Most dating sites reviewed on this blog fight for a slice of your attention. A Foreign Affair - better known by its domain, LoveMe.com - fights for your passport. Founded in 1995 and based in Phoenix, it is one of the oldest international marriage agencies still operating, and it sells something no swipe app does: organized "romance tours" to Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America, plus letter translation and in-person introductions. We spent three weeks digging through its pricing pages, tour terms, and user reports to answer the question behind every search for an A Foreign Affair review: is this a legitimate path to an international relationship, or an expensive time capsule from the pre-app era?
The short answer: it is a real company delivering a real service, with real marriages on the record - wrapped in a pricing model that punishes anyone who does not read the fine print.
What A Foreign Affair actually is
A Foreign Affair operates as an international introduction agency under the rules of the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA), the 2005 US law that requires background disclosures when American clients are matched with foreign nationals. That compliance matters: it is the legal line between an introduction service and a mail-order-bride operation, and AFA leans on it publicly.
The product lineup is threefold. First, an online catalog of profiles - heavily weighted toward Ukraine, Colombia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Second, a letter-writing and translation service, where each translated message costs credits. Third, the flagship: group romance tours, typically seven to fourteen days, bundling hotel, two large "social" events, and staff translators. Tour packages run into the several-thousand-dollar range before airfare, and the per-letter costs accumulate quietly in the background.
The numbers nobody puts on the landing page
International introductions live or die on trust, and the trust environment for cross-border romance has rarely been worse. The Federal Trade Commission's Consumer Sentinel Network logged nearly 70,000 romance-scam reports in 2022, with reported losses of $1.3 billion and a median loss of $4,400. The follow-up data was barely better: Americans reported $1.14 billion lost to romance scams in 2023, the highest total of any fraud category the agency tracks.
Emma Fletcher, the FTC researcher behind the agency's romance-scam data spotlights, put it bluntly: "Romance scammers tell all sorts of lies to steal your heart and money, and reports to the FTC show those lies are working." Any service that moves courtship across borders sits inside that risk envelope - which is why the verification question matters more here than on a domestic app.
Where A Foreign Affair earns its keep
The strongest argument for AFA is physical presence. Letters and video chats can be faked; a week in Kyiv or Medellin with staff translators and scheduled socials cannot, at least not cheaply. User accounts going back two decades consistently describe the tours as well-organized, and the company publishes engagement announcements with names and photos. For a specific customer - typically an older American man with disposable income and a preference for traditional courtship - that structure is the product.
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Where it falls short
The complaints cluster around two issues. The first is the letter model itself: paying per translated message creates an incentive problem that AFA has never fully shaken, and former clients have long alleged that some letters are written by translators rather than the women pictured. The second is cost opacity - membership tiers, credit bundles, and tour deposits stack up in ways that make the true spend hard to forecast. Our advice matches what we tell readers of every review on this site: set a hard budget before you register, and treat any contact who steers you toward more paid communication instead of a meeting as a red flag, whatever the platform.
Verdict
A Foreign Affair is legitimate in the narrow sense that matters most: it is a decades-old, IMBRA-compliant company that really does fly men to meet women abroad. Whether it is good value is a different question. Against the backdrop of $1.14 billion in annual romance-scam losses, any service built on paid correspondence deserves skepticism until the first in-person meeting. If you go, go for the tour, skip the pen-pal economy, and keep your fraud radar on.
Offers Free Trials
Over 1M Members
Able To Message & Video Chat With Other Members