If it is the case, I don’t know where finds the energy to pull it off. She works 7 days, 80+ hours a week. Up until recently we used to spend 3-4 hours calling or texting daily. It’s much less now, but it still adds up. The rest of the time, she’s either at home sleeping or buying groceries as indicated by her live location.
True, and that was the point of booking a room together this July. Last year was fun. This year was about seeing whether there was a there there.
Actually, I’ve had her on the phone for almost one hour today, and we’ve talked about this for the first time in weeks.
From the beginning, she’s always seemed to be alternating between yearning for intimacy and nervous avoidance. We’ll see which aspect of her comes out on top.
I’m not interested in that for many reasons, but thanks.
I doubt if this is a romance scam since it’s gone on so long with no requests for money. She would have been asking for money long before now. Unless you’re uber wealthy, a one-year long con wouldn’t make sense. And if that were the case, she would have been keeping up the flirting constantly rather than going silent.
Regardless of the distance, country, culture, and religious differences, this doesn’t sound like a good foundation for a romantic relationship. It sounds fine for a very casual, friends-with-benefit kind of thing, but I wouldn’t expect anything more than that. A romantic relationship wouldn’t have all this start/stop, hot/cold, and intense convos/ghosting. It sounds like she’s just looking for something to break the boredom from time to time. Enjoy it for what it is. Don’t hope for anything more.
Not really. How did he get scammed? They met up once, he never gave her any money, she’s not pressuring him to get married. What exactly is the con? Sounds more like a person that wanted to have a little fling, did so, and now doesn’t want to put in the effort of a long term relationship with a person they met exactly once for a few days.
Yeah, I appreciate the additional information @Moonrise. I think we’ve had our fair share of stereotypical “65-year-old white guy thinks 29-year-old SE Asian is really into him” posts here, but your situation doesn’t sound like this at all.
I’d disagree with posters that say she’s just looking for something intermittent or casual, though. It sounds like she’s just busy as hell. Relationships are time consuming and she may be doing the best she can. Whether that’s enough for you, only you can say, but it seems like you’re not satisfied with the level of commitment and that’s OK. I voted in your poll that you should change the hotel and not let her know, and I’m going to stick with that; cut your losses and move on.
Again, in over 8 months, she’s never asked for money or gifts. When we met, she paid for the room and the cab ride.
As for the marriage part, her intentions are unclear. She has repeatedly said that she wants me to live with her. However, whether I take her to Europe with me, or settle down in Indonesia, marriage is going to be be obligatory for legal reasons. Yet, the word seems to scare her. She’s told me that her ex-husband was physically abusive and unfaithful, but I sense there may be more to her reluctance than that.
This is how I increasingly see it, and also why I hesitate changing the booking now. I’m going back to her home town anyway to explore the culture. If she’s still around, then we have a room. If not, well, there’s plenty of stuff to see and do where she lives. And I could still meet someone else, though it may be awkward.
I knew there would be suspicions of something like this but I sincerely have no interest in dating a woman 30 years younger than me. On top of the high risk of scams and cheating, they look like babies to me. I’d feel really creepy dating a woman only a few years older than my daughters. Plus, there are plenty of women who are still attractive well into their 40s. She sure is.
I’m not satisfied with the significant decrease in communication in the past couple of months, along with a series of frankly suspicious signs, especially since initially, she really made it all happen. She’s the one who insisted on meeting up after her work day, found and paid for the hotel room, and reconnected with me at a time when we were not going to be able to see each other again before long.
I would have been perfectly fine with just a hook-up. I was delighted that she wanted us to have a committed relationship. But it seems that what we have now is a vague in-between thing that I’m not sure how to deal with.
Oh. Well then. I’m not sure why you are being so coy about your destination. You are presumably going to either Solo or Jogja (assuming we’re talking Javanese gamelan and wayang rather than Balinese) neither of which is a small town the way I assumed from reading your OP. (Though Solo is pretty conservative, it’s true.) You’ll have zero trouble avoiding this woman if you want to. Just ghost her and have a great time.
I was just in Solo a few months ago for two weeks of classes in gamelan, which I’ve played (though not continuously, since it was a little out of the question in Egypt) since 1992. I studied suling, and it was wonderful. I didn’t know there were other gamelan afficionados on this message board! Enjoy.
One pattern I see is that she might be enjoying the feeling that she can reel you in at any time. She can ghost you, contact you at a later time, and you’re back to being all-in. If she’s feeling lonely or vulnerable, she knows she can reach out any time out of the blue to boost up her self esteem. Then when she’s feeling better, she goes off and resumes her life without you. A healthy relationship would be more two-way, where each of you are getting your needs met from the relationship. It sounds like you want this to be more of a serious, real relationship than she does. It sometimes can be hard to manage your own feelings and emotions in a situation like this. When you’re in contact with her, I’m sure it feels wonderful. You may want to have those limerence feelings all the time, so you might be trying to force the relationship into being more than it is. I’m sure she is glad to talk to you and see you, but it sounds like to her it’s more fun-in-the-moment rather than trying to build a long-term relationship. You may be reading the signs in a more positive way than they actually are. When she reaches out, you may think that means she wants to build a relationship, but it may actually be that she’s feeling down and wants someone to make her feel flattered and desired. I don’t think this pattern is going to really change. If you continue the relationship, realize it will probably be a push-pull type of relationship where she’s sometimes hot for you and other times cold.
