A close friend of mine at that time encouraged me to step up. She assured me that many of her friends got married and everything was fine with them. On top of that, two of my friends managed to get married well thanks to online dating.
One day, while sitting in a cafe and sipping my favourite Frappuccino with ice, I thought: why not? And I signed up for a dating site. At that time – and even now – it was one of the most popular dating sites in Kazakhstan.
I signed up for the website under the name "Maral" and set my real, but rather blurry photo for an avatar. I started learning about the process and almost immediately met a very clever guy. He wasn’t from Astana, so our communication somehow gradually fizzled out.
I find it important for a guy to have fine communication skills.
Many of the messages I received were plain and beaten:
– What are you doing here, baby?
– Let's get acquainted.
– I really like you.
There were also messages with sexual content, where men offered casual sex from the first lines. They were banned immediately. After all, I was looking for a husband, not a sexual partner or lover.
Looking ahead, I’ll say that almost none of the candidates were interested in my work and hobbies, but everyone wanted to know whether it was me in the photo.
My first online friend was Aslan. Lets’ call him that. He had a good looking profile. This cute, from the photo, guy wished me a good day every morning, bon appetit at lunch, and asked me about my day in the evening. We were penpalling for a couple of weeks and then decided to meet up. It was Sunday. I wanted to impress him. I had my hair and makeup done, put on the most smart and elegant dress I had had in my wardrobe.
Anyway, we met.
To say that I was deeply surprised is to say nothing.
It was a forty or forty-five-year-old man.
It was Aslan, no doubt. However, it seems that the photo was taken when he was young.
Thin, unpresentable, but intelligent.
We spent a wonderful evening and text each other for a few days… Until the day, I received a message from a girl with the sonorous name Roxana, saying that her ex-husband avoids paying child support for three years hiding somewhere. She gave me her phone number so I could tell her where we'd meet next, so she could come and rip his 'skinny ass' off. At least that's what she wrote to me.