Page 369 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Cross-cultural communication in intimate relationships 347

making agencies of all kinds are booming, including mail-order bride services.
The modern mail-order bride industry began in the early 1970s with personal
ads and print mail-order catalogues (O’Rourke 2002). However, it was only
with the spread of internet access that the industry started to boom. In 2002,
O’Rourke (2002) estimated that, at the time, there were around 2,700 agencies
worldwide, with around 500 based in the US. From the mid-1980s onwards an es-
timated 5,000 mail-order brides from the Philippines alone entered the US each
year, a total of 55,000 as of 1997 (Hughes et al. 1999). The advantages of the
web-based agency over newspaper ads or print catalogues are obvious: To begin
with, the database can be kept up-to-date at all times, so that customers do not
need to worry that the prospective partners they are interested in might already
have been taken. Most sites emphasize this fact in their advertising, for instance:

If you watch our site closely, you will notice that 50 beautiful women are added to it
every week. But what you might not notice, unless you bookmarked many ladies’
profiles, is that we also de-activate many profiles every week. Approximately 5–25
such deactivations each week result from daily client requests and contacts from
ladies asking to be removed from our site as they have entered a serious relationship.
We honor these requests without hesitation. 6

Furthermore, the genre of the personal ads has changed with the new medium.
Personal ads are no longer a minimalist genre where the advertiser has to be
concise because they are paying per word or even per letter (Bruthiaux 1996).
Web-ads typically include a closed list of attributes (age, physical measure-
ments, ethnicity, religion, smoking status, etc.), plus a photo, and two open-
ended sections where the advertiser can describe themselves and their desired
other.
Finally, prospective partners do not have to rely on the personal ad in iso-
lation, rather the membership system of many sites offers an opportunity for in-
stantaneous communication. If a client is interested in an advertiser they can
initiate a chat session with them. Cristina, whose “real-life success story” is fea-
tured on “Filipina Heart” describes the process as follows:

I dont know where to start my fairytail like story. I was in filipinaheart only to chat
with my friends but i did not expect that i will meet the man that will give me hap-
piness, love, and everything to me. one day, i go to the internet cafe to close my pro-
file in filipinaheart because i am so busy studying but there is this man named garry
that popped up in my computer screen only a few minutes before i can close my pro-
file. i am not really interested to talk that day but i felt something for him and that talk
last for hours and we promised to talk everyday either in filipinaheart or phone. we
communicate everyday […] 7
If a site does not offer a membership system (where the men pay for access to
the data of all the women advertising on a site), the client can purchase the con-
tact details of the women they are interested in on a case-by-case basis (“add to