Most Turks bring bride from abroad

2 April 2007

BRUSSELS – Some 60 percent of men of Turkish background bring a marriage partner over from Turkey. Only 25 percent of the Turks in Limburg marry a woman who has grown up in Belgium.

There has been a decline in the trend however. Among Turkish women, almost 80 percent used to find a marriage partner in Turkey, that number has fallen to 60 percent. The same figure has fallen from 73 to 60 percent among men.

Limburg residents of Turkish descent say they would prefer to marry someone from Turkey. That is also the case in Oost-Vlaanderen and Antwerp. One of the reasons is that women find the men who have grown up in Belgium too traditional. And the men find the women who have grown up here too western. So both prefer to look for a marriage partner in Turkey.

“The fact that young men and women don’t have much contact with each other here, while they are given more freedom to get to know each other while on holiday in Turkey, certainly plays a role as well. They are in a holiday mood and that makes it all more romantic,” says Hilâl Yalçin from Leopoldsburg, who conducted the student for the Equal Opportunity Policy Office of the universities of Hasselt and Antwerp.

The conclusions are based on couples living in Flanders on 1 January 2004 and of which (at least) one member was of Turkish descent. There were 19,251 such couples in Flanders as a whole at this point, including some 7,864 in Limburg.

None of those surveyed reported that he or she had been pressured by parents to marry someone from Turkey.

Subject: Belgian news