http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news ... -women-men
Quote:
Wanderlust: How to marry a Russian man in three months
A shortage of men motivates some Russian women to become better lovers. Here's how they're doing it.
MOSCOW – Yulia Varra says that when a 50-year-old Russian man looks for a girlfriend, he never considers women close to his age.
“He wants somebody under 25,” she said.
While men in other countries might want the same thing, they probably don't have a waiting list of young, pretty maidens interested in a relationship with them.
“We have a very specific situation in Russia, said Varra, 42.
"There are too many women and not enough men."
While anecdotal evidence suggests Russia isn’t the only country where successful women over the age of 40 struggle to find potential husbands, the gap here is wide enough to be statistically significant.
Based on preliminary census results published in March, men account for just 46.3 percent of Russia's population, while women make up 53.7 percent.
There are many reasons for that gap.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russia's population has been steadily decreasing. Since the last survey in 2002, it dropped by another 2.2 million.
But the number of men is declining even more dramatically. Russian women today outnumber men by 10.5 million, primarily due to high male mortality rates fueled by heart disease, accidents and alcoholism, all made worse by dramatic socioeconomic changes in post-Soviet Russia.
But that's not all. Only a fraction of the men who are still alive aren’t violent, impoverished or addicted to alcohol, Varra claims.
“Finding a Russian man over 40 who has money and isn’t an alcoholic is extremely hard,” she said. “Such a man will probably have a car, a weekend cottage, but often also a wife or at least a mistress or two. Yet, to many Russian women this is still a better option than settling for an indebted drunk.”
It all adds up to a pretty bleak situation for Russian women.
But where others her age see despair and frustration, Varra sensed a business opportunity. She runs a class in Moscow called “How to Marry in Three Months” designed to teach women how to overcome the challenges of Russia's man shortage.
The course takes place two to three times a year, and has been so popular that Varra is working on a book of the same title, “How to Marry in Three Months.”
She teaches female customers how to find, keep and marry a man in six easy steps, which run from “Putting oneself in places men of interest frequent,“ all the way to “Getting him to marry you.”
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It seems like a really good plan. Would any of the ladies here care to give it a whirl?