If you had a daughter, what percentage of men from this group would you allow to date her?

[MrMan]

Yohan,

I probably have known hundreds or thousands of Indonesians, but I have to really think to remember those who have been divorced who live there. I can think of a few, and also cases where a man took a second wife and did not tell the first and that sort of thing. But it is not extremely common there, or at least not in the Christian community there. My wife had a cousin who divorced, one I know who had a baby out of wedlock, three male relatives from the same family who took second wives/mistresses. Usually, the stories you hear about marriage problems are men cheating of their wives. I did hear one rumor of a middle aged female relative having a boyfriend. Her husband is said to have cheated on here a lot. I know of one woman who had a child out of wedlock when she was young, and one man who just stopped living with his first wife, remarried, had the second wife raise some of his kids, and I think he tried to keep it a secret in the town he lived in. One of his sons may have done the same thing. I am not sure if his first wife divorced him or left him, but they aren't together. But this out of hundreds and hundreds of relatives. Percentage-wise, it seems divorce is low along with other things like children born out of wedlock. I'd say the divorce/long-separation rate based on my anecdotal experience based on those relatives is probably single digit-- that I know about. Among friends, church people, etc., it seems divorce is kind of unusual. I worked with one woman who was either divorced or divorcing her husband. One that I know of out of the many people I worked with over 10 years. It's probably like the US in the '50's.

So, now I am thinking of the Indonesian community gatherings in a US city I used to live in. I'd say there were probably 200 people or so in the overall Indonesian community, counting expat husbands, and wives, who'd married ethnic Indonesians. There were two couples where the man was Indonesian that I know of. I can think of two divorces in the whole group over 6 or 7 years. It's much lower than the US population. I think one of those couples was probably a Muslim-- Jewish couple, so their religions did not teach as strongly against divorce. I am not sure who broke up with whom. The other was a husband who left his wife for another woman. I would guess the divorce rate for that time period was around 2% or so, and this was in the US.

I have read that marriages to foreigners tend to have lower divorce rates. The stats were old on that. I don't think the US government departments like to release those stats for some reason. A poster on a forum said he'd been told Filippinas will marry you for a Greencard and leave you, but men married to Filippinas have a divorce rate of 20%, but the overall population is 50%, so who are the real con artists? I am not sure about the Filippina divorce rate for expats in the US. But I did know a number of Filippinos in the Filippino community, mostly married to each other, and do not know of any divorces among the families I met. These were church folks who may have had more stable families than a lot of other people. I did not see a lot of mixed white with Filippina marriages among them, though. If Filippinos are closeknit and have a community that retains traditional values from home, that may help. Some foreigners hang out with each other in the US after they get here.

If you are living overseas, and you know your wife will obey you when you tell her not to hang out with a gaggle of divorced women when she gets back home, it may not be so dangerous.