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!
