Ulbosyn Shaleken
How to avoid becoming a spinster?

Author's note

Hello there! My name is Ulbosyn.

I'm 33 and I’m a journalist. My zodiac sign is Virgo.

I started thinking about family life when I turned 29.

Until that moment I worked, hanged out with friends, went on business trips, studied, attended workshops.

However, the thoughts about starting a family and having beautiful and healthy children occurred to me when I turned the age of 29.

At some point, I even started dreaming of a marriage certificate with its distinctive blue jacket.

This is what I wanted in the first place.

Civil marriage?

Cool!

However, it wasn’t for me.

I'm one of those young ladies, who like telling everyone: 'Please, meet my husband'. I wanted to put on a wedding dress and call all my relatives. Tell everyone: his name is…

They always call an unmarried girl of 25 years of age or older a spinster. Not everyone could stand the disapproving looks and whispers behind their backs. In my book 'How to avoid becoming a "spinster"', I’ll share my brief experience in finding a husband.

I’m aware that there are a lot of television and radio broadcasts, books covering this topic and providing various, sometimes quite mind-bending, tips. I’ve read many of them. They typically contain a case study and advice. So I decided to share my own experience.

Why not?

Chapter 1

Dating sites: shh! First-hand experience…

If a woman closes her profile on a dating site, then she has got married.

If a man closes his profile, then he has got busted.

Author unknown.

First: yes! Of course, I was courted by young men. I mean, I didn’t remind people of a lonely, sad, prickly cactus. However, I didn’t imagine any of my fellows as a prospective husband.

Alas…

I thought one was too tight-fisted and greedy. The other was drinking too much beer and talking a lot. The third lied to me for two months that he’s an avid bachelor and ended up being the father of three boys. It happens too. Overall, they weren’t for me…

They say you must try everything in this life, and I agree with that! I think this saying shouldn’t be interpreted as falling into homosexual relationships, threesome and heavy drugs. However, dating services weren’t too bad to try. So I took my chance. For some reason, it always seemed very shameful! How come? Sign up for a dating site and upload your real photo!

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.

That was the 'grand finale' for the story.

The second case was also funny. A profile photo portrayed a smiling, cute guy with brown eyes. About thirty. He said that he was 35 and worked in the city as an architect.

We chatted for two weeks and then I decided to meet him.

A young guy with long hair neatly combed back met me that day. He was wearing long polka dot bell-bottoms and a red sweater. He seemed to be much lighter than me. He was too skinny.

I was 68 kilograms at that time.

All evening he was shy, spoke haltingly and at the end he offered to rent an apartment, watch a movie and drink some beer.

That made me laugh.

We paid the bill and I left.

A joke on point:

Ladies, don’t go to dating sites, go to employment sites.

Same profiles, but pictures and CVs are real.

The third candidate has been fooling me for a week saying that he had just come back from the States and wanted to get married urgently. He said his parents want grandchildren, and he really liked me. That’s what he said. My heart 'sank'…

Wow, I thought…

However, it turned out to be a great deal simpler. Like in this joke.

Online dating:

– Hi! Where are you from?

– Hi! I from Russia. And you?

– I from France.

– Pizdish.

– Chestnoeslovo…

Exactly one month passed since I signed up for the site. More than 200 people wrote to me during this time. Many of them told me they were up to serious relationships and would marry. Some wanted to meet to make sure we fit together.

I met three other young guys, but it did go beyond cafe dating. From my experience, profile photos have little in common with their owners.

So, don’t trust the photos on dating sites. Men tend to 'rejuvenate' or 'embellish' themselves a bit. A handsome guy will turn out to be an oily old man with a sagging belly or a married guy with three children, who want to have fun on the side.

There were also those without a profile photo, but with the 'premium' icon on. Premium account is a paid service that allows you to send messages without a profile photo.

These dinosaurs are there for years. They’ll never send you their photo. They usually call you straight away and ask for meeting. But I've never met such men. I decided not to take this risk.

Overall, dating sites are full of surprises.

                                    A joke on point:

A guy on a dating site met a girl. They exchanged photos. It turned to be his mother-in-law.

Conclusions

There are decent men online, who have no other options except dating sites due to their excessive employment.

Men tend to embellish themselves on dating sites. They upload six-year-old photos of themselves, want to look younger. They tend to conceal their marriage, children. They tend to lie about having own business and money to burn and send an off-topic photo with somebody's fancy car.

There are also those who look for one-night stand or married guys who look for a side adventure or silly girls to have fun in a motel room.

People mostly communicate with a fictional image, not with a real person. Many illusions crumble when faced with reality.

There are those who say they have an instant crush on you and ask your Skype login right away. The climax of such stories is him asking for money… He promises to give it back very soon, telling all sorts of stories like lost IDs, an ill family member, car accident. I have banned a couple of those immediately.

You don’t want to have a long online chatting with the person you like. Call each other after a short conversation. You don’t ask for his number and send yours straight away, but at the same time make him understand clearly if you have a real interlocutor or not. The faster you move at least to phone communication, the sooner you understand what kind of person he’s. The live conversation reveals true level of intelligence and manner of communication, whereas correspondence allows to gloss them over.

How to behave on dating sites

Upload your real photos. Don’t upload exceedingly blurry photos or those where you’re wearing glasses. I find it silly, to set a photo of you with a bouquet of flowers for profile picture. They may think that you have no end of boyfriends, and your heart has long been taken. Even if he wants to send you a message, will you read it?

It is no secret that nowadays, many girls come to dating sites looking for potential sponsors. Therefore, it is better to ask a guy about his financial situation when you meet him in person. Gently. I mean really gently. Not point-blank: okay, darling, now tell me…