#dating abroad

[mindovermatteryes]

Before you swipe in Medellin, you need to hear this. 🚨

It’s not about being scared, it’s about being smart. The best connections here don't start on an app—they start in salsa classes, on hiking trails, and in real conversation.

Trust your gut. Stay safe. The right person is worth the wait. 💙

#Medellin #passportbros #TravelSafety #DatingAbroad #DigitalNomad

[mindovermatteryes]

The harsh reality nobody talks about 💀 Less than 2% of passport bros actually make it work long-term. Before you book that flight to Medellín, know the REAL stats on marriage rates, divorce rates, and relocation success. Real talk 👀🇨🇴

**#PassportBros #Colombia #Medellin #InternationalCouple #DatingAbroad

[sikapa41]

German-Russian Guy Prefers to Date THIS Culture

German-Russian guy on who he would prefer to date. Get RODE mic: Join DBB mailing list: Dating in Scandinavia? Read: We used Epidemic Sound in this video. FREE MONTH: Dating Beyond Borders is a Youtube channel that focuses on highlighting the cultural differences that come into play while dating people from other countries. Videos out every Thursday – hit the bell button to receive notifications!…

View On WordPress

[sikapa41]

Hardest Thing About Dating in the US as a Latina (Chile)

I talk to Anabel from Chile, who tells me the hardest part about dating in the US and why dating in Chile is a lot more straightforward. What is the biggest difference between dating in Chile and the US? Get RODE mic: 5% off Holafly eSIM: Shop DBB guides: … Join DBB mailing list: Dating in Scandinavia? Read: We used Epidemic Sound in this video. FREE MONTH: Dating Beyond Borders is a Youtube…

Hardest Thing About Dating in the US as a Latina (Chile)

[forhimdating]

Ukrainian Women Love is NOT Unconditional

[mendoukusagariyadating]

Threre’s a third guy, but I don’t consider him a failure.

We didn’t have sex, and we haven’t kissed, but I still talk to him so I can’t write about him yet. 

His will be a very long post. 

I can say that he was in my apartment and no moves were made and no sex was had. But I actually had a different motive for meeting him, so it’s not a failure. It's just an option that didn’t get explored. 

But I guess chronologically he takes the letter F. 

Maybe it’s F for Friend?

Only time will tell. 

[mendoukusagariyadating]

Today’s story is a little bit shorter: B, The First Guy Who Truly Lived Nearby

I also met B on Tinder. He has since unmatched me, but that’s only inconvenient because it means I can’t look back at our conversation to see who initiated it, and that’s a detail I like to know.

I have a feeling it might have been me. We matched, and then right away I sent a message. I didn’t stop to overthink it. I was feeling chatty and open and very “what the heck it won't hurt to message someone first.” I’m not in that mood very often so I roll with it. Anyhow, his profile said something about music so I opened with a question about music.

Now, here is where it’s important to know that Japanese Tinder and American Tinder are very different in their conversation opening conventions. This carries across applications, but at the time of this story I haven’t refined or expanded my search yet, and I’m new to Japanese Tinder, so I don’t realize the social faux paus I’m making by not starting with the typical 「はじめまして！～と言います。よろしくお願いします。」Loosely translated it’s a set phrase that means something approximating: ”Nice to meet you, Call me ~. Please take care of me.”　It’s how you properly start a Japanese conversation, I think. At the time I did not know this and launched right in, American style, leading with a question-- not introducing myself and being polite and all that.

His response was kind of caustic, rebuking me for jumping right in without saying hello first. I apologized profusely, we managed to hold a conversation for at least a couple of hours, switched to LINE because Tinder is buggy and impersonal, and since he lived very nearby, decided to meet. It was the very next day after we moved the conversation to LINE, on a Saturday. We were chatting about music or something, and then it turned into I’m bored, what are you doing right now, and I managed to push it back a little because I was cleaning my house or doing laundry or both or something, and then since I’d made him wait he wanted to sleep, and then, because Japanese has a tendency to be ambiguous, I was unsure of his meaning and asked if he meant that we should sleep together, so he asked if I wanted to sleep with him, and I was shocked at how quickly things had turned and said, truthfully, that I didn’t know yet. Then he said that since he was tired he was going to sleep. So I clarified that we would meet AFTER, and he said if we’re going to meet it’d have to be then. Now thoroughly embarrassed, I asked him to START with that, and he said he would. Our next message was him waking from his nap and we set a time to meet.

