MrMan wrote: ↑
November 24th, 2021, 7:43 am
I'm a middle aged man who got married before it was a common thing to try to find dates online, back just before the turn of the century, so I cannot tell you the legitimacy of this site. I am married to an Indonesian and lived overseas, and I have read some stuff on expat-related sites.I have read about Filipinas who sit around on a computer all day in an Internet cafe/room where they rent time on a computer, who have lots of online boyfriends and try to hit them up for cash. There was a man interested in an online prospect, and he sent a local investigator who found the place she went to use the Internet who struck up a conversation with him. She told about her many boyfriends and how she got money from them.
I used to go to church in the US with a lot of Filipinos, and I do not know as much about the actual culture(s) there as I do about the culture(s) in Indonesia, but I think they are both similar cultures in that they are very marriage oriented. The women want to get married. Marrying age is the early 20's. If they go past that, they may feel the social clock ticking if not the biological one. In some people-groups in Indonesia, if you are single in your 30's, they try to match you up with a cousin or your relatives cousins.
From this forum and elsewhere, I get the impression that there is a subculture of sex workers and 'free prostitutes' who sleep around with expats in certain cities. I would imagine these girls might find it hard to find husbands after they have been 'spoiled.'
See AlsoThe 5 Best Dating Sites & Apps in the Philippines – Expat KingsDateInAsia: een gratis en veilig datingplatform voor meer dan 60.000 Aziatische singles die op zoek zijn naar vriendschap en romantiekDateinAsia reviews in 2023: Is it worth it?Learn DateInAsia.com - Ultimate Asian Dating InformationI have no idea what the percentages are, but I suspect on a dating site with a lot of Filipinas and expat men, there are probably girls serious about finding a husband and some who are trying to scam lots of men out of electric bill payments and payments for mom's emergency heart surgery. I have no idea if it is normal for a Filipina to say, "I love you" in the third or fourth message she sends you if she is __trying to__ be sincere, but that seems super weird to me and it would turn me off. I saw a video of a guy who got messages about getting married, and he started to push for meeting her parents really soon so they could talk about marriage to see how she reacted.
If you are young and the women find you attractive, online fan mail might be legitimate. You might be sort of okay looking in your home country, but if a girl likes white guys, she might really think you are good-looking. Filipinas might have a different taste in white men.
I cannot tell if men are good looking. (I can tell if someone is odd-looking.) So I could not look in the mirror when I was young and give much of an evaluation of my looks. My mom said I was.
Occasionally, a girl indicated interest in me, unsolicited. But in Indonesia, I met a girl for a few seconds at a bus stop and she gave me a business card. I was picking up on signals left and right that young women liked me. A couple of women I knew from church sent home gifts to my mom when I went home for Christmas. (I did not get this, but someone later explained that they might be hoping to warm up the mother-in-law.) I was at prime marrying age, too, so that was probably part of it. Some percentage of girls there like white men. After I got married, young women would ask my wife, "How did you find your husband?" or "How did you find a man like that to be your husband." They could also see that I was a Christian and a devoted husband, not a wild party animal, so that was probably part of it.
Some of the attention might be from women are serious about finding a man to marry. If finding a well-to-do white man is a rare thing, maybe they chase you. I've seen bits and pieces of 'The Bachelorette.' Somehow, the girls get convinced that this quasi-short-term-celebrity potential husband is the bees knees. So they throw themselves at the one high status male they are all competing for, in ways that might be self-degrading in other settings, quickly telling their feelings, etc. Women trying to get that rare foreign husband in some cultures might be more willing to do this than in others. You could ask Filipinos whether a woman's behavior is normal.
Some women can be 'gold diggers' in that regard. But if they are looking for a well-to-do man, but with an aim to be a good wife and stay together for life, I would put them in a different category from the scammers. Still, greed is a bad characteristic, and I did not want to marry a materialistic woman. It would have messed up how we used our money, how much we give and stuff like that.
Occasionally, a girl indicated interest in me, unsolicited. But in Indonesia, I met a girl for a few seconds at a bus stop and she gave me a Great observations, @MrMan. The culture around marriage and having a stable relationship with a "well-to-do man" in Indonesia and the Philippines sounds quite similar. I can imagine that, perhaps, the Islamic background of many Indonesian families gives casual dating and fooling around a stronger stigma than in the Philippines. Here is where young women are supposed, in fact expected, to "shop around" to find the best possible man for them, one who fits their desires and - sadly - the material requirements of a better life for themselves and their families.
