I don't really have a dog in this fight. I was wondering what this thread would be about-- gambling for Filippinas. Then I see it's about guys posting pictures of girls, and other guys telling them their pictures aren't hot.
Newlife Philippines did that, so I checked out the links he referred to on DateInAsia. Personally, I think the pictures of the first girl Droid picked out were as pretty as any of the pictures NewLifePhilippines posted. The girl he skyped, 'spider' something or other... I didn't think she looked all that attractive, something about the smile.
The girl publicduende posted didn't look all that attractive to me. Her face is kind of oddly shaped.
But all that is my own personal opinion about looks, and it doesn't matter in the least because I've got my own wife. And if one of you guys likes a girl's looks, and another man doesn't, who cares? It's a good thing we like different looks and personality types, so we can marry different women instead of all competing over the same woman we consider a perfect 10 while the population dies out.
When I lived in Korea as a young man in my 20's, a married Korean man told me that looks were important before you got married, but after that, character was a lot more important as you live with a woman day after day. That's pretty good advice. I like the fact that my wife is a beautiful woman and I can look at her face and body and enjoy that. But we are all steadily becoming less attractive. If we live long enough, our skin sags and droops. Marry a 10 now and she will be a 1 in 50 or 60 years, and if you are a decent guy, you will still love her and have sex with her. Most 20 year olds don't want to have sex with a 70 year old woman (which is good so the rest of us don't have to keep other men away from our grandmothers and aging mothers.) But it's like the frog slowly warmed up in the pot of boiling water. A frog will jump away if you try to drop him in a pot of boiling water. But if you slowly heat it up, he'll stay there until it boils. Gradually, a man see his wife age. It happens slowly so it is used to it. When they are both 80, they still have sex, at least sometimes, supposing the marriage is good and they still have working parts.
It's good if there is some initial attraction early on. But character, morals, values, faith, etc. are all more important than what a woman looks like.
Btw, I looked around on Date In Asia. You can choose a woman by height, weight, religion, children, and marital status. So you can weed out single mothers, divorced women, women who are taller than you in high heels, women over a certain weight, and women over or under a certain range. I see they have some details on religion. Pentecostal is listed separate from Christian, which is weird. Maybe it's a reaction to the fact that a small percentage of Pentecostals aren't Trinitarian. When I was dating, a woman being a non-Christian was a deal breaker. So this is pretty cool. They should have a category for virgin or nonvirgin. They could lie about it, but if the virgins answered honestly, at least self-professed nonvirgins could be ruled out. That was a deal-breaker, or nearly so, when I was looking for a wife back before online dating was really a commercial thing.
I can see the appeal of online dating for singles if they have that kind of fine-grained criteria. And everyone on the site is looking for a partner. If you ask a girl at the office out, that could be awkward. But here, everyone on the site is presumably looking for dates, marriage, etc. If a girl doesn't like you, she can just choose not to send a message back? I don't know how all that works. But I can see why so many people meet and marry through the Internet. It's a world where everyone is there for dating, and there is no loud music or sleezy atmosphere (hopefully) like a club.
I read a post that girls on the site are scammers. If you choose ones from very conservative religious backgrounds, is she less likely to be a scammer? What about men who have really 'sincere' profiles, the kind that says the man is looking for a wife, hoping to find a woman who is serious about getting married. Would that make it better or worse?
I'd imagine if you wanted to marry a woman off the Internet, you'd have to go there and interview her friends and relatives to see how legit her intentions are. I've hear of hiring someone to investigate her, sending someone to the internet cafe where she chats online and striking up a conversation with her about her online boyfriends and her intentions. If she says she's getting money from all these men or that she has a lot of online boyfriends, that could be a way of ruling a girl out after you'd Skyped her?
I knew of three girls from church that married after dating online about 12 years ago or so. They were sincerely looking for spouses. Probably due to language issues, I don't think Indonesia has much of an online dating scam industry. I haven't heard of it. Not everyone speaks English that well. Those who can are usually middle class, Usually, just about every woman in Indonesia wants to get married, and they tend to marry a few years earlier than women in the US. So when they hit their late 20's, they really want to get married. And there are some who just don't meet someone who marries them, and they can go online and find a foreigner who is still single. It's kind of hard to find singles in Indonesia after a certain age. I think the Philippines is the same way, with the Internet being an exception. I have a friend who likes Indonesian and Filippina girls. Even though I went to a mostly Filippino church at the time, I didn't know any singles in the 40+ age range he was looking for.
Still, this is a lot riskier than getting to know a girl totally in real life. If I had never married or were widowed, I might make it a goal to go live in Indonesia and meet a girl there. I'm happy with my wife, and it has been a good experience. I speak the language and know a bit about the culture. I like the marriage culture there better than in this country, and there is a certain mystique to Asian women.