I met him at the nearest train station. He got there before me. A train came in right as I was arriving so I got stuck on the other side of the tracks. Less than 5 minutes later I was sitting inside of his car and we were down the street, driving away into the city part of town via some roads I’d never taken before. We discovered almost immediately that we were very close in age, so it was casual Japanese with him from from the get go. He seemed very cool. Like, hipster kind of cool. Too cool to be bothered, cool. He looked like an artist. He was wearing super baggy clothes in earth tones and a floppy black beretesque hat (hats are unusual here unless they’re a fashion statement, and it was definitely a fashion statement). There was something very languid and lethargic about him, and I found it disconcerting, but not threatening. If we’d been in America I would’ve assumed he was an avid pot smoker. Instead I considered that he might be on some sort of medication, but he’d just woken up from his nap so I blamed it on that.

I don’t think he ever truly woke up the entire time we were together. Not that it was very long. Less than two hours total, I think.

He took me to one of the well known chain cafes in the city we both live in. I hadn’t been to one yet, or really noticed them at all, to be honest. Since then I have noticed that we have at least 3 of them, which is a lot of anything to have in a city this size. I digress.

I watched the way he moved as we walked from his car into the cafe. Something about his body language was off, but I couldn’t pinpoint what exactly it was. Maybe it was his excessively baggy pants? But it seemed to be something more deeply rooted than just trying to walk without letting anything fall down. I looked at his shoes, wondering if they were to blame-- they were hideous. I can’t remember what they looked like, but I remember being very upset at his choice of footwear. (I spent an alarming portion of my first 2 months here being surprised at how ugly some of the shoes are (to my American sensibilities).) Anyhow, I decided it was unlikely that his shoes were causing his unusual gait, and pushed that train of thought aside to focus instead on the fact that he was obviously making fashion statements and I was wearing whatever I’d managed to scrape together out of the approximately 10 items of clothing I owned at that point in time.

We sat in a booth that was just as saggy as I was interpreting him to be. I’m sure the two fed into each other, influencing my memory and making each other seem worse in my minds eye than they were in actuality, but still. He ordered a sandwich thing on a burger bun and a coffee. I got...something to drink. Oh, Cinnamon tea. It was literally a cinnamon stick in a cup of hot water. I was underwhelmed, to say the least. I asked how his sandwich was. He’d practically inhaled it. It looked very fluffy and insubstantial-- a thin layer of scrambled eggs and maybe a slice of romaine lettuce on a smooth white bun that caved in far too easily where his fingers held it. It wasn’t one of the better sandwiches he’d had, but he liked the coffee.

We talked about music and compared artists, and I told him about some bands he should check out based on his preferences. He told me there was a music festival happening not too far away the following weekend, but I had some other plans I couldn’t get out of. I also hadn’t gotten my first paycheck yet, so I didn’t have the money for a ticket. Once we’d settled into the saggy booth, he pulled out and frequently took drags on an electronic cigarette. Or actually, he was smoking very thin conventional, analog cigarettes in some sort of electric device that made them smell even more terrible than normal cigarette smoke. Normal smoke is annoying, and will choke you, yes, but it’s familiar. Somewhat nostalgic in a weird way. This machine gave his cigarettes an acrid smell, as acidic as smoke can be, completely unlike the cigarettes of my childhood. It burned my nostrils. I wondered how he could do it, just the smell was enough to make me sick. I imagined the taste was terrible. I tried my best to time my breathing so that I wouldn’t breathe in for a few moments after he exhaled it.

Cigarettes are a deal-breaker for me. My mom smokes, and my dad died from lung related problems that I’m sure were worse than they needed to be due to all the second-hand smoke he inhaled working in restaurants and bars back before smoking indoors was against the law in America. Doctors swore up and down that he had to have been a smoker, but I lived with him for 15 years. He wasn’t.

Anyhow, enough of this little aside. I think B paid for my drink along with his food, and we were back in his car, headed back to my part of town. We talked more. He was pretty easy to be with. We talked as though we were going to actually become friends, and he was going to introduce me to his other friends. There was a bar he recommended we go to sometime. I drive past it every now and then and think I should check it out, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Part of me doesn’t want to accidentally run into him there… which reminds me I haven’t finished this story yet.

