Dating in Asia
I've had more than a fleeting notion that I could meet my future wife somewhere along my travels in Southeast Asia. Before leaving the US, I shared this thought with a friend who asked, "Oh, like another backpacker?" When I explained that I had actually hoped to meet a Southeast Asian woman, my friend earnestly asked, "Oh, do you want someone to cook and clean for you?" My friend isn't a judgmental person. She asked this with no scorn or derision. Yet relationships between western men and Asian women are still so taboo that I suspect even my friend imagined a loveless financial arrangement. I feel called to clarify what I want out of life, to explain why those aims are starting to feel incompatible with what most western women want out of life, and how my own spiritual path has led me to feel more at home in Asia.
My earliest relationships were all based on the premise that we might one day get married and start a family. I had three girlfriends between high school and my early twenties, and I didn't have any interest in one-night stands or relationships that were solely about sex. By my mid twenties, most of the intelligent and interesting women my age who were still single had started dating guys who were seven or eight years older. Those guys had more to offer. They were more mature, more stable, and more accomplished. As my alcohol addiction progressed, I had far fewer opportunities to date, and in my early sobriety I was willfully single because I was focused on becoming spiritually healthy and taking care of myself. It's really only a few years ago that I became eligible to date at all.
My first sober relationship was a whirlwind. I was completely ready for marriage and kids, and she enjoyed the feeling of being loved by a man who was so passionately interested in her, but ultimately she didn't reciprocate the seriousness of my interest. When it ended, I decided I needed to learn how to date for the sake of dating. I didn't have much experience dating and my prior relationships seemed to have just fallen out of the sky. I resolved to learn how to meet women and get dates. I became much more focused on acquiring the knowledge of how to reliably get dates than acquiring a relationship.
For the next few years, I dated serial daters. In the process, I became a serial dater, too. When I realized that there's a never-ending supply of women who are available for a few months of sex, I stopped putting much effort into seeking long term compatibility. I desire emotional intimacy, though, so I fell in love with a few of these women despite none of my long term needs being met. It was a new kind of pain that felt especially worthless. When serious relationships didn't work out, I could take comfort that "'tis better to have loved and lost," but when a situationship ended I wondered why the hell I put myself in that position in the first place.
My natural disposition is to be family-oriented and monogamous. I've let pain and self-doubt lead me in an unfulfilling direction of pursuing something I thought was good enough, but my time abroad has rekindled my desire for a family. I'm making a resolution to avoid romantic entanglements that block me from meeting my partner in a deeper spiritual journey.
Western women are on an interesting path, but I doubt it's a path that's going to bring them long term happiness.
The spiritual path of men has historically been one that offers balance to male ambition. Young men have an unbridled desire to go out and make their mark in the world. Young men don't just explore, they conquer. They demand to be seen, heard, and acknowledged. At some point the world doesn't completely bend to their ambitions. They become disillusioned and seek answers. Some arrive at the conclusion that the world is unjust for failing to provide them with whatever they want, but wiser men look inward to understand what the world wants from them.
The masculine spiritual path is one of learning patience and acquiescence. We learn how to function within a society and become more useful to our fellows. We learn to be more caring and empathetic, or at very least to be intellectually curious about another's point of view.
The feminine spiritual path has conventionally been different. Women are biologically inclined toward agreeableness and cooperation—it's not just an expectation of society. The feminine spiritual path has been one of finding a voice and claiming space. Fearless self-expression and agency are some of the markers of spiritually advanced women.
Over the past 100 years we've stripped away many of the barriers that women used to face in society. We have leveled the playing field enough to reveal some of women's natural advantages. Educators have always known that girls develop intellectually at a much quicker rate than boys. Now that we've removed so many of the obstacles that used to disincentivize academic performance, girls and women are considerably outperforming their male peers. This has carried over into the workplace as well, with women under 30 now out-earning men their age.
