages and scarce affordable housing have left many young people feeling economically squeezed. The COVID-19 pandemic worsened inequalities, increased unemployment for some groups and amplified unpaid caregiving burdens, especially for women. When institutions and careers appear unreliable, familiar narratives about gender can offer the illusion of stability—even when they reproduce inequality.
Implications
As a sociologist, I study these processes not only to explain dating trends but to trace how inequality is reproduced through intimate life. Cross-border dating practices do more than generate personal stories; they reflect and reinforce structural patterns of wealth, gender expectations and migration.
If societies want to reduce the appeal of nostalgic gender hierarchies, policy matters. Addressing stagnant wages, rising costs of living and fraying social safety nets would reduce the economic incentives that make traditional gender bargains attractive. Otherwise, nostalgia for a clear gendered division of labor—where men expect women’s labor and women hope for economic security—will continue to shape how people form partnerships across borders.
Julia Meszaros is an associate professor of sociology at Texas A&M University–Commerce. This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
