Reviewed On: 3/31/2008

Price/Period: $19.95/30 days



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Reviewed by Cupids Reviews Staff

Bride.ru may be an online dating site, but it appears to be just one step above the old-fashioned mail-order catalogs. Flawed in design and appearance, it makes up for its shortcomings by offering what appears to be a solid lineup of real Russian women who are looking for love. If a foreign bride is what you’re after, there may be hope yet. Read on to find out more about this unique site.

The profile creation process is anything but routine on Bride. The system doesn't use traditional dropdown menus, or multiple-choice answers, for common questions. It's all freeform fill-in-the-blank, leaving tons of room for human error. You cannot skip any fields and you're indeed required to upload at least one photo of yourself to join.

"Bride offers an interesting package that you won’t find on many other sites."

You can search by limited information, since, obviously, only a few details, such as height and weight, have standardized dropdown menus of options. The other fields, such as occupation or even education, could have an endless number of answers. It's unfortunate that there's no keyword search available on the site.

Free access plays a large roll in seeing what a site has to offer. Bride offers an interesting package that you won’t find on many other sites. You can surf the site for free and even contact some of the members. They’ve tiered profiles off into three categories: gold, silver and free.

As a man, your tier is determined by whether you've paid or not (obviously). However, it's less clear how it's decided what level of membership can contact any specific woman. Some of the women can only be contacted by gold members. For others, gold and silver subscribers can reach them, while a few can be contacted by all members, paying or otherwise.

It seems that if a lady is over thirty or has children, she may be contacted free. Under thirty and moderately good-looking garners a gal the suitors that have paid for at least a silver membership. Therefore, it stands to reason that the females who can only be contacted by gold-level subscribers tend to be the youngest and most objectively pretty on the site.

Although the site has seen a slight decline in visitors, it remains popular. The less expensive of its two premium memberships is comparable to most dating sites. However, its top-level gold members are charged a much higher-than-average recurring monthly fee, along with a very expensive one-time setup fee the month of membership.

I wouldn't suggest springing for the higher-priced gold membership without testing out Bride.ru for free and then upgrading to the lower-cost silver tier first, but the site seems to work for people.

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