Young western women now have such abundant opportunities that their desires resemble those of the young men of prior generations. Some are motivated by a desire to learn and explore, and others are motivated by a desire for personal achievement, but nearly all of them are full of drive, ambition, and a desire to go out and make their mark in the world. Yet young women have to suffer the incredible loneliness of being the first generation with such limitless privilege. Their elders can't relate to their experience, and there's no one around to guide them.
When a young woman experiences the inherently selfish suffering and disappointment caused by her conflict with a seemingly unfair world that refuses to bend to her will, she can't very well turn to stoic gray-bearded elders who recommend humility and acquiescence. Her elders are either meek and gentle old ladies who can't relate to her struggle or unusual firebrands who insist that any barrier to her personal ambition is caused by an unfair institution that should be torn down. Fight, fight, fight! A young woman could conquer the planet only to reap the reward of incurable loneliness at the top.
People raised in cultures that believe in karma and reincarnation don't tend to feel personally motivated to go out and correct all of society's inequities. In Southeast Asia, even people in the socialist countries don't want to hear that kind of talk. There's a collective skepticism about the ability of government to fix their problems, and nobody wants a repeat of Pol Pot or Ho Chi Minh. Most cultures don't share our western attitude that anything short of utopia sucks. In Southeast Asia, most people believe that life is hard so you might as well be pleasant.
Most eastern women want to be pleasant. In Thailand, they end every thought with the gender-specific article "ka." (Men end every thought with "krap.") Many Thai women continue to use the "ka" article when speaking English because they feel a sentence sounds cold and insufficiently feminine without it. Obviously English-speaking foreigners aren't exerting patriarchal pressure on Thai women to speak this way; it's just something they do because it feels comfortable.
I've talked to enough eastern women to have formed a sense of why they want a man. They feel alone. They feel stressed out by the decisions they have to make by themselves. They feel like they have no one to turn to for support when they're vulnerable and scared. When they describe the type of man they want, they list elements of stability. Someone who works hard. Someone who is confident. Someone who is brave. All I hear are qualities that any man could live up to with good behavior. When they list their fears about men, it goes the same way. They don't want to be abused, cheated on, or abandoned.
Feminine women know how to motivate a man to live up to his purest notion of what a good man should provide. They say things like, "You make me feel safe." Our desire to be protectors doesn't come from a sense that women are weak, it comes from a desire to live up to the trust that has been placed in us. Any normal man is going to be so moved by "you make me feel safe" that he'll want to learn how to keep his partner feeling safe. Women can get what they need from men by nurturing men.
This concept is unpopular in the west. I've seen women write "I won't be any man's mother" right in their online dating profiles. I'm sure that these women had some painful experience of investing time and energy into immature men, but to decide that all men are unworthy of nurturing is a weird conclusion. There aren't any men who arrive on the planet as fully-formed good husbands waiting for the stork to deliver a family. Losers and saints alike require formative experiences, and women have a role to play in those experiences.
The notion of a man being a "provider" is doing poorly in the west, as well. The term is overused by delusional gold-diggers who feel entitled to boundless luxury, but it also describes a quality that's essential to attraction. Being a provider is about supporting all of the fears that make women feel alone. Stand up comics whine about their wives lying in bed late at night upset about ridiculous fictional threats. "Would you still love me if a genie turned me into a worm?" These questions are only annoying and illogical when they're interpreted literally. The question is merely an invitation for reassurance that her man will always be there to courageously face whatever unthinkable challenge life might present. Sometimes those challenges are financial, but being a provider is deeper than that.
I have a few wealthy friends and colleagues whose wives don't work outside of the house. For a long time I thought this was a unique privilege of their financial success, but it's only more recently that I've reflected on how little most of them had accomplished when they got married. It wasn't that their great accomplishments resulted in a happy home life, it's that having a happy home life was one of the elements that aided in their success.
