Don’t bring me down

Well, about a week into my search for international love online. Started chatting with this one girl from Manila who looked pretty good in her pictures. Her English was fine and she laughed at my jokes (good sign!). A bit of a surprise then when I found out that she had lied on her profile. The girl wasn’t 26, as she stated… she was 40! Zoinks!

Now I have nothing against 40 year old women (except, of course, that women don’t age well!), but I do have something against lying about your age/height/weight. Why not just be honest from the get-go? I never lie about any of those sorts of things. I think it’s a bad way to start off a relationship.

Having said all that, I’m still chatting with her because she’s fun. But if I was interested in a 40 year old, I’d be datin’ them here in America!

The most extensive contact I had this week though was with a girl we’ll call “E”. Her photos showed a sweet-looking, super-thin beauty. I was pretty excited to chat with her, and the conversation flowed pretty smoothly. Her English was impeccable, something that makes all the difference in the world. I really have no idea how one would ever “fall in love” with a girl you could hardly speak to.

Anyways, as the conversation wore on, E began to exhibit a pattern: she constantly talked herself down. She was “never gonna find love”, she “was not good-looking”, she “was always left by men”… after a while of this, and futile efforts to stem the lack of confidence through compliments and such, it started to wear a bit on my nerves. She wasn’t after money or anything like that, but I had no idea why she was on a dating website. No man would date this woman in a million years!

Let that be a lesson for you ladies out there (and men too, I suppose): CONFIDENCE is key! If you don’t have confidence in yourself, then no one is going to be attracted to you. Having confidence does NOT mean being conceded. It does NOT mean thinking your shit don’t stink. It’s simply the best way to present your “wares”. Think of yourself as a stall at the market. How would you present the goods you’re trying to sell? As “pretty good”? “Adequate”? No, you would present your goods in the best possible fashion, while still being honest about their value and quality.

All this doesn’t matter if you’re a piece of shit. You can’t polish a turd. But if you’re a decent human being, I behoove you to “accentuate the positive” and to stop bringing other people down! No one will want you if all you do is complain about your life and your problems. We all have difficult lives! We all have problems! We all have scars from our pasts! But we do not dwell on them. We move forward, always forward. And we open our hearts and our minds to love.

My first experiences

Getting a profile up on the site was quick and easy. There was a charge of a modest fee (no more expensive than any US-based dating site) in order to have the ability to contact the women on the site, but this was expected. RULE #1: No one does anything for free!

I put in my main search criteria (age, height and weight are all I really care about… yes, I know… I’m a troglodyte!) and clicked the “Search” button and… wow! Holy hell, if the Philippines doesn’t have just a pleothra of beautiful women! I’ve never really had an “Asian thing” like a lot of white guys do, but maybe I was just looking at the wrong types of Asians! Filipinas are totally different from Japanese (too white) and Chinese (moon-faced, too white) girls! They’re skinny, tan, with maybe the only defect being that some have wider noses than I prefer. But there are a LOT of absolute lookers!

Now granted, a lot of these pictures could be total fakes, cropped from some Internet site and the profiles created to entice desperate, old, fat American men (I think I only qualify in 1 out of 3 there!), but I will assume a girl is who she says she is until she proves otherwise.

I shoot off an email or two to girls who I find promising, but that actually doesn’t even seem necessary. I’m gettin’ tons of “winks” and emails from (supposedly) interested girls. Sweet! This is a little different than match.com here in America where the only girls who contact you are either overweight or horribly ugly (or both!). All the pretty girls on match.com and other sites are just getting slammed with attention, because all the guys want the same 10% creme de crop! Well on this site, *I’m* the creme de crop! It’s a nice change.

I try to be a gentleman and respond to every wink and email, but soon enough it becomes overwhelming: there’s just too many! Eventually I’m just auto-deleting girls who I know I won’t be attracted to. Some of the girls who contact me are simply stunning. Like Miss Universe-level. Obviously my radar for scamming is on full band, but geez, what if some of these girls are real?! It’d be a goddamned gold mine!

I email one of the girls, let’s call her “Nikki” (not her real screenname), and she gets back to me pretty quick. A couple compliments (and who doesn’t like to be flattered) and then she’s offering to chat with me on Yahoo IM. Alright, I think, let’s see if this girl is for real. Well, we chat and it seems to go pretty smooth. Her English is good and she seems like a nice girl. Of course, mostly, I’m just judging her based on her pictures… she’s really pretty and my shallowness is in full reign!

