Marriages made to keep up with appearances

The Star

22-06-2025

Compiled by FAZLEENA AZIZ AND C. ARUNO
INDIVIDUALS who are homosexuals or bisexuals are said to be marrying women as a way to hide their sexuality, Kosmo! reported.
This not only puts the woman in a place where her rights are denied but also has her being used like a 'trophy' in front of others, the report claimed.
Laila (not her real name) shared how she found her husband's holiday pictures with his boyfriend at a resort overseas.
She is in a long-distance relationship with her banker husband, who works in the Klang Valley, while she is a civil servant working on the East Coast.
'He comes back once in a while; sometimes for months on end we don't even meet. When we were together, I didn't suspect anything, but it got weird when he chose to sleep separately.
'I never really thought much about it as our marriage was arranged. But after a year, I started getting suspicious because he didn't seem to be interested in women.
'When I asked him about our honeymoon, he often gave excuses,' she said.
After Laila found his pictures with other men, she was heartbroken. She divorced him.
According to general, sexual and reproductive medical practitioner Dr Ahmad Ramdan Zainordin, some 30 gay couples sought medical treatment at his clinic every month.
He said most of these couples are aged between 20 and 40 years old and married to women.
'Based on the examination, many of their wives are unaware of their husbands' sexuality. Most of them don't reveal anything about their wives and often come to the clinics alone.
'As such, the wives don't know the status of their infections. Some of these men have never consummated their marriages with their wives as well,' he said, adding that the marriage was merely to keep up appearances.
> Actress and entrepreneur Nur Fazura Sharifuddin, 42, is still not open to finding a replacement after separating from her husband, actor Fattah Amin, on Oct 7 last year, Harian Metro reported.
Fazura, when met at the launch of the music video for Luar Biasa, said that even though time has passed, it feels like just yesterday that she went through a very difficult episode in her life.
The above articles are compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a, it denotes a separate news item.