NEWSLETTER- NOVEMBER

1. COMPLEXITIES OF THE PINAY-EXPAT RELATIONSHIP.

This months newsletter is taken from a topic we recently aired on our recently created You Tube channel. It’s called VERITAS PHILIPPINE SOLUTIONS. If interested in viewing, please go to YouTube, then Veritas Philippine Solutions, subscribe and get access to many high-quality programs relating to expats lives in the Philippines.

So, is it prostitution, need, or love? What am I referencing? I’m referencing what represents a significant aspect of the foreigner-expat-Pinay interaction. Where or how does it begin? Dating websites offer an introduction for foreigners to connect with Pinays. These websites attract both foreigners and Pinays Pinays who sign up in large numbers. While having some middleclass site members, they primarily represent a cross-section of lower-class women in the Philippines. Who are these? Women aged 18-40 who live often in the provinces with little formal education, and whose lives are destined for relative poverty. They have no hope for any upward social mobility. BUT many are lovely, even beautiful looking, with addictively attractive bodies they are happy to show and subsequently share with the appropriate foreigner either online or in person.

I’ve lived in the Philippines now for eight years. Prior to then I’d regularly visited so I basically understood how the process worked. I met several short term (defined as one nighters or, at most, a weekend) girls on the cherryblossoms.com channel. It’s also where I met my first and last long-term companion, lover, and, at one time supposedly my future wife.

I need here to make some relevant statements. There are MANY healthy, long-term relationships between expats and Pinays. That is good, it is pure, and rather beautiful. It was not however to be my destiny. For the first time on my life, despite being married twice, this Pinay was the first woman I ever loved or would ever love.

I also need to here recognize my character defects, my shortcomings. I’m not a good person for someone to be involved with in any long-term relationship. I’m fun and amusing for a long weekend. But my value to any woman is questionable in the long term. I’m short tempered but also am loyal, supportive, and was surprisingly faithful to that lady. The day I met her at the Ayala Mall in Cebu, she was number 4 of 5 of my meetings with potential playmates. I never had intended to enter any meaningful relationship with her or any other woman.

That plan didn’t hold. I still struggle to understand how the relationship I’d believed was so strong we’d be together until I drew my final breath, was, in fact, a mythical illusion built on quicksand.

It was six months ago that it ended. Our new house was close to being being completed. Please note she paid for most of the land cost and the construction. My contribution was modest but meaningful.

I’d begged her to come to couples counseling with me. She reused point blank. I know why but, out of respect for her, I won’t say it here. And so, the relationship ENDED. She was on a business trip to Vietnam and left a text message from Manila airport confirming it was over. We were done.

I keep an irregular diary. In hindsight, I saw many warning signs going back over several years. It was then I realized I’d been blinded by love. I used to watch she sleeping peacefully in bed at nighttime and wonder at her beauty and devotion to me. Yes, I’d helped her to rise in the world but it became clear she no longer needed me. Any objectivity failed to materialize because I’d been literally blinded by love. I had believed I would die with her just as we had discussed and she had promised. Silly lad! I’d become an embarrassing cliché.

I spent a challenging few months going from place to place staying in guest houses for a few days at a time. It was a painful process. Eventually, her house was built and she moved there with our daughter. I took over the lease where we had lived together.

I ‘ve come to terms with life as it is , not necessarily how I think I’d like it to be. I haven’t been with another woman since then. I’ve gone from having a wonderfully wild sex life with her to the opposite extreme with suddenly no interest in women or sex. Nada! I’ve always been a man of extremes. This is yet another dark example.

I will never enter any new long-term relationship. I refuse to again enter the ritualistic dating, mating dance. The process of seeing, sensing, smiling, playing the game which leads to crossing the Rubicon into an ocean of potentially turbulent emotions. No way! You might understandably think Oh he says that now, but later he’ll change his mind. Trust me, I won’t.

Every time I see a couple, I observe precisely at which stage they are at. No more for me thanks. It’s far to exhausting. At age seventy-five I’ve decided to live on many interesting life time memories and leave well enough alone.

I recently met her and was relieved to realize I’d healed and had survived the experience. I felt no emotion other than a sense of sadness for her believing that through financial security she will eventually find happiness. I wish her all the best with her life. Even if I was willing to entertain the emotion, resentments are not healthy for me or for anyone. It’s a nonsensical waste of energy. So, I won’t.

Friends, how many more days do you or I have left to breathe? I don’t know, but certainly want to live each day bathed in the maximum light I choose to let in. Were I allowed one final wish it would be to be gifted a gentle smile in the final moment of my brief dance through time.