It's an increasingly common love story happening in Singapore and elsewhere around the Southeast-asian region: A man walks into an office, casts his gaze upon a row of pretty, foreign women, picks one, and a short time later, they both get married.
Foreign brides serve a need in a community, where, for some reason, the local men there cannot find themselves a spouse. But with such cross- border matchmaking sessions, come inherent dangers for the brides, and sometimes even the groom too.
We have heard many anecdotes of study mamas who divorce their husbands after snaring a Singapore citizenship, or even horror stories of unhappy wives who stray.
Conversely, there are also husbands who abuse their new wives, engage in bride trafficking elsewhere in the region, or in the most extreme cases, murder them.
But as the stakes for love get higher - educated women who cannot find soulmates in men who are not their financial or intellectual equals, and therefore look overseas to foreign men who may be more savvy than their local counterparts, or men from countries such as Korea and Japan who look to less-developed countries for companionship, one thing seems to universally certain - a strong marriage is one where both partners have equal amounts of commitment to the each other, where communication lines are open, and both strive to make the other happy, even if their union did not begin as a love match.
You may ask why the girls would still like to do it. Poverty, debts, hoping for a better life, cannot take the harsh and hardship of the country side and may even be curosity what it is like living overseas. Do you think there is or will be true love? Yes, may be but what percentage. It started with the Taiwanese doing that, then the .....
I do not believe that finding a spouse at a commercial matchmaking agency is a good thing, for both the man and the foreign wife, certainly not when the man simply chooses one from among a bevy of beauties and uglies that he olges.
That being said, this rising trend and the way match-making agencies are making marriages as easy as buying a can of coke off the shelf of your neighbourhood provision shop will leave .....