Thai women looking for foreign husbands on the internet
Surfing the Web for Mr Right
Educated women of rural origin, widows seek foreign spouse
Long popular in the Northeast with poor and uneducated women, the so-called mia-farang fashion is now catching on among northern widows and single, well-educated women in Bangkok of rural origins.
A women's studies academic warned it might just be the response of the sex trade to the cyber era.
"The trend is changing. In the past they were always northeastern women from poor families without much schooling. That continues, but the emerging group is widows from the North," Nuch, operator of search the web, the hottest online dating website, told The Nation.
Nuch's Bangkok-based company Sweet Singles Thailand offers an online dating service for Thai women looking for a foreign groom.
"Interestingly, another growing group is single women from rural provinces now living in Bangkok. They're highly educated; some even have a master's degree from a decent university," she said.
"Seven years ago most of our clients had had failed marriages. Now 60 per cent of our membership is single," Nuch said.
In the northern capital of Chiang Mai, online dating has been booming for years, said Nee Saenphrom, operator of a Chiang Mai-based online dating business that is expanding into six provinces.
"More and more businesses have opened in the past two years, specifically for online dating. You can easily find advertisements in local papers. Some have websites, but most of them have only mobile-phone numbers," Nee said.
One such website boasts it has arranged over 4,000 weddings.
Every day new faces apply for membership at Nuch and Nee's offices. At Nuch's some 40 women sign up daily while Nee's receives some 50 applications per month. Nee's office has 300 members registered, not counting those who succeed in marriage and log off, while Nuch's membership runs to over 1,000.
That is the quantitative aspect, but quality is even more interesting, said Romyen Kosaiyakanon of Chiang Mai University's Women's Studies Centre, who has just finished a research project on "Cross-Border Marriages: A Case Study of Thai Women-Foreign Men Matches Through Online Dating Services in Thailand".
"One-fourth of applicants have bachelor's degrees, 30 per cent have vocational degrees, and 20 per cent have high-school diplomas," she said.
"Half of them are divorced, and 40 per cent say they are single," she added.
The average age of the Thai women was 37, with the youngest 18. The men were 53 on average.
Nee and Nuch said there were several main reasons causing the women to turn to online dating. One is their experience of marriage to Thai men, another is a personal tendency to favour foreign men, and third come economic and social circumstances.
"Many of them said they were tired of Thai men's behaviour, especially their irresponsibility to their families, flirting and dishonesty to their wives. Not all Thai men are like that, but we have to admit that it's true for a certain number of them," Nee said.
"Many women have been raising children alone in order to save their marriages. Now they receive more information and learn that there is no reason for them to put up with it. They have started questioning how it is men manage to do that to them," Nee said.
Pranpreeya Prasongdee, 37, a former marketing manager in Chiang Mai, said she had lost almost all faith in connubial life when she divorced her husband, a policemen, eight years ago.
"After arguments about his new women for years, he started beating me, until one day he broke two of my ribs and badly hurt my head after a fight. I took my son and ran away from the hospital, out of his life," she said.
Nuch said more women visiting her office told her they had a good impression of foreign men, especially their sense of looking after their families.
"There are two groups, one which really want a foreign husband and another group, mostly single women, who are looking for men who can better their social status [in education and finance]," Nuch said.
"I'm not saying they don't do it for the money, but for many of them it's much more than that. More and more women join online dating services to seek long-term relationships, to find someone who will mind their kids, give them more security financially and take good care of them for the rest of their lives," Nee said.
Pranpreeya agreed.
"I decided to apply for membership after taking time to study the service and witnessing success cases myself. But the prime reason is I want a brighter future for my 17-year-old son. Unless I marry my Australian boyfriend, my son will only get a mediocre education. He can continue his studies abroad if I do. He wants to be an architect," she said. Pranpreeya's getting married in Chiang Mai in October.
Researcher Romyen admitted that it was not easy to explain the social phenomenon.
"Traditional feminists say it's a new type of cross-border sex trade; liberals say it's about fair supply and demand, while many believe it's a new bargaining era on the part of women," she said.
"What I concluded in my research is that it's not a trade in women. What they trade in is contact and access for women.
Supply and demand are certainly biased, though: there are six times more women than men in the system, so men have more choice, without considering the greater power of men in terms of nationality bias [farangs being seen as better than Thais], finances, better access to information and other things," she said.
"As for the idea of this being an equal bargaining-power era for women, I found that was definitely not true. It may be a new bargaining era for women, but not an equal one. As I say, all the rules of online dating services favour men rather than women, whether intentionally or not," Romyen said.
"If it's trafficking in women, it's the smoothest and softest kind, though of course there's no equality there either, despite the so-called new bargaining era," she said.
That's an academic's point of view, said Nee and Nuch. Business continues to boom no matter how you explain the ongoing fashion.
"The online-dating business has done very well by me. It's good business, even though I have more competitors these days, but I know I do it better than they do and have more experience. I run it with the good intentions of helping two people find their real long-term soul mate and a better life," Nee said.
Nuch said: "Even though the money from membership is not big, we can supplement it from related services like translation, hotel reservations, cars, visa applications, souvenirs and even wedding services.
"The money to be made attracts more and more people to the business. The question mark is their quality and the risk for the women involved with a non-professional service." Nuch said.
Kamol Sukin
The Nation
