Maybe Not An Arranged Marriage, But As Close As You Can Get To It

Working in oil I made my first trip to Kazakhstan. We went to visit this company that had trucking and other logistics support. The manager was arrogant and unbending, and beside him the whole time was this beautiful blonde blue eyed goddess.

I ran head on into the world of power, politics, and expendable people. She was there because she spoke English, she had played tennis in some capacity. But at that meeting and the others she never spoke, she just listened. Her boss, the arrogant SOB, did the talking in his heavily accented English.

Several trips later, we had signed them up for our purposes, she slipped a note in my hand. She offered to marry me, if I took her with me. I truly at that moment didn't understand the note she had given me. It was only after talking with a guy who had been there for a long time that he enlightened me. To get out she needed a visa. To get the visa to leave she needed to be married to a foreigner. He also told me these girls usually make good wives, they are forever grateful. Hey, a tennis star, her English was very good, and look at that. Where was I ever going to find that to marry me.

The marriage was official, in the local sense. Not religious. A visa was applied for and it returned quickly. With some help from her boss, but I never proved that. She was on a plane to the 'west' in two weeks from the day she put the slip in my hand. Today she is an American citizen, today she has a son of her own. And for these many years she has been a wife in the west, she's lived up to her commitment. Our fortunes have been both up and down, companies get bought out, others fail. After my experience there I settled for staying domestic and I am looking down the barrel of retirement. A man of my age with a 45 year old beauty, which I'm sure it has crossed many minds that she's a trophy wife. But in her world, I'm the trophy, not the other way around.