Stickman Readers' Submissions October 8th, 2011

The Dating Market in the West versus in Thailand

There have been a few submissions on here recently about dating in the West versus dating in Thailand. I'm just coming up to the end of a two week holiday in Bangkok and spent a month here earlier this year. Comparing my love life when I'm here
to when I'm in Australia is like chalk and cheese. Sure, I get women in Australia, but dating there is a much more frustrating experience than here to say the least.

I've spent the past few days with a Thai girl I met in a nightclub last time I was here. She is so beautiful that people are constantly commenting on it, including Thai guys. We were at a Thai bar last night and one of the band members
came over and told me he thought my girlfriend was hot. A German guy the night before told me he'd been to Thailand many times and had never seen a girl here as beautiful as her.

mens clinic bangkok

She's also very sweet and pretty intelligent. She's a little low on self-esteem and very shy.

In Australia, she'd be considered a prize girl, and I'd be proud to even know her. Here in Bangkok, she was ridiculously easy to meet. I was simply standing in a nightclub and her friend brought her up and introduced her to me.
An hour later she was back in my hotel room.

Is she a freelance prostitute? Almost certainly. She doesn't have a job but seems to have plenty of money. She has some friends who are definitely on the game.

Last time I was here I gave her some money, but not much. This time she explicitly told me she didn't want any. She also got pretty surprised and offended when my hotel's reception asked her for ID. She spends a lot of time overseas,
so I suspect she has a rich sugar daddy or two up her sleeve.

Anyway, whatever her situation, I don't care. I'm not looking to get married with her anytime soon.

Stick and his buddies would probably consider her to not be a quality girl. <You're not wrong!Stick> I'm guessing I could meet someone even better than her if I lived here. Meeting hot, sweet,
accommodating women here is insanely easy. If you have to give some of them a small amount of money in the morning, you can hardly complain you didn't get value for it.

Prostitutes in the West are completely different. I've never been with one, but that's because they're not attractive to me. Hard-core, expensive, and aggressive would be the only way to describe them. Many of them are obvious
drug-addicts. A friend of mine paid a stripper $50 (1500 baht) for a ten minute lap-dance a couple of weeks back. He wasn't even allowed to touch her.

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I've dated hot women in the West too, but the power balance is completely different. I spent a couple of months once going out with a girl who worked as a TV presenter on the Discovery Channel. She was also so beautiful that people regularly
commented on it. Plus, she was often recognised as a minor celebrity, which was always nice for the ego. She liked sex too.

But I was left with little power. She could ditch me and find someone as good or better in a nano-second. She knew it and I knew it. Asserting yourself under such circumstances can be difficult, even if you know it's the right thing
to do.

With my current Thai girl, I get the impression I'm the one with the choices. If she lost me, she'd have a hard time finding another guy as good, even if she is hot. She seems to be constantly worried I'll leave her for someone
else. Right now she's gone home to do my laundry for me. Try finding a semi-attractive girl in the West who offers that kind of service.

That's the most interesting difference between Thailand and the West. The sexual marketplace is skewed towards men here, and women there. Indeed, the attitude I pick up from expats here is remarkably similar to that of girls back home.
Farang men are the ones in demand here, and they know it. When Stick talks about "manning up" and being more demanding of girls, he's doing so from a position of market power. If he found himself single and dating in New Zealand
again, I think his attitude would either have to change, or he'd find himself spending a lot of time sleeping alone.

It can take a while to get used to this new state of affairs. I'm certainly not there yet. So I think you should lighten up a bit on the newbies who comment here.

Statistics even reveal the difference in the marketplace. For those of you who haven't seen it before, the CIA World Factbook is a fascinating website. It has all types of interesting stats about every country on Earth. One I particularly
like is the number of men and women who are fit for military service, which means healthy and between the ages of 16 and 49. The top age may be a little high, but in general you could consider this to be a good rough guide for the dating market
in each country.

In Australia, for example, there are 1.04 men for every woman. The UK is the same. The US and New Zealand are a little better at 1.02 men per woman. Remember, these are the young and fit, so we're not talking about your local nursing
home.

In Thailand there are 0.94 men per woman. In Brazil there are only 0.87 and in Russia only 0.77.

And that's just the measuring by quantity. When you look at qualitative factors, the marketplace becomes even more skewed.

What do most men want in a woman? Being physically attractive and easy to get along with are probably the most important things. Are there more women with these qualities in Western countries than in places like Thailand? I don't have
any empirical data on the subject, but I think it's pretty clear the answer is no. If anything, Thailand probably has better quality women, when measured on what most men are looking for.

On the other hand, what are most women looking for in a man? Physical attractiveness is one factor. But they also want educated, financially secure, polite, healthy and loyal. Again, I don't have any hard figures, but I think it would
be difficult to argue that there are more men in Thailand with these qualities than in the West. Around the world, middle-class Western men have a reputation for making the best husbands.

