It was German National Day. Bernadette Rehbaum was invited to a party thrown by the embassy in Abu Dhabi. Little did she know how that evening would change her life.
Bernadette had been living in Abu Dhabi for more than three years, happy in her career as a retail professional. Life was good except for the absence of a life partner. Would she have to return to her native country to fulfil her dream, she often wondered. Barring this occasional grey cloud that shrouded her mind, she was waking up to sunny days in her expatriate life in the capital.
At the party a friend invited her to a salsa evening at the adjoining club in the hotel. There she was introduced to Boris Salazar Lohfink, a fellow countryman, also working in Abu Dhabi. He asked her if she would like to dance the salsa with him. She said yes. As the evening unfolded, they realised that they were talking so much time was racing away. "When we got talking, we hit it off instantaneously," recalls Boris of the memorable evening.
Two days later, Boris called up Bernadette and invited her to have dinner with him. A month later, she visited him in his hometown Berlin and her gut instinct told her she had found what she was looking for - her Mr Right. "I was very sure that he was the one for me," she says. Boris proposed to her in February last year and they got married in August in Berlin.
Looking back on her bouts of uncertainty of finding Mr Right in the UAE, Bernadette says her misgivings were misplaced. She is now convinced that even if she had returned to Germany, finding Boris would have been impossible. "I know for sure I would not have met him in Germany because we live in two different cities with a lot of distance between us.
"I was born in a small town called Hamm, which is about 150km away from Dusseldorf." And Boris is from Berlin. Both of them studied and worked in various parts of the world before casting their anchor in Abu Dhabi. Arguably, the chance of finding your life partner decreases when you are moving from place to place. But as Boris says, "Hope is the last thing that dies." Bernadette couldn't agree more.
