Does this mean he hasn’t met her yet?
I don’t get it…This is 2022, not 1995.
(yes---- I’m an old fart with grey hair who’s still married to the same wife I met way before the internet existed–So I know absolutely nothing about this online dating stuff. Please can somebody 'splain it to me?)
One day in 1995 or so, the internet suddenly appeared—And there were chat rooms, and dating sites…and plenty of scams.
. There was an expression back then: “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog” (accompanied by a cartoon of a dog typing on a computer in a chat room run by cats).
The scams back then were based on text-only chats, with an occasional email attachment of a single photo of a too-good-to-be-true sexy girl. And plenty of people fell for it.
But this isn’t 1995 anymore—we have video.
Facetime, Zoom, Skype, etc…
So how has this friend of the OP not yet met his girlfriend, and why does he have to travel across the globe to “meet” her?
What is the etiquette for this internet dating stuff?
I would guess that after two people start dating with texts on Tinder or similar app, the next logical step is to get a little more personal, and start talking with video. See if you feel comfortable with each other, and then maybe decide to meet at a Starbucks or something.
Am I wrong?
Exactly - life in a Phillipine slum or a 50 year old schlub? If it was a decent chance to get out, not really any contest. Heck, compared to a slum, a not so nice schlub might still be an attractive option. A woman can survive a heck of a bad marriage long enough to get citizenship followed by a divorce.
If the schlub is a kind person with a good income, it might be worth staying in the marriage. Throughout history, most marriages were to “someone available”, not “someone I’m madly in love with”.
Depends what you mean by “taken”. There are plenty of Filipina women who will actually marry unattractive older Western men. They will actually be their wife and look after them. They will also get the money and passport they desire.
You can view it as exploitation, or not. From both sides. I have seen several Westerner/Filipina marriages of this nature that work out, in a certain sense, for both parties.
Yes, that was exactly the deal my friend was looking for. He was fat and in his forties. He wanted a wife young enough to bear him children. He intended to care for and support his wife, and as a tenured professor, he could reasonably promise to do so. He wanted a wife would would take a traditional role and care for him and keep his home.
As best as i can tell, he found all that, and they are still married. She was even pretty.
Transactional? Sure. But there was no fraud on anyone’s part. I think they both went into the marriage knowing what they were signing up for.
IANA expert on this stuff. I went recently from late wife #1 to new wife #2 without needing to even try the online game. Wife #2 however is a 10-plus-year veteran of online dating and has given me a few clues about how she and other women (and men) make it work for them. With that caveat ISTM …
For sure for somebody local (who’s real) the progression is text through the app, then make direct contact via txt/email outside the app, then (maybe) vid, then in person. But for somebody halfway across the planet, that last step is a doozy.
Depending on their level of tech sophistication and social milieu somebody may say they met somebody online after just a couple texts or they may say they haven’t met them until they’ve seen & touched them real live face-to-face. So I wouldn’t ascribe much significance to someone’s use of “met” or even of “dating” with or without scare quotes.
An interesting side question once foreigners are involved is the issue of differing first languages.
I know English is a common second language in the Philippines, but that’s probably more concentrated in the educated minority than the much larger class of poor folks. As an example, I can stumble along in Spanish badly in person, but helped by the extra time available and the extra online help I can write at least half-assed decent Spanish.
Were I in a developing legit online relationship with a Spanish-speaker, I might be inclined to keep the conversation merely written a lot longer than I would with an English speaker. And my counterparty may have the same problem and solution with her English. Lastly, if this is a scam, the language barrier provides a neat excuse for why the mark keeps getting texts in broken English and stills or vids of her having fun, rather than live real-time vid conversation.
You’re wrong in my experience. I’ve never once had a video chat. I’ve had voice chats but not in many years and even then it was uncommon.
We match on an ap or web site. We exchange some messages. We meet in public for coffee or a meal or a walk. Most people don’t want to waste a bunch of time texting back and forth for days. Arrange to meet relatively quickly or move on.
There is nothing in the email pasted by the OP that suggests Steve hasn’t video chatted with his girlfriend. He hasn’t met her in person (because, as you said, it’s 2022, and travel is tricky for a myriad of reasons).
I have a friend whose husband left her for a woman he met on-line, playing video games. I think. They’d had voice calls, but I don’t believe he had seen her or met her until he decided to move to Florida to live with her. He did visit, first. And I suppose he might have learned something on the visit to change his mind. But he didn’t. It seemed very weird. Not the “leaving his wife” part, although that was awful for my friend, but the “decided to marry a person he’d never seen in the flesh” part.
Oddly, I get DMs and friend requests from the handsomest soldiers you have ever seen who just want some contact with a loving woman while they’re on deployment. It’s the same sort of deal. Bye “guys”.
Re the OP: Might be a scam, might not. Why spoil his fun?
Back in the day [1998-2000] my friend Anysia met a really nice guy in Australia through the IRQ and some message board about Babylon 5, and he came to visit, and they did manage to convince Australia they were serious, she got a visa and she and her son yanked up stakes and emigrated to Australia, and they are still happily married.
I tried to multiquote to respond and somehow botched it, but in any case, with respect to the questions upthread about why the Philippines, if you’ve ever seen that documentary about the father and son (the Watkins) who likely created QAnon, they lived there and frequently extolled its virtues. So, a possible connection there…
Sorry I have not gotten back with you, I have been very distracted. Yes I met someone from the Philippines by accident online and also Portland has a very large Philippine community. I like the personalities of people who have not been corrupted completely by our American values and has a sense of humor to boot. I cannot see her in the Philippines due to vax complications so we are going to travel in Malaysia and Thailand the last two weeks of October. I needed something to break my routine and this does it like a boss! I will let you know how it goes
If you want to head out West [Oregon] you are welcome to stop by here. Fall/Winter is not the best time as it is very rainy here but it usually doesn’t freeze except the end of December or start of January.
Seriously, I do hope this is all for real and works out. There are way too many horrible lying scammers in the world, and it would be nice to have a story with a happy ending.
There are a lot of Filipinos and Filipinas at my work. Several of them are married to local ‘white’ (i.e. English-speaking Caucasian) co-workers . One of the locals was trying to convince me that this was the way to go; he’d been over to the Philippines and met a much-younger woman and gotten married and brought her back.
Filipina women can be fantastically attractive, especially when they’re a little older. It’s tempting. But most Filipinos I’ve met have been rather on the conservative side. I am not, so that would be an issue right there.
Something I thought of reading this thread. I don’t know if anyone else in the world thinks this way. I automatically think “Met online” is different than “Met internet dating.” To me “Met online” means initial contact on some site that isn’t a dating site. Like the SDMB. I started talking to someone from interaction on an Army Facebook page. It was new, only had a couple thousand members so we kept seeing each other’s comments (the page has over 1 million members now). I flew out to see her and had a disastrous visit. We met online. All of the other relationships I’ve had post divorce have been online daring through a dating website. Maybe I’ll ask on the polls only thread.
It’s the same sort of deal. Bye “guys”.
