Bachelor, divorced, widower or just plain unlucky in love? If you fit into any of these categories and long for a soul mate to share the rest of your life with, head over to Odessa in Ukraine, the so called ‘dating capital of the world’.
And that’s probably the scene that greets you in this small Black Sea port city in Ukraine which attracts hordes of westerners to its streets every year. Filled with café and parks galore, Odessa is literally teeming with beautiful women waiting to be your soul mate. You either get to meet them here for the first time, or establish contact with them beforehand via online chats and emails.
The women in Odessa are more than willing to mingle with foreigners and on more than one occasions, you would come across one who says “I like a strong man who knows his mind. I think I can be your soulmate.”
The conversations and meetings are arranged by numerous dating agencies which give you anywhere from a few days to a week to explore the city and meet its so called ‘angels’. The dating agencies also provide you with free entrance to several happening events at cafes and nightclubs in order to give you the opportunity to meet several prospective brides.
You can go on dates with these women, speak your heart out to them (using a translator of course) and then, by the end of the week, marry one of them and take them back to your home to start a new life together.
Sounds like a dream right? Well, don’t be fooled. For underneath all those dreams and promises lie a lucrative business industry ready to milk the money right out of your pocket before you even know it. And it all starts with the first online chat or email shared by prospective victims to their dream girls located in Ukraine, the Philippines and Colombia.
Let’s take a detailed look into the costs involved in meeting and marrying the girl of your dreams in a country like Ukraine. A dating agency you get in touch with lets you have access to countless online profiles of prospective brides in these countries. You start chatting or mailing them, spending as much as £1 or £10 per chat or email respectively.
A couple of chats or emails later (amounting up to anywhere between £3,000 and £10,000), the agency would offer you a lucrative by-product; a trip to these countries to visit the women you have been chatting with. The cost of the trip? Around £3,000 or more to visit the country, get access to its party events and girls.
You make the trip, anticipating to meet the girls you had established an emotional connect with online. However, in most cases when you reach the place, you would not be able to meet those girls and would have to go through the entire procedure of meeting a new girl again. Some of them would have switched off their phones while others would fail to arrive at arranged dates, citing reasons as simple as an ailing relative. Chances are these women never existed and you might have been speaking to one woman with different fake profiles (paid by the agency to do so).
Let’s move onto the actual dates. If the date does choose to arrive, she would do so with a red shirted translator in tow. The general perception is that Ukrainian women do not know English and would need a translator to communicate with you. These translators charge you on an hourly basis with bills ranging up to £250 or more. Probe a little further and you would be amazed to know that most of these women would speak near perfect English, and still bring a translator anyway. Why you ask? Go figure!
The dates themselves are expensive and would require you to shell out huge sums of money to please your girl. A simple walk in the park or coffee in a café would never do for these women. You would have to opt for high end restaurants for meals, luxurious pool clubs or elite beach parties in order to impress these beauties. So expect to shell out much more than you bargained for.
Even claims about the loyalty of these women seem to be false. Westerners flock to Odessa to marry and take home brides who would be with them for the rest of their lives. Their take on the matter pertains to the selfishness of the western woman who just takes your belongings and walks out on you.
Sadly though, the women you meet in Ukraine through these dating agencies are no less than their western counterparts. Chances are your girl will accept your proposal to get married, come back home with you, stay until she has perfected her English and has got access to the money in your bank accounts and then just disappear one fine day.
