Polygamy, though illegal, has become a fact of life in Kazakhstan. Men with multiple wives are not uncommon.
But now some powerful women are looking for a piece of the action, turning to Almaty dating agencies to help them find just what the woman who has everything needs: a second “husband.”
“It sometimes seems to me that the world’s turned upside down and a matriarchy is setting in,” Irina Proshina, the deputy director of one unnamed Almaty dating agency, told the Megapolis newspaper.
One high-powered businesswoman decided that “since one husband wasn’t coping with his spousal obligations, she needed to acquire a second,” Proshina said, though in her view “guys aren’t pets” to be acquired like that.
Sometimes women bring along their husbands to help make the tricky selection. Proshina’s agency has had three women, husbands in tow, come by seeking a second man. Perhaps not surprisingly, the men looked “down-trodden and hen-pecked” to Proshina’s well-trained eye.
Polygamy was outlawed in Soviet times but has gained ground across Central Asia since the collapse of the USSR, growing in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan as well as Kazakhstan. It’s illegal but mullahs often bless polygamous marriages, giving them a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of society.
Though an Islamic marriage is not an option for women with multiple “husbands,” there’s no shortage of volunteers. “Guys often turn up at our agency who passionately wish to become the husband of a well-off woman,” Proshina explains.
Some men, she says, “are ready for anything for the sake of a rich and beautiful woman: to be third in bed and in life, to become a gigolo – to anyone, just not to live in poverty on a single salary.”
They don’t care what number in line they are, either—Proshina knows one Almaty woman who has three “husbands,” the youngest the same age as her son. “And she’s happy, she jokes that she’s got a male harem.”
Joanna Lillis is a journalist based in Almaty and author of Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan.
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