Phnom Penh – In a country where most couples still meet through their families, young Cambodians are taking love into their own hands with social media and mobile phones.
It started with a mystery phone call.
A couple of years ago, Sakphea, then a second-year student at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, answered a phone call from a number she didn’t recognise.
On the other end of the line was a man she had never met before. She asked who he was, but all he told her was his name. “I want to be your friend,” he said.
She hung up, but the man called back later from a different number, repeating that he wanted to be friends. He called over and over, and eventually she relented and they began to talk.
“He began to call me every day, to ask about my family, my studies, my relatives,” says Sakphea, now 25.
Unknown to her at the time, Sakphea had become part of Cambodia’s telephone speed dating circuit, in which men and women call wrong numbers until they reach a member of the opposite sex. With luck, the dialler meets a future sweetheart this way.
In Sakphea’s case, the man who called her, Ros Chanpisey, 31, hit the jackpot: he became her husband.
“I did this because I like to woo a girl,” he says of their initial phone encounter.
As someone who comes from a well-off but traditional family – his younger sister had a successful arranged marriage – he was also aware he was going against convention.
Traditionally, a boy and a girl had no control over how they met, he says. “It depends on the parents. It depends on the grandfather.”
“Facebook is now the popular way, but it’s not our culture.”
Telephone “speed-dating” is just one way Cambodia’s youth are finding partners, eschewing the more traditional but still common practice of arranged marriages.
The trend started when mobile phones reached Cambodia in the 2000s, says Trude Jacobsen, a history professor at Northern Illinois University who researches Cambodian gender and sexuality.
Suddenly, young people could contact others outside their immediate family or geographic network.
Diallers sometimes get phone numbers from a fortune teller who tells them the “numbers are lucky,” Jacobsen says.
Random texting is another popular way of making contact.
“University students have told me they’ll just start texting random numbers, saying, ‘Hi, I am such and such, do you want to meet me?’” Jacobsen says.
University student Srun Chanlay, 24, says she occasionally receives phone calls from strangers. The callers are usually from the provinces, where it is harder to meet new people.
“They are searching for someone to talk to. First they say, ‘Hello. How are you? What are you doing? Where are you?’ Then they ask, ‘Do you have a boyfriend? Can I be your boyfriend?’” she says.
Receiving Facebook friend requests from strangers looking for love has also become common.
Srun Chanlay says she receives several requests each month from Cambodian or foreign men, often middle-aged, seeking a girlfriend or a potential spouse.
Srun, who met her boyfriend at university, says she always turns down strangers who approach her like this. She and her friends prefer to meet people through their friends or school networks.
“Most of my friends don’t believe in relationships that develop through the internet because it is not the real world. We believe and we trust more in what we see,” she says.
Professional Cambodian matchmaker Hash Veasna is also sceptical of relationships that begin online or over the telephone. Such relationships are usually short-lived, he says.
Couples who meet this way are “too young or not in love,” so they tend to get along for a short period then break up or hook up with someone else using the same method.
It is also easier to fake personal information on Facebook or over the phone, he says. The mask then drops when the couple meets in person.
Meeting random strangers also carries high risks. In November 2014, a 20-year-old woman in Kompong Chhnang province was gang raped after she agreed to meet a man over the telephone, according to the Cambodia Daily.
But for the most part, young Cambodians approach such random dating with good intentions, says Jacobsen.
“People are looking for genuine connections, especially the girls who reply in their mid-teens to 20s,” she says.
“They are responding to people at the other end, genuinely thinking the person is looking for a love connection.”
But family expectations can still pose a challenge. Relatives today might be less involved in terms of facilitating arranged marriages, but they still usually get the last word.
“A lot of people are trying to make their own luck,” Jacobsen says. “Now with Facebook, people are seeing each other’s Facebook friends and writing to them. But it’s still going to come down to whether their parents agree to this match.”
Srun Chanlay agrees, saying, “If our parents do not agree, I think it is not possible to marry.”
Sapa-dpa