Having lived in Finland for a couple years, the fact that there was an overabundance of woman in the Helsinki Capital City area was not exactly news to me.
Approximately 3,000 Finnish citizens marry foreigners each year. These unions increase immigration into this country, although of course in some cases the couples choose to live elsewhere.
Common-law marriages and marriages account for something like 60,000 foreign nationals having come to Finland - a figure well in excess of the refugee population, for instance.
In Helsinki, the numbers are already substantial: more than one in four marriages in the capital are between a Finn and a foreign partner. There is no great wonder in this, since Helsinki boasts thousands more women of marriagable age than it has eligible bachelors.
Many educated urban Finnish women actually go and seek out a spouse from Western Europe. For example, four out of five of the British citizens living in Finland are male. As a general rule, they are also well educated. -
Helsingin Sanomat
When my wife read this her first comment was that of the available Finnish men, about 30% of them are un-date-able, making the shortage even greater. From my experience, there were Finnish women who only dated foreigners. This is why Helsinki is such a great place to work or go to school, if you are a foreign male. Oddly enough, the same is not true for foreign women. At least not according to my MBA classmates.
The story also goes into the problems that foreign men have in finding employment in Finland, despite being highly educated and trained. This problem I can relate to given how hard I tried to find work while living there, before giving up and moving back to the States. Traditionally, the excuse not to hire a foreigner has been the inability to understand the Finnish language. This excuse appears to be wearing thin as more and more foreigners actually learn the language. I still remember the shock of one interview when I responded to him, in Finnish, when he mentioned that I needed to speak Finnish for the job. Quickly Finnish was not to important any longer and Swedish (Finland's other official language) was what I needed to know. Basically, for many of the jobs, lack of Finnish language skills was being used as a simple excuse not to hire a foreigner.
Murat Yüzlü opens up his diary-cum-order-book on the table of a café in downtown Helsinki. It is full.
There is no shortage of work for a business consultant and interpreter, it seems. But as far as Yüzlü's specific field is concerned - managerial positions in the hotel and travel business - things are rather different: in fifteen years of living in Finland he has not managed to find work in his own branch.
So, if you are looking for a Scandinavian woman and you have no idea how to get the Swedish Bikini Team member, you might want to broaden your search as Finland has women looking for you! What is the trade-off? Well first, they are not Swedish, although some are Swedish-speaking. And some people consider Finland not to be part of Scandinavia. That however only becomes a problem if any of your friends ever manage to get themselves a Swedish babe. And the chances of that happening are low.
And once you have found her, you are probably much better off bringing her back home. It really is difficult to find work in Finland and when you do, the salaries are almost always much lower, and the taxes much higher. It was a painful decision for me to move back but seeing how many of my friends continue to struggle, I know that it was the right decision for me. We often entertained the idea of moving back prior to purchasing a house earlier this year. But the plan was to buy our own business instead of trying to find a good-paying job.
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