I've never specifically sought cooking or cleaning from a partner, but I want to push back against the notion that those are such evil things to want from a partner. I've struggled to meet a western woman who's capable of cooking and cleaning for herself, let alone for a family. Single women my age have shared memes about laundry taking seven to ten business days to fold. They've used the word "adulting" unironically to describe basic elements of living. I can't relate. I got off to a slow start, but since I got sober I've kept up with things like cooking and cleaning. Making my bed in the morning has never taken more than 90 seconds. Folding laundry has never taken more than ten minutes. There are certainly elements of cleaning that I've neglected (the very back of the toilet doesn't get a lot of attention), but picking up after myself has been a matter of good habits and self-regulation. I positively impact my environment and my environment positively impacts me.
I don't regard homemaking as a demeaning chore, anyway. I occasionally buy cheap flowers at the grocery store just because I enjoy looking at them. I enjoy cooking. When I dated an older woman who shared my desire to keep a nice home, we operated mostly as a team. If we entertained guests, we planned the menu, shopped, cooked, and cleaned up together. If we hosted a group of her friends, I'd do almost all of the cleanup and let her entertain the guests, and if it was mostly my friends we'd switch roles.
My mom was a full time professional, but she kept a beautiful home because she enjoyed doing it. She was usually very gourmet, but she prepared even the simplest meals with perfect plating. She'd serve us an omelet on a school morning with beautiful presentation: edible flowers, an elegant drizzle of sauce, and matching plate, charger, cloth napkin, and napkin ring. She wrapped gifts beautifully and creatively. She sewed us costumes for Halloween, school plays, or just playing dress up. In the winter, she'd put our clothes in the dryer for a few minutes so that they'd be warm when we got out of the shower. My mom's acts of service were expressions of love.
Dating in Southeast Asia isn't about tricking some poor woman into a role of subservience in exchange for extra portions of rice and indoor plumbing, it's about casting my net in a culture with more compatible values. I know there are women who would smile while making our kids' lunches and leave little love notes in their lunchbox. I know there are women who would be touched to know that my favorite food is something simple they make on a weeknight.
It's not impossible to find those values in the west. There's a growing group of western women expressing their desire to be homemakers, but these self-described "tradwives" have rather fetishized the activity. I don't know why they need to dress like it's 1962. I'm not tradhusband material, anyway. I seriously doubt that they'd find my worldview conventionally masculine enough to keep a family safe from masked cat burglars, Soviets, homosexuals, or whatever else mid-century housewives want protection from.
Some of my best qualities are unattractive to more conservative western women. I know that there are ways I've failed to provide romantic partners with what they need, but it's aggravating when the offending behavior is something I worked hard to develop in myself. I used to take a much more active role in attempting to bend the world to my will. I thought I could protect myself if I picked the right strategy and made the right effort. This is a masculine mindset. Today, my faith is no longer in my ability to protect myself, but in my ability to acquiesce to what the world sends my way. A conservative family in an older American culture could believe that God provides and a father's job is to be a moral man who answers the call. But most contemporary conservatives in America have thrown away their spiritual foundation, so a father's job is to be God. Father should believe he's indestructible, and anything short of that is repulsive weakness.
Buddhist cultures all have some level of belief that the ever-changing nature of the world makes pain inevitable. There's no amount of strength, wealth, or power that can reliably protect and insulate a person or a family from it. This doesn't prevent the normal human desires people have to lock their doors, amass wealth, or seek good standing in their community, but it does create some underlying moral sense that our best protection is the internal quality of resilience, not our temporary material defenses.
I do a better job of being a masculine provider in this context. My lifestyle demonstrates personal discipline over the things that I actually have the power to control. If we acknowledge that there are some bad things that we can't prevent from happening, humor in the face of adversity is a fatherly trait. Patience is a fatherly trait. Curious analysis of fear is a fatherly trait. I really admire the confident gentleness of the men in Southeast Asia. I find it much more convincingly manly than blustery western machismo.
This spiritual context seems to impact femininity, too. Southeast Asian women have far fewer inhibitions about being nurturing or caring. They don't seem to be taught stranger danger, so they're really affectionate. Little girls and old grandmothers warm my heart with every interaction. They're clearly taught that it's good to be sweet and pleasant.
