A few months ago, a certain inter-racial couple, Debby aged 42 and Micheal aged 35, made headlines after their wedding photos surfaced online.
Many Nigerians believed the young Man, only married the white woman for her money and of course, papers.
Well, the couple in a new interview with LITV has cleared the air on the misconception.
Michael and Debby said they have been married for “16 months”.
Debby was born in Ireland but lives in New Zealand. Michael is from Delta state, Nigeria.
Speaking, Debby said they’ve faced a lot of challenges from “Nigerians who are envious of their relationship” and also from people doubting the authenticity of their marriage and insinuating Michael married her for the “green papers”.
Speaking on why Nigerians are ‘envious’ of her relationship, Debby said it’s because they want something like what she and Michael have and people get envious when they see people doing something different.
When asked how she met Michael, Debby said she is a former military person, ex-royal Navy, where she served as an aeronautical engineer for 13 years. She added that the Navy has an “external website for Maritime and that’s basically how we connected.”
“I was helping to do administration on this maritime website and Michael became a member and was asking a lot of questions about the Maritime industry, about Naval, because he was very interested in that type of thing. He was also serving as a maritime person as well. And so the connection came and then we started to chat off the business level.”
At the time they moved from a business relationship to a romantic one, they hadn’t met in person. “I’d just seen a photo,” Debby said.
When asked if she wasn’t sceptical because of the notion that Nigerian men are after Caucasian women to swindle them of their fortune, she said: “I was initially, but I’m sort of very intelligent on that aspect and my view was, I just basically said to him, ‘if you’re going to try and scam me and steal all my money, I’ll just kill you’.”
Debby and Michael both laughed at this point in the interview.
Debby added: “I put it out there right from the beginning.”
Michael adds affectionately: “You can’t kill me now.”
And Debby responds, “I can kill myself.”
“If you kill yourself, you kill us,” Michael replies.
Asked for how long Debby intends to remain in Nigeria before travelling back to New Zealand, Michael said: “Initially, our plan was, try to do much here, spend much years here, then we can travel out to New Zealand or UK which is her origin.”
Michael said he’s had his visa to New Zealand since June this year but “we’re still looking to do a lot of things here.”
He adds: “But the only area we’re having problem with is the security aspect because she can’t go out (in Nigeria) without me or escort, because of some… Because of that, it’s limiting her movement and also our movement.
“Of recent, we had a bit of security challenge, which, after then, we just decided to go back to New Zealand.”
