“Rosie” knew a lot about stereotypes. As mail-order bride from the Philippines, she faced… “Rosie” knew a lot about stereotypes. As mail-order bride from the Philippines, she faced stereotypes that she must be a meek, passive woman who wanted to marry a Western man simply for economic advancement. Many people assumed she would be willing to cater to her husband’s every whim.

No one ever said stereotypes couldn’t be defied.

Pitt Professor Nicole Constable, of the anthropology and international studies departments, has recently published a book, “Romance on a Global Stage.” The book explores the wave of international dating on the Internet.

Constable spent about four years researching couples involved in international Internet relationships. In the relationships she studied, the men lived in the United States or another Western country, and the women resided in the Philippines or China.

Constable’s research echoed the manner in which her subjects communicated. She met many of the men through list service groups, which were directed at men interested in finding love across the world. She corresponded with the men and women, following their journeys to find love, in many cases all the way until their eventual first face-to-face meetings.

Constable was well-received, for the most part, with her research, with the exception of one of the larger groups she joined. While most of the men were supportive and encouraged her work, a small percentage of the group lambasted her, causing her to withdraw from the group.

Otherwise, the men and women she contacted were enthusiastic about her project. Many of the Chinese women, in fact, saw her as a resource — a person to ask about whether or not it was all right for a 50-year-old man in the United States to still live with his mother, for example.

There are many incorrect, preconceived ideas about mail-order marriages, creating a difficulty for Constable in writing this book. One of the manners in which she dispelled the stereotypes was through examining the motivations of the couples.

Most of the men who participate in this type of Internet dating do so because they are looking for a woman who is not career-centric, who is willing to put raising a family first, and who is not likely to seek a divorce. The men feel they cannot find this type of woman in the United States anymore, Constable reported, countering the stereotype that the men want only a submissive, meek woman.

One of the couples Constable interviewed was Rosie and Ben, who requested that their real names not be used. When Constable met Ben, he had just become engaged to Rosie, a Filipino woman, after an Internet courtship. Both were communicating with others on the Web, but after meeting each other, they decided to make a commitment to one another.

There was just one problem: Rosie didn’t know if she was married or not.

Years earlier, she had become pregnant by the son of her employer. Her employer drew up a marriage certificate, but Rosie did not know if it had ever been filed.

It had. Annulments were hard to come by in the Philippines, but Ben would not let the absent husband get in the way of their love. For a year, he fought to get an annulment for Rosie, and once it was granted, they moved back to the United States for his work and got married.

Constable hoped to dispel the stereotypes concerning this type of courtship. The book is about “getting beyond images to meeting people,” according to Constable.

She hopes “people will view the men and women [she writes] about as more than and different from the simple stereotypes of pop culture, [such as] men who buy brides or women who sell themselves.”