This is where things get kind of rocky. I know that as women in the west have broken through the glass ceiling and achieved more professionally, many have encountered issues being perceived as pushy ballbusters. Men wanted the woman they interacted with professionally to behave more like their wives and mothers. It's not lost on me that the cultural expectations that make Southeast Asian women so pleasant probably also limit what their culture will allow them to achieve in the workplace. But I want different things from a romantic partner than a great coworker.
I'm not worried about the plight of women in the workplace at this juncture in history. Our society has conditioned women to be effective workers and effective leaders, and they're meeting the mark. Very few of them are interested in starting families, though. Many observe that mothers tend to fulfill more of the parenting duties and regard motherhood as a trap that holds them back from what they deem truly important: their careers.
I've worked with a few women who probably never would have been happy as mothers. They're uniquely brilliant and talented in their careers, and the world is a better place because they've had the opportunity to pursue their interests. However the majority of people are more fulfilled in life when they have the opportunity to raise a family. Our society has failed women by removing obstacles to working but not removing obstacles to motherhood.
Some women don't have the skills to enjoy fulfilling careers yet still regard motherhood as a risk to their equality. They're entirely bored with their jobs and would much rather avoid work if it were financially possible, but they were brought up with girlboss programming that makes them uncomfortable with any reliance on a man. There's a general feeling that motherhood is demeaning, even when compared to a job that's demeaning.
Even women who do want to start a family don't have a realistic sense of who they ought to be pairing up with. Online dating creates an insidious reality distortion field. I don't think most women fully understand the implications of the fact that 10% of men get 90% of matches on dating apps. These are the well-educated, well-earning, handsome, fit, disciplined, powerful, and charming guys who most women are seeking. Despite their objective scarcity, most women have matched with or even hooked up with a few of these 90th percentile men. Regardless of their own attractiveness, they get the idea that only these kind of men are good enough to marry.
Most women loathe the prospect of "settling" for someone who has accomplished less than they have, but they fail to understand that their accomplishments aren't among the criteria that make them desirable to male partners. It's not that being self-employed or educated is unappealing to men—a normal loving man is going to take pride in his partner's accomplishments—but it isn't one of the primary attributes of female desirability.
The men who have the unusual luxury of being desirable to most women don't have an incentive to commit, but it's unusual that they've renounced monogamy entirely. The most audacious fuccbois I know have all shared a private fantasy of finding their dream girl and living happily ever after. There are some common elements to the attributes of this dream girl, but no one has ever shared that they want a boss babe with a master's degree.
Men have varied preferences for personality traits in a partner. Some prefer a woman who's tough and outdoorsy while some prefer a woman who's afraid of spiders. Some prefer a woman who's curious and intelligent while some prefer the dumb blonde. But there are a few attributes that are universally desirable in female partners. Men want women who are soft, nurturing, caring, loyal, and agreeable. These characteristics make men want to commit.
When women evaluate their own desirability based on the same standards they use to evaluate men, they end up with a totally inaccurate self-appraisal. When their occasional trysts with extremely desirable men convince them that they have a reasonable chance of obtaining a serious relationship with one, they get the impression that they should hold out for better. Even when they choose not to hold out for better, their relationships are plagued by their feelings of resentment about settling for men they deem inferior.
I want someone who thinks I'm a catch. I want someone who respects me. I want someone who regards my desire for a family as evidence of my loving nature, not a sinister plot to undermine her career. I want someone who isn't quietly comparing my achievements to those of men who only wanted her for sex. I want someone who wants to be nurturing.
I've posted and retracted this blog a few times because I feared my tone was too defensive or that I wasn't being sympathetic enough to western women. I'm going to leave it up in its imperfect form with the disclaimer that my idea are still forming. My aim isn't to make any claim about how women ought to behave, but rather to recognize their struggle and defend my interest in seeking something else.