my old landlord made good money working on oil platforms before he became a landlord. no problem with the money.

but not socially successful. socially speaking i think he had difficulty making friends.

and his Slav wife was status-conscious, so she judged him for this lack of social success. to all the tenants, he was pretty domineering and nosy, but to his wife, he was quite submissive.

no one says it out loud, but if you're a Norwegian man and you have to marry a foreign woman instead of a Norwegian one, the implication is that you weren't attractive enough to find one here, so you had to get one from abroad instead, and the woman is perceived to do this to improve her material comfort, so he's essentially her sugar daddy.

Oslo is full of Thai women who divorced from such relationships and ended up working at massage parlours or as prostitutes to make ends meet, because they had no language skills and no network, making it difficult to gain regular employment.