The Vulnerable Alien Wife: Beyond Mail-Order Brides

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"You're married!" Richard screamed on the end of the line. "You're married to me! I need to have a female in my life."

It was a typical fight between my ex-husband and me, some months before the end of our marriage.

"I don't know where you are right now," he continued, bringing the decibels down a notch. "I can't live like that!"

"I'm at a networking event," I responded coolly.

"Make a choice, then, your career or your marriage. I can't have you running around!"

"I am not your little bird!" I screamed, aggravated by his comment. "A person can't live in a cage!"

"I will have you with me, I don't care at what cost!" he responded. "Come home now or I'm filling out the divorce paperwork."

I lit another cigarette on the end of the line and said nothing.

"You are choosing to divorce me?"

"No, you are choosing to divorce me."

"If you're not mature or responsible enough to be my wife and be with me -- I'm going to let you go," Richard said, like he was laying me off. "You can work on our life together or -- "

"Our life? No. Your life. I can work on being a part of your life, do it your way or hit the road."

"Come home," he said. "Come home or I'll change your situation."

"Meaning?”

Richard said nothing.

"You mean 'come home or I'll have the NSA personally escort you out of the country.' It's what you mean, isn't it?"

"If that's what you choose, that's what will happen. I love you. I have to be with you."

"Love is not this. Don't you dare tarnish love with this."

The problem with his threat was two-fold: one, I didn’t want to live in the United States. Our plan -- which my ex-husband changed without my opinion after we were married -- had been to move back to my home country of Peru after we were married. But I was flexible and in love, so I decided to stay. I'd spent much of my life in the U.S., and it didn't seem like a great sacrifice to spend a few more years here. That was the first thing: despite the fact that he treated me like he'd done me an incredible favor by enabling me to come here and thus escape my desperate existence with a strong support system, a full household staff and a booming economy in what he called a "third-world" country (it's actually a second-world country), he was the only reason I was here.

The second problem was more detrimental to him: I knew my rights. I knew the law. In fact, I knew more about both than he did. I knew that no matter how many times he said he was just joking, holding a knife to someone's throat, saying you're going to shoot them, or coercing them with threats about their immigration status are very serious things, and that, should I choose to stay, I could petition to do so under a waiver made available to foreign women for just this reason.

Even so, during this period, I thought several times about people who are coerced to stay in horrible, abusive relationships because they don't understand their rights and so dread going back to their home countries that they simply bow their heads and take it. No one should live like that. Unfortunately, the system we have in place to assist foreigners who come to this country in the name of love is not one many of these foreigners know about. We have to fill out a million forms and file a thousand petitions, but rarely are we given the required information about what our rights are or what legal recourse we have should things go terribly wrong -- and certainly never are we given a handbook about what is legally acceptable behavior in a marriage.

THE VULNERABLE LIMBO TO HAPPILY EVER AFTER

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by AnastasiaDate.com, a dating service seeking to "bring the world together" by enabling men the world over to scan the profiles of thousands of Russian and Ukranian women to find the beautiful, young love of their lives. Lawrence Cervantes, content director of AnastasiaDate, was in Los Angeles with two spokeswomen, users who had been active on the site for several years and were available to show me the ropes.

I accepted the invitation, though my thoughts about marriage brokers survive in a bitterly confused, war-torn space in my mind. Not only am I a foreigner once married to an American