So, B drops me off in front of my building, and I say thanks and we should hang out again and he says the same and I go home. I send him the names of the bands we talked about so he could look them up. He said thanks, and that he’d looked them up. And then radio silence on both sides. For 24 days.

And on the 24th day, he sent me a message: 「えっちしましょう」 ENG: “Let’s have sex”

No punctuation. No hello.

To which I replied (in Japanese) “uhh…” and then  “If someone says that to you suddenly, isn’t it decided that the answer is no?”

B:「たしかに」 ENG: “Yeah, that’s pretty certain”

And that was the last I ever heard from him.

I think that in addition to deleting me from Tinder, he also blocked me on LINE because I did send him a message, 3 months later, saying “it’s been awhile” and he never even read it.

And that is the story of B.

[mendoukusagariyadating]

Let’s start with the first one to make an impression

Ah, naming conventions. Let’s call him A. I’ll decide later if I’m going to go through the alphabet or what. The backstory on all of this is that I moved to my new home in “rural” Japan (an hour from a major city, so far enough to be inconvenient, but not far enough to be in the middle of nowhere) in the beginning of April. I’d never lived truly alone before, so I didn’t know just how lonely 一人暮らし would be, or how it would affect my mental health. I’m still trying to figure out the latter. Anyhow, let’s get back on point. I started Tinder again, something I’d deleted off my phone months before and given up on. But, living in a neighborhood surrounded by rice fields and a pig farm, where the only other people you see for the first two months are elderly people and children, will really do a number on you. I was desperate just to meet someone else in my age range who lived somewhere nearby. How else to check out the local population than to use an app that lets you sort by distance? And so here I am, on Tinder once again, swiping and not knowing what I’m looking for, and thinking it’s just friends, and talking to strangers. And then I see that someone has Super Liked me. My initial reaction to being Super Liked is “EW NO WHY THAT’S SO LAME,” but this is Japan, and things that Americans are too cool for are just par for the course here. I deliberated a bit, decided he was decent seeming enough that maybe he’d be cute in person, and matched with him. He messaged me quickly. We talked, in English, for a little bit before setting up a date for that weekend. I hate small talk and am bad at messaging people I haven’t met, so I prefer to just meet ASAP to assess the situation. We’d meet at the station in the city that I supposedly live in (I’m on the outskirts) and go for lunch. He offered to find a place, and being brand new here and not confident in my Japanese internet skills, I let him. We met on a Saturday, at the aforementioned station. He was a bit late because there was more traffic than he’d anticipated. He doesn’t live that far on a map, but for reasons I’ll never fully grasp, it takes forever to get anywhere here. He’s in another city a few cities away, so it was actually a bit of a commute for him. The first thing he tells me is that I look very young (he said high school age, but I don’t believe that), and when I greeted him he said that I seemed very Japanese in my mannerisms. I followed him to his car. It was a cute little blue hatchback that I liked immediately and it made me like him more, tbh. My first impression of him wasn’t immediate attraction, but I felt safe, and so away we went to the cafe he’d found. We go inside and SURPRISE! They’re renovating! And the kitchen is not open. No biggie, but I can tell it threw him. He apologizes profusely and asks me to look around the store part of the cafe while he finds somewhere else. He asks how I feel about oden, and then we’re off. He feels super embarrassed, but I’m happy and amused. I like a good adventure and nothing makes a better story than things going wrong. The replacement place he found is down some tiny one lane two-way streets, tucked away in the middle of a residential neighborhood. There’s a guy playing with his two young children in the street next to the (tiny) gravel parking lot. The atmosphere is AMAZING. It’s the cutest most interesting looking place I’ve seen since moving here. I couldn’t wait to see the inside. We walk up the path and I’m just excited and drinking it all in and we get onto the porch and they’re still closed. No big deal, they open for dinner and were due to open in about 10 minutes. So we hung around for a bit, he apologized more, I promised him that I liked things better this way.We’d found such a cool place! Still, the place was unusually quiet and eventually he decided to call. So, on any other day they would’ve been open, but some special circumstances made them push back their opening time that day. And we were hungry. So he made me choose -- yakiniku or some fancy looking cafe. I chose yakiniku. But first I wanted to check out the tiny shrine around the corner and while we were there we looked at the other side of the Oden shop. It was made of old miso storehouses. Very cool. We promised we’d come