As soon as I arrived here in 2013 and then in 2015, I also bought the delusion that we white foreigners, whether in their 30s or 50s, never married or single again, were some sort of hot commodity in the local dating market. I was convinced that being taller, whiter, with a defined face structure and a pointy nose, earning a multiple of the Filipino average salary and well educated/spoken, would make all the difference.
In short, I thought I ticked all the boxes to be the hottest catch in town. The facts that the town was Davao City, much less cosmopolitan than Metro Manila and even Cebu, and that I was on a mission to start a business and build a stable life here...all of this would, in my naive mind, play a role in making me somehow special.
While I did get a lot of interest from girls, mostly girls I contacted via Date in Asia or Filipino Cupid, and the odd acquaintance in a mall, they were all girls with one or more of the following:
1) from poor backgrounds, unable to support themselves and their families (often their kids) properly, stuck in an exhausting, underpaid job with no perspective of escape or redemption
2) dark-skinned, thin and with strong Malay or native features, which makes them undesirable to most local men, but not to most of us foreigners
3) from families of bad reputation: dad in jail, overwhelmed with debts, all sisters are single moms in need, etc.
These are what someone called "excess" or "leftover" girls. They would do anything for the chance of a better life, including sleeping with an out-of-shape 50-yo at the first date. Some of them will have learned how to endear themselves to their male catch: they're sweet talkers, they're good at sex, often both. They are also the ones who, when dumped or double-timed by a man looking for the next adventure in bed, shed no tears and get ready for the next chap in their contact list.
Remember that most Internet scams, like entertaining multiple men, only work when said men are far, abroad and on a different timezone, unable to meet them for several hours and see how they are really like. That's why it's much, much easier to get "love" from these girls once they come here and start living here, possibly for several months instead of the canonical 10 days.
When the men are here, these Filipinas have no choice but to put up their best behaviour and see if anything sticks. If not, no heartbreak, if the city is big enough there wlll always be someone else to meet.
Having said that, I also found women who were happy to have sex with me on a NSA/Fubu arrangement. Many more than I would have though initially, actually. The issue is that, bar few notable exception, all of them were bored single moms in their late 30s, with no immediate financial need but little hope of a sex life, as local men always prefer to hook up with, young attractive girls given a choice.
Back in 2015 I even met an Indonesian woman who worked for the Indonesian consulate in Davao. Interestingly, Davao has a somewhat overlarge Indonesian consulate, which acts as a diplomatic outpost for the muslim community living in Mindanao and the Indonesian fishermen who often trespass into Philippine waters. Anyway, woman was a bit on the chubby side but sweet, a mom of 2, divorced...and she liked sex. We lasted a couple of weeks, then I got bored and we parted ways. Talking to a foreign friend who lived in Davao, I learned she had been in bed with him, too. And this is a morbidly obese American man, nothing to write home about.
Most men, especially those from the Anglosphere and Asia, are happy with relationships they know are functional in nature (you take care of me, I take care of you), so long they get the benefit of being with a girl 20, 30 years younger, whom they consider hot and desirable, with some good character to keep the relationship strong once the sexual attraction fades.
To some men, like me, especially those who live in the Philippines long enough to see the bricks behind the curtains, so to speak, it soon becomes a tired old carousel. All that meandering among girls who can say "I love you" to a man one day and another man the following day, so long they are given the chance to stick around and have their lives changed, stops beind exciting and adventurous and becomes the parody of itself.
As many of my old post show, my honeymoon only lasted a year, maybe 18 months. At that point I made my priority that of finding a good girl for a serious relationship. It took me an additional 18 months and quite the luck to find C, my wife. Even after I decided to give my heart to her, having sex with so many different girls had me rotten spoiled and it took a few painful months to adjust to having her as my exclusive sexual partner. She is an absolutely wonderful girl, she is worth platinum and I love her to bits.
She gave me all the meaning I needed to have, to justify my life here, indeed my life, my existence tout court. As wiseman says, you can live without knowing why you're living, but you can't live without knowing for whom you're living.