So women in the West are surrounded by high quality men and find themselves in comparative short-supply. In Thailand, it's the opposite. I used to go out with a Thai girl in Sydney who now lives in Hua Hin. I met her at a speed-dating
night where every man there was interested in seeing her again (every guy ticked her card). She was hit on constantly by handsome, successful guys. Most of the time, she dressed conservatively with her hair up and glasses on, because anything
more sexy was an invitation to be approached.

Now she's back in Thailand, she says it's almost impossible to meet a good guy. She's now dating a professional Thai guy who she admits she isn't physically attracted to. She also suspects he cheats on her. But she's
worried that if she leaves him, it will be hard to find a replacement. This is an attractive middle-class girl with a good job and a nice personality.

Another interesting thing to note is that countries with less men tend to be less developed than those with more. You can have lots of fun speculating why, but I think there's something to be said for keeping men sexually frustrated
being good for society. If men have to compete for quality women, they'll become better quality men.

Again, Thailand provides plenty of evidence of this. Stick often comments on how low-quality the farangs he sees in Bangkok are. Indeed, there's plenty of evidence that spending time here has a corrupting influence on a man's character.
One example, among many, is the young man considering dropping out of medical school to become a low-paid English teacher after being exposed to the Thai sexual marketplace.

Dating in the West is an incredibly frustrating experience. I know many men who would be top of the tree here who go for years without sex in Australia. My best friend earns double the average wage and was known as a bit of a pick-up artist
in his younger days. He told me recently he's only had sex with his wife twice in the past five years. She's become very overweight, doesn't work, doesn't put out, and spends so much of his money that he often can't afford
a beer after work. This kind of thing is so common it's frightening.

I know another guy who is so handsome that he works as a male stripper. He constantly has women interested in him, but still complains about all the games and other crap he has to put up with. Even a guy who is so attractive that he can make
good money from it is still on the back foot in his relationships.

If there's one phrase that can be used to sum up how Western culture brings up modern women it's "self-esteem". Sometime in the past, we decided our girls didn't have enough of it and needed much more. Education for
girls these days resembles a self-help seminar more than the three Rs. From their earliest years they are told they are special, and entitled to the best of everything with little effort. There are many nice girls in the West, but even the best
of them can't easily escape this cultural programming.

I was reading a column in the Sydney Morning Herald recently by a reasonably attractive (but not hot) 30-something Sydney woman who was trying out online dating. She claimed to have communicated with more than 300 men and been out with quite
a few of them. Presumably there were many more whose emails she didn't even bother to reply to. The bottom line was that none of them were good enough for her. The entire column was a complaint that, while there were lots of great guys, there
were none she "clicked" with. This attitude is unfortunately very common and starts early.

About a year ago the same paper published a column by a seventeen-year-old girl complaining about the poor quality of all the boys she knew. She compared them unfavourably to the vampire character in the novel Twilight – an immortal, spectacularly
romantic, unbleliveably handsome and totally loyal dream man. The real males she found herself surrounded by were, by comparison "immature". The irony of an ordinary suburban teenager expecting an impossible fantasy man to fly in through
her window making judgements about others maturity was apparently lost on her and the newspaper's editors. It also says something about our culture, that a column attacking teenage boys as a group can be published in a national newspaper.
Even children are fair game for criticism if they're male.

Finding love in the West is not impossible, and there are plenty of good Western women out there. But the market is incredibly skewed against you as a man, when compared to Thailand and many other countries. And that's before we even
start talking about the legal system that equates living with a woman to signing a contract handing over control of your assets.

There are plenty of complaints about Thai women on this website, and maybe some of them are justified. But I think if you look at the alternatives, and prevent yourself from getting in over your head, you'll find the dating market here
is a pretty wonderful thing.

Napster

Stickman's thoughts:

I maintain that it takes just as much effort to find genuine happiness in a relationship when she is Thai and he isn't. The respective backgrounds are just so different that major adjustments are necessary by each partner.

As far as the woman situation in my country goes, let me tell you about my closest friends back home

* One guy is married to a Thai nurse he met in Auckland.

* One guy has a long-term de facto relationship with a Thai admin worker he met in Auckland.


* One guy lives with a Thai student he met in Auckland.


* One guy is married to a South African he met in London.


* One guy is married to an English lady he met in London.


* One guy is married to an American woman he met online.


* One guy is in a long-term relationship with an Aussie girl and they now live together in Queensland.


* One guy is dating a Chinese girl he met online in Wellington and they have since moved to Melbourne.


* One guy is married a Kiwi girl he met in Auckland, my ONLY close mate involved in a serious / long-term relationship with a local girl!

So of 9 good friends back home, only one has a Kiwi partner! A number of my friends in NZ rave about the benefits of "imports" and confirm that all you say about dating in Australia is, not unexpectedly, just the same in Kiwiland.

nana plaza