davewe wrote:TRADER1972 wrote:davewe wrote:
I think this is the key takeaway here. Your preconceived notions should go out the door. This is one of the most attractive things for me about traveling to other cultures and PI in general. Leave your Western concepts behind with these girls. Now I am not saying you should be blind and foolish but these women will surprise you and amaze you often if you let them.
Davewe, I enjoy your insights and post very much.
Can you expound on the way they may surprise or amaze?
I don't think it's a very profound insight, but for me when I travel abroad I always study how people are the same and how they are different from us. How they are the same seems obvious: the same physical needs, emotional needs, the need for family and connection, the need to create a better life for your children. The ways that people in other cultures are profoundly different is more subtle and powerful. This is certainly not just true in the Philippines.
Since most of the discussion here is about women, well I'll stick to that, though many other differences also fascinate me. Women's views of men, relationships, sex, and marriage are different depending on what culture you are in. It isn't just the fact that you can get girls abroad when you couldn't get them at home. It isn't just that women are less feminist in 3rd world countries. Those views are too simplistic.
My gf has a simple mantra she repeats whenever I tell her how she doesn't understand how attitudes and life are different in America from the Philippines. She says, "Well, I am not an American." That is it! These girls aren't American and they don't have the same views as we do. That was what resonated for me in nightwatchsf's posts. It wasn't whether he got middle class or "elite" Filipinas. It was that he understood that to flourish in a foreign culture you have to leave your Western concepts behind and accept the fact that the women and their attitudes are different. How does that manifest itself in the Philippines? This has been well documented in cases like Will N's and the unlimited supply of girls or with older guys like me and many others (the supply is not unlimited, thank goodness, but the one is pretty damn nice).
There are so many differences that no simple post could cover them. But you know what amazes me about the Filipinas I have met - they really like men! Almost everything else comes out of that: the sweetness, the loyalty, the out of this world sex. These girls really seem to like men and if you are "her man" you may find yourself the object of intense adoration. This is something that Western men are no longer used to, where so many women just plain don't like men!
IMO, the guys who do the worst abroad are the guys who just want it to be America but with hotter girls. They complain about the conditions, the attitudes of the locals, the crappy food, the weather. And in the end, they even complain about the women. Why would any woman want to be with a guy who hates her culture or country.
But the guy who travels and expats and love where he has landed and finds the attitudes, the people and the differences fascinating - that guy will have no lack of female companionship and the girls will adore him and think he is what Will N. claimed - a God.
