Like most addictions, it started innocently enough. Like most Filipina girls, I swooned over Western celebrities. I had love affairs with Brad Pitt, Jude Law, Christian Bale, Topher Grace, the list goes on and on. I’ve been quite the brazen hussy in the confines of my head. Don’t let the blank, glazed eyes fool you.
I like foreign men, mainly because of the influence of Western television and Hollywood. And because of my dark brown skin color and very dalagang Filipina features, foreign men like me. But in a society where barely legal teens marry fat, foreign septuagenarians for the chance to a better life on the other side of the world, I had to steer clear of the mold. We have been taught at an early age (from the penpal era, gag!) that only ladies of a certain type would go for foreigners. Nice, educated, respectable girls don’t. So like any nice, educated, respectable girl, I spent most of my early adulthood with supposedly nice, educated, respectable Filipino men.
I don’t have anything against my countrymen. I really don’t. But to be perfectly honest, Filipino men are still technically cavemen. They haven’t really evolved that much. Filipino men still expect their women to cook for them, wash their clothes, clean up after them, part their legs when they feel like having sex (1-2-3-I’m-done-let’s-go-sleep!), and have their babies. Filipino men are insecure, chauvinistic babies who still look for women like their mothers, who are leftovers from another era, really. (To be fair, I know some Filipino men who are better evolved than these Neanderthals but they’re very few, practically endangered.) And after way too many relationships with the quintessential Filipino mama’s boy, I’ve had enough.
I once had my palms read by a rather shady character years ago. She told me my husband “will cross seas” to be with me. I also had an epiphany that my children would have to be of mixed race because let’s face it, mixed race children are generally more beautiful than pure breeds. And after my very first relationship with a foreign man, I knew I never wanted to be with a Filipino man ever again. I was gone. I was soooo gone.
This is a chronicle of my quest for the perfect (for me) foreign man. Read on and you will see that no matter how I like them so much better than our own homegrown breed, they’re really not that much different. At the end of the day, men are still men and overused cliché or not, we can’t live with ‘em, we can’t live without ‘em.
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