OutWest wrote:So far as I know, I am the only man here who has actually married a "Middle class Filipina" and ironically, I did not even set out to do so. I did not know her status before I met my wife and while she was obviously not out of a nipa hut, she easily could have been from one of those many solid but poor working families who struggle to own their own appliances, likely have a family motorcycle, and struggle greatly to keep their daughter in school, with the possibility she might land an overseas job. You want to know what did it? when we first met, she gave me the prettiest, most pure, open eye to the soul I have even seen, and I could not help but return the favor. The eye is the window of the soul, and she gave me the wide uncovered window indeed. She and her family do not get into the social clics, they are kind and personable. If you are married to that morena from a poor family, it makes no difference to her. After my first meeting, I would have married my wife if she was poor as a church mouse. She went home that day, and told her mom, "Mamma, I met the man I am going to marry. He is a foreigner. I hope you like him."
You are one of the THREE true and tested success stories in here. Together with Pete and Dave. The exceptions that confirm the rule. The 3-standard-deviations-from-the-mean from which you work out the mean.
I think I challenged you (and Pete and Dave) on this point in another thread in the past (forgot which one), and it went like this:
1) you found your girl several years ago, perhaps not 11 or 13 years ago like Pete, but "a while ago", when dating sites like Cherry Blossoms or Filipino Cupid or Filipino Kisses still had a handful of those needles in the haystack. When large-screen smartphones and data connections in rural areas weren't much around and a foreigner was still saluted like an Angel from the sky, and not mercilessly compared to the K-Pop idol or Hollywood stud
du jour.
2) you (and I think Pete and Dave) found your girl off the beaten path of Mindanao. On one side, a girl from a village near Ozamiz or Pagadian 7/10 years ago. On the other, a smartphone-yielding entitled millennial of Davao today. Not saying it's absolutely impossible to find girls like those off the beaten path, perhaps in even more rural villages where local families still give their pretty daughters good values and send them to local universities, instead of letting them loose in the big city.
That's why I did find inspiration in the idea of perhaps finding somebody in Butuan or Iligan City, Dumaguete, those cities like that. However in Mindanao (Dumaguete is technically in Visayas), all of those places are quite a big hike. The closest tier-2 city to Davao without meeting the Muslim rebels is General Santos, which effectively could be an outlet. Once again...if I can't even find the time to spend half a day in Samal (in front of Davao), how can I spend a week roaming the edges of Mindanao?
3) perhaps the most important of them all, you had set yourself no expectations on who exactly you wanted to find, apart from, obviously, some aesthetics and moral thresholds that no good man looking for a long-term partner should ever compromise on. Perhaps you were lucky or, as I can infer from your stories, you were in a position to choose, rather than be chosen.
Believe me, none of the girls I could be possibly interested in will ever go back to their Mamas telling them they found the man they'd love to marry. In fact quite a bit of the opposite has happened, and could happen again: that the girl gives me a lukewarm-to-cold shoulder and it's only the insistence of her family ("yes you don't like him cuz he's too old, but he's the only man around and he's gonna help us") that makes her come back to me, with the fakest of "eyes to the soul".
It could be a sign of times, after all, OW. The age range we are targeting is always early to late 20s. But a girl on that age range 10+ years ago is not the same as in 2017. You could tell me I am no saint myself and can't expect the Virgin Mary as a bride, but I wasn't born yesterday and certainly haven't found a single, and I mean ONE single girl, who could impress me with her purity, her clean soul and her grace. It's all social media face value, "relationship goals", peer pressure to find the young stud and take a lot of selfies with him (and automatically rule out more mature men who might well be better LTR material).
Everything is exposed, everything is out there and hiding it isn't an option. So most pretties would rather not be seen with any less than the man of their (tall) dreams, then give them a honest chance. Hm,where have I heard this before?
Perhaps you Three Holy Kings have been fortune-stricken. Or you found you gem at another time, another place.
OutWest wrote:I don't know about offering advice. So much of life is an accident. PD is a honorable man. He carries perspective and baggage, like most of us. I would always wish him the best. I do know, doing a good job of finding yourself helps on the way to finding the girl, or helps on the way to her finding you.
If she is one of those poor brown skinned morenas, what is the quality of her heart? Have you even passed someone by for some "reason" , only to regret it bitterly later? I have done that. It does not go way easily.
So much of life is an accident, but I now realise so much of my trouble comes from very conscious choices...choices I thought would give me the ability to respect myself even more than I do, and regardless of what people think. And choice who, actually, deprived me of the only qualities a girl of my fancy would find palatable: my live/work abroad status and my financial stability.
What's the quality of a morena's heart? Let me tell you the quality of the last (very) morena I tried to fall for. Ironically, a common friend of Will N Dowd who he introduced me. Single mom, one kid with a foreigner, who turned out to be a convicted child abuser (and currently in a Washington DC jail), super-keen to stick to me despite I told her clearly I didn't like her, and not because of her skin. There was something wrong, something fake, like 90% of the ladies I meet anyway.
We were about to plan to live together and, for the first time ever, I agreed to have her little girl live with us. The house had not 1 but 2 spare rooms, after all. Until, all of a sudden, she is called to work in Manila with her best friend (another dark morena who had the golden chance to marry herself up with a geriatric company manager from Switzerland). A couple of weeks of occasional calls full of smoochies and promises, until she suddenly goes quiet. A quick (and involuntary) browse on her Facebook reveals she's attended the company Christmas party and she is happy to pose in the company of...an equally geriatric guy, probably a manager at the same company. Called her for the last time, she makes up an excuse, that we're not meant to be and quickly fades into gray.
The heart of a morena? Statistically akin to the heart of any poor, uneducated girl who can fake any feeling and make incredible decisions, and corresponding u-turns, to try and catch the best life can throw at them. And who can blame them. But if this is the game to play, there is no soul to be seen, no crack large enough to give you a glimpse of it. And if/when you do see it, all you see is the same level of fake and calculating cynicism every woman in the world is capable of...then what's the point with keeping my hopes up?
Tutto il mondo e' paese, the world's one big town, we say in Italia.
If they can't look past skin tone, where you went to university and which school you went to. They're snobs and yet to evolve into something more decent.
(that is what I call my friends) 
