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Diva
updated 25 May 2013, 13:19
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Thu, Aug 05, 2010
Diva
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Foreign brides: Where is the love?

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.

She was making money from other men
Asian men forced to marry foreigners: study
She married him, but she did not love him
Foreign brides in demand in S'pore
Love does not always need to come first
First China, then Vietnam... now Myanmar brides?
Fiance used knife to make me sleep with him

 

readers' comments
We must thank the woman charten "AWARE" and our govt policy to put all the wise woman in the market for GDP growth at the expense of broken HOME,Foreign woman.SMART policies.Blame who?
Posted by catnmouse on Thu, 5 Aug 2010 at 12:45 PM
Bride arrangements by agents are already banned in Vietnam. The reason was because the brides are just being sold off to a foreign man for a paltry sum. The arrangement fees are usually around SGD10,000. Out of this, the agent will provide return air ticket on budget airlines (around $200), hotel accommodation in mini hotels for 3 nights ($150), wedding dinner for families ($400), miscellaneous fees ($250) and pay the brides family anythings between $700 and $1,000. The balance goes into the brokers' pockets.
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 .....
Posted by DuLichDat on Thu, 5 Aug 2010 at 12:31 PM
In the good old days, young men and women were match-made too. Okie, the matchmaker could be a "professional" 38 por, grandparents or parents of both sides, but there was at least a "vetting" process to ensure that the personalities of the potential spouses would not clash. There were also checks on the the 8 character but that's subjective depending on whether or not you believe in that.

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 .....
Posted by on Thu, 5 Aug 2010 at 11:19 AM

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