This guy was about one billion percent more pathetic/worse than I even assumed he was.
Again: thank GOD this guy only chose to humiliate himself, and not take his wife and kids out before doing so.
His “trip tips” for Georgia were SUCH an embarrassing side note in his interview. Yes, dude, we get it: you have now been to one or two other countries. You’re not worldly, special, or a good dad/man.
In the 1990es when USSR fell apart and life in postsoviet bloc countries was very difficult, many women wanted to leave "at whatever cost". This is the time when shady bridal agencies made albums of "Eastern European" brides. Men who were not too "hot" here would attempt to find mail-order brides; i once met a party of such grooms in an airport in Iowa. However: I never met any couple like this here. The rumor says it that even if they managed to get married, they'd divorce very fast.
(At the same time, there was an opinion that "Eastern bloc women took better care of their men, would cook and be homebodies". It might have been true to a degree, but I'd say, "their men" meant "men of their own culture", and there is a long and sad explanation as to why it was so).
But nowadays it is harder to survive on one salary, anywhere in the world, so let us put it so, a man is lucky if he finds a woman willing to marry him and have children with him. There should be certain equality, education-wise first, for it to happen.
So it seems that Ryan was already very lucky to have found a good and loving woman who agreed to have a family and three children with him. It partially had to do with him living in a small tightly knit community in Green Lake. That community, it seems, has certain "old" values and was willing to spend almost three months looking for their own who, as they originally thought, got in trouble.
Move him anywhere close to a metropolitan area, and he'd be underwater a decade ago, no pun intended. Not the most "going" profession, a family, three kids...question is, would he even be able to get a family, tbh. That he accumulated debts was not surprising. That there were stresses because he "failed" in his own community is predictable. Maybe it all was a "psychogenic fugue", to start anew, to leave his old life behind.
But rationally thinking... imagine that he believed in miraculous love over FaceTime and planned to start another family in Transcaucasian Georgia at 45. A woodworker, not speaking any "going" language there? Maybe the woman didn't know that he was married, but she surely didn't expect a man fit only for work at a Tbilisi construction site. How did he expect to survive there?
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