A man kneeling on an airport runway proposing marriage to someone he knows only from her letters. A woman crying tears of joy at the sight of her long-distance Prince Charming.
Did their letters so bloom with romance that no kiss was necessary to seal their love? Did the words meld into a single narrative until the minds that formed them knew they could no longer let an ocean keep them apart? Well, not exactly.
'I drilled her, they were not romantic I-love-you letters, they were more an interrogation,' was how American pilot Frank Hardy described his prenuptial correspondence with Kyiv resident Yelena Grubaya.
Hardy and Grubaya, whose first encounter is the subject of a front-page story in this issue, are both clients of a marriage agency that specializes in pairing up Western men with Ukrainian women. The American was looking for a more traditional wife than he could find in modern America. The Ukrainian believed media stereotypes that portray Western men as 'more intelligent, more gentle, more educated … healthier,' than their Ukrainian counterparts. One sort of cringes at the thought of the information transfer that must have taken place before this deal cleared the matrimony market. Did Hardy quiz Grubaya about her strategies for cooking chicken? Did he in turn provide her with his bank account balances? It all makes their engagement on the tarmac seem more a transaction than an affirmation of true love.
That said, the romantics among us would do well not to judge the happy couple. All of us, consciously or otherwise, look for mates compatible at least in taste and temperament. Successful marriages (a category that includes some loving marriages) usually feed the spark of emotion with the kindling of rational accommodation. If some couples choose to start with reason and hope the emotions come later, who's to say that they have got it wrong? American men with old-fashioned (some might say outdated) notions of marriage are more likely to find their match in Eastern Europe than on their home soil. Women raised in Ukraine do as a rule have a narrower definition of male chauvinism than their sisters in the West, and some are tempted by the Western lifestyle. The advent of global communications has brought these groups into contact, with inevitable results. Such unions are certainly not for everyone, but frowning on them seems at least as close-minded as viewing matrimony as a purely commercial venture.
Frank Hardy's meeting with Yelena Grubaya won't remind anyone of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. But it does hold out the possibility of a far happier ending.