As it turns out though, after a few chat sessions, Nikki mentions that she’s having trouble sleeping. I ask her if she has insomnia and she says no. I prod her for an answer and she says that she doesn’t have any money, including, get this, any money for food. For food! I mean, this girl has an Internet connection in the Philippines, yet she doesn’t have any food! No wonder they’re so skinny over there! I tell her that her mom and dad will surely feed her, but she says that they’re out of work. How convenient!

Anyways, I can see where this is going and I tell her that it was nice talking to her and I wished her good luck on finding a fat American dude to send her money. It may sound harsh, but this was pretty obviously a girl that was scheming to have an American checkbook as her boyfriend. No thanks.

I met this other girl, totally cute, and she wanted to chat right away. So we ended up talking and she was fairly quiet. Maybe that’s the pattern of the scammers (I’m giving it away here, huh?): they’re not really interested in who you are, only what you’ll give them, so why on Earth would they ask any questions about you? This girl never asked me for money, but she kept saying how much she wanted to meet me and how sad it was that we were an ocean apart. This is on the very first time that I chatted with her! So yeah, the bullshit meter was tilting off the charts.

There have been a few other girls I’ve been in contact with, including one who I don’t think is a physical match but who at least seems real and genuine. That’s refreshing after going through the scammer experiences. Not that they were traumatic or anything, but it always sucks to be sold a bill of goods by somebody who just wants you for your money and is not interested in you or love or truth. But who knows… if I were in those girls’ situation, I’d probably get my money by hook or crook, any way I could! So I don’t want to be too harsh on them.

I’m still chattin’ with a few and we’ll see how those go. I think the key is to remember that these sorts of relationships will take a LONG time to build, since it will all be done through emails and online conversations. You can decide in a few minutes whether or not you like someone if you meet them in person, but through the electronic veil it’s much harder to know if there’s a real match.

Let’s just see how it goes!

This blog’s purpose

This blog will serve as a chronicle of the travails of my dating life. Specifically, it will concentrate on my experience attempting to meet foreign women through various channels.

Now “why foreign women” you might say? I guess the main reason is because I’m unhappy with what’s currently being offered to me by the modern American woman. Now this doesn’t mean I’m one of those cranks who wants his woman barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen… but I don’t want a woman who is all take and no give. And that is exactly the type of women that America is producing these days.

And to be honest, I’m looking for a woman who is more interested in starting a family than she is in starting fights at clubs (you know who you are, girls!). I want a woman who’s moral, who actually enjoys pleasing her man (concept!) and who realizes that material things are not the be all and end all of life.

I have money, I’m relatively fit (not fat like the typical stereotype of American men going “offshore” to find a woman) and definitely good-looking (not a 10, but not a grenade either. Solid 7!). I’m probably smarter than the average bear, am a huge reader and music-lover and like to party and go out. I’m naturally shy, but I force myself to be social and I’m very good at it. People think I’m funny (cause I am!) and like to be around me. I bring excitement and laughter to any gathering!

All that said, I’ve found it difficult to find a girl that meets my standards. First off, I have *extremely* high physical standards. I know exactly what I want (skinny, dark hair/eyes/skin) and what I don’t want (white, overweight, blonde!). I am this way because I was married once and I wasn’t fundamentally attracted to the girl I married. Thus, over time, I lost my attraction to her and this contributed to the dissolution of the marriage. Totally fair on her part that she went out looking for the type of adoration I just couldn’t provide her.

I may make myself sound like a monster, but really I’m not. I’m just a typical guy who is visually-attuned and overconcerned about a woman’s physical appearance (in other words, a feminist’s worst nightmare!). I know it’s shallow, I freely admit that, but this is how I am, how I’ve always been and I don’t see it changing anytime soon.

So my standards of beauty are very high and, I have to say, I’m just not finding a lot of candidates here in the States to wet my whistle. That’s why I figured it might be worth a shot to expand the pool of possible recruits. And it was natural to look toward the Phillipines, as the women, physically-speaking, are more in line with my tastes. There’s also the advantage that English is taught there as a standard part of education, so communication would be easier with a potential mate.

I’ll hold off on disclosing the website I’m using, as I don’t want to implicate them in any scams that various girls on there might try to attempt. I’ll also hold off on naming the guilty, as there’s always the possibility that the language barrier contributed to a gross misunderstanding. I’m asking these girls to communicate with me in their 2nd or 3rd language. One has to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Will I find the love that I’m looking for? I would speculate that the odds are low, but the attempt, at least, should be fun. And we’re off!