back there the next time.We got back in the car and I laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. He called ahead to double check, and everything seemed fine. We chatted on the way, and when we got inside and sat down in the waiting area I realized for the first time that we were very likely on a date. He was sitting very close to me. I was a little taken aback-- I thought we were just trying to be friends. I let myself adjust to the new parameters of the evening. We got a table. We ate lots of meat. And “salad”. We talked in English and Japanese, discussing language on an intellectual level. He was smart. He knew he was smart. It was good conversation and I found myself thinking that he was really easy to get along with and that we could make good friends.  But somewhere in there things changed and he started making lots of really intense eye contact that made me blush and look away. He asked me the classic “what are you thinking?” And I never know how to answer that, so I dodged it. I returned it. I wasn’t expecting him to not dodge it as well. His thoughts were something to the effect of “You have such nice eyes. やっぱり外国人は良いなー.” Which, I’m not going to lie, as far as statements go, that one makes me kind of uncomfortable. (trans: “as I thought, foreign women really are beautiful”) It’s like putting down Japanese women, fetishizing me, and also not actually seeing me all at the same time. But he’d meant it as a compliment I think, so I tried to ignore it. This is also when I realized, without a shadow of a doubt, that I was indeed on my first date in Japan. When we finished eating I went to the bathroom and he paid for dinner while I was in there, and then offered to drive me home. I live 25 minutes from the city part of my city. He didn’t mind. He drove me home. He took some road I hadn’t taken yet (which I now use all the time) which went past a building with neon signs. I asked if it was a strip club, he got super awkward, saying he didn’t feel comfortable talking to me about that sort of thing. I laughed it off. I also live near the ocean, so since he’d driven all the way out we decided to go look at it. There’s no beach, so we just parked on the road next to the wall and went for a walk. It was windy and cold. I was glad I had a jacket. We stood for awhile, talking and looking at the ocean at night. And the moon. Then we got back in his car. He had to pee. He asked if he could use my bathroom. Of course I said yes. He’d just driven me all the way home. There’s no parking so we parked a little ways down the street and as we were walking up he couldn’t take it any more and went to pee in the bushes. Then he asked if he could still come up to wash his hands. At this point I’m wondering how far he’s hoping to take this because I’ve never seen a more obvious ploy to get into someone’s apartment. At some point I’d decided that I was okay with this being a date, but I really had no intention of having sex with him on our first meeting. That’s not how I approach trying to date people. In fact, it’s a pretty good way to make sure I don’t date someone. I was curious though, and not opposed to him in general. So I apologized profusely for the mess-- I think this was the first time I had dirty dishes in my sink (I’d just moved in at the beginning of that month) and let him in to wash his hands. And wash them he did. And then he came out and stood around awkwardly in the 玄関 (doorway) before putting his shoes on and going back out. I was confused, but I also didn’t invite him further in. And he didn’t make any moves. And neither did I. But I walked him back to his car and before he got in he asked if he could give me a hug. I didn’t realize how much I’d NEEDED a hug. And right then, in the hug, I was ready to try dating him. Even if I wasn’t really attracted to him yet, I knew he’d continue to grow on me. At some point on the date we’d exchanged LINE info, and we kept in touch afterwards. He was leaving soon for work training in Tokyo. He’d be gone for a few months. It made me sad, but it wasn’t forever. I could wait. We talked pretty regularly for awhile and he helped me get through the really hard loneliness that gnawed at me my first few months. We slowed down and pretty much stopped for awhile. I met and talked to other people. I’m sure he did too. And then one day he sent me an “I’m on my way back what are you doing?” message. I was at a festival with friends, but it made me super happy. We started talking more again. We tried to set a date to hang out. There was some miscommunication. I tried to make it easier for him by making plans to go to a festival in the city he lived in. Then a Typhoon was coming and I changed things so I’d spend the night at my friend’s house because it’s in a much safer location than where I live. It didn’t hurt that my friend lives in the city he lived in. I was trying to work things so I would meet up with him before I went to my friend’s place, because I didn’t want to leave to go hang out with a guy-- that feels gross. He, on the other hand, was trying to come to the onsen by my house. Obviously a typhoon was coming so it wasn’t safe and I’d made plans to get