Single women who want to overcome the stigma of singlehood or single motherhood can now borrow men to pose as the groom in an elaborate ceremony that will definitely not translate into a marriage.
Kha’s wedding day looked perfect from the outside, but she was hiding a dark secret: the 27-year-old was three months pregnant and her husband was fake, hired for a staged wedding to avoid the social stigma of becoming a single mother.
Breaking from tradition in socially conservative Vietnam can come at a high price for the whole family.
“My parents would have been the first to be filled with shame if I was pregnant and without a husband,” Kha, barely showing, told AFP a month after the $1,500 fake marriage, which was quietly paid for by her baby’s father who is married to another woman.
The wedding-guests-for-hire business is growing in Vietnam — where some 70 percent of people…
Read More…..Punch Newspapers