out of the area. He said he’d meet me. He was doing something, I forget what, I may not have even known what, but he was very slow to check his phone. Oh! I think he was playing tennis? And then he decided to go to the bouldering gym and said he’d meet me afterwards. I told him when I was getting closer, but silence. I got to the station. Silence. He hadn’t even read my message. I waited. I waited. I got tired of waiting and I told my friends I was there. They came to get me and that was that. When he texted me an hour later I told him he was too late, I was with my friends. He asked if I couldn’t leave for a few hours. I felt like I couldn’t. I think that’s where I fucked up. I didn’t make it clear that I’d had a time limit (although I did tell him I was eating dinner with my friends) and he assumed I’d make the time for him when he was free. I tried to reschedule with him for the next day. There were fireworks. That was the original draw to his city. In the morning I asked what he was up to. He was going to Don Quijote. I hinted that I’d never been to one, but he didn’t take the bait. An hour later I asked if he’d meet me that day. Two hours later:“Should I go back to my city?” He answered with a version of:“Sorry I’m still shopping. You’re not going to see the fireworks?”“My friend kicked us out and the other friend had plans so she went home, but I stayed trying to figure out what to do. I didn’t know the fireworks were still happening? I might go to the bathhouse across the street.” Two hours later I sent a second message:“The fireworks aren’t cancelled?” 40 minutes later: “It looks like they’re doing the fireworks” “Hmmmmmm”“What is the bathhouse like?”So I described the bathhouse. And he responded again. And then I realized that he never answered my question about meeting. So I told him that I didn’t think he’d actually answered my question about meeting. And that there were still 3 hours until fireworks and I didn’t have anyone to watch them with so I was going home. And two hours later he asked if I was going. And apologized for being unable to respond earlier because he was “outside.” And then I apologized for the previous day and the miscommunication. I told him I thought we needed an actual time and place set before the day of if we were going to try to meet up. He agreed. After that we didn’t speak for almost two weeks, but we’d previously made plans to go to a different festival that weekend, so I sent him a message asking if we were still on. His reply was confusing, but the gist was that he had two people coming from far away to visit him that day and that I was free to join them in [the big city an hour away] if I wanted. But one of the friends was “[sic]my a girlfriend from Tokyo.” I wanted to go to the festival, and the absolute LAST thing I wanted was to hang out with him and this girlfriend I didn’t even know existed. I hoped maybe it was a language thing, so I stressed the girlfriend part in my reply, which first rejected the offer, pointing out it would be weird for me to be with him and his girlfriend, and then trying to gracefully take my leave. I thanked him for helping me survive my first months here and told him I’d had fun when we hung out, but ended with “Take care and I wish you all the best.” If there’s anything the people in my life don’t like, it’s when I’m trying to distance myself from them because I’ve caught feelings, so of course he apologized about the festival and explained that the other friend was coming from another prefecture and his girlfriend “joined naturally.” And that he’s sorry for it being weird and if I wanted to hang out after the summer he’d be glad to go to festivals with me. To which I replied that he shouldn’t worry about it, I got the wrong idea about what we were trying to do. I told him truthfully that at first I thought we were just trying to be friends and I was fine with that, but then I misunderstood and thought we might be trying to be more than friends, and that I made it weird on my own. And I did want friends, and thought we could’ve been good friends, but it was hard and I had other things that were hard so I was running away and letting him go. To which he replied that he maybe didn’t understand but if I was okay with him, we could “have dinner or do something fun together again next time :) “ So I switched to Japanese. “First of all, you have a girlfriend, don’t you? She came all the way from Tokyo? That’s good! Have fun! I misunderstood.” I re-explained the above message adding in that no matter what I tried we couldn’t meet up, and making plans is super tiring for me, and I hate unrequited love so I didn’t want to see him for awhile. I’m running away. And then he said he understood. He thought it was a good idea to give me some time and then we could go for food or to play. [This really felt like a bad joke at this point] To which I replied (in Japanese) “Isn’t this enough? I got hurt, I’m embarrassed, there isn’t really a reason that we need to meet again is there?  I really am grateful but our relationship was always very easy to misunderstand. I’m tired. I want to give up. And then, finally, I never heard from him again.