You’re right. An old habit of trying not to give too much information online
It’s Jogja.
And indeed, while I love Indonesia, it’s Javanese culture in particular that fascinates me. So, Javanese gamelan and wayang kulit, indeed.
Thank you.
Last year, I attended a short private wayang kulit performance and was offered to try the saron afterwards. The pupeteer handed me a very basic score, and since I play the piano I managed to do ok, I guess. In any case the other musicians started acompanying me and that made me think that I needed to take some classes this year.
That’s something I’ve noticed too.
From the beginning she’s always seemed extremely insecure. It took her a couple of minutes to get out of the cab when we met, and she told me that the driver practically had to kick her out (“He looks nice, and now you’re here, so go!”). She’s repeatedly wondered why a man like me would want to be with an old, ordinary woman like her. She’s obviously fishing for compliments, and I have no problem providing them. For one thing, she’s definitely not ordinary. The problem is when she suddenly disappears.
I’m aware of that. What amazes me is how the “power dynamics” so to speak changed completely between July and September.
When we met I was relaxed, confident and protective. She seemed anxious, hurt and scared. She later told me that she was sure I wouldn’t like her.
Now, I’m the one who has his phone always at hand, while she calls and texts whenever she feels like. The only thing that gives me some solace is that I’ve never pursued her. When she disappears, I don’t go out of my way to text her, I just wait until she resurfaces. She’s actually low-key complained about it (“You never look for me!”)
You don’t mention here exactly how you met a stranger from another country shortly before you were planning to visit there. On the modern internet, it’s actually quite hard to meet strangers online except on platforms dedicated to fairly specific purposes. Being specific about the exact circumstances of your meeting would shed a lot more light over what might be going on.
I’ve also noticed that on some of the less sex-worker friendly/informed areas of the internet, people can slip into an unthinking stereotype that everyone working a romance scam must be a cold hearted psychopath who is calmly manipulating their victims with ruthless efficiency and zero emotional investment. In reality, romance scam is not a binary category but a broad spectrum and they’re done by average human beings with messy emotions and just the same foibles as the rest of us.
What started off as something with muddy intentions might have simply continued to evolve into something with still muddy intentions but with a mix of half truths, intentional deceptions and mutual reinforcing of fantasies that neither side has the heart to dispel.
At the end of the day, regardless of whether there was any deceptive intent on either side, the deception can only persist because the other person is unwilling to be honest with themselves about their true intentions and desires and would rather prop up the fantasy than face their own self-deception. That’s something nobody else can help you with except by your own reckoning.
We met on dating app which I had set to travel mode two weeks before going. I got a dozen likes within the first few hours, but her profile immediately stood out.
I’ve suspected for some time that she signed up to that dating app looking for hook-ups with foreigners and nothing more, but didn’t dare tell me.
She said she had been too busy with work for years to think about having a committed relationship before we met. In her profile pictures, she wore clothes that were tasteful but more revealing than those the other local women where wearing, and her descriptions were full of double-entendre. Her knowledge of slang sexual terms also surprised me, with her English being otherwise pretty good but a bit formulaic.
So, she may have found some appeal to the idea of a long-distance relationship which allowed her to continue working as hard as ever while having her emotional needs met. But I can sense that she misses intimacy and this may be what is becoming difficult for her to bear now.
As for me, I know I want to see her again, and spend those five days together next July as we had planned last summer. I’m open to anything beyond that, but not sure about what form that will take.
This whole thing is really strange. In some ways, you seem very levelheaded and understanding about how limited this relationship really is and how it is likely to play out (not great). But in other ways, you seem really delusional and unwilling to see what I think is fairly clear to most of us based on just your brief descriptions here. I think you really need to brace yourself that you will never really have a sustained, normal relationship with this woman. As long as you are really ok with some kind of on-again off-again low effort situationship, then I think you are fine. But this is not going to be anything more than that I fear.
After my wife died I had a series of multi-month relationships with local women sorta similar to the OP’s situation in some aspects.
In my case the women, each in their turn, seemed like pretty good catches during the first couple of dates. They checked all the biography boxes, wanted attention, affection, dating, etc. But only about 2 days per month. The rest of her life was already full of other commitments, whether that was job(s), adult children, classes, hobbies, a pet, her gaggle of lady friends who she like going out with singly or in groups, etc.
Somehow her life was almost full, but she still wanted to shoehorn a man in there as a bit of spice. But not as a main ingredient of her monthly diet of activities and social.
Took me multiple months per woman to realize I was just an accessory in their life. Which was utterly not my goal. I’m sure each of those ladies would have been outraged had I been running 10 of them two nights per month each. Because that’s what it would have taken for me to get the volume of companionship & dating and co-activities I was seeking. Instead they expected exclusivity. Which they claimed to offer in return, and I was/am willing to believe them in that. But their idea of exclusivity was we get together 2 days per month and the other 28 I’m on my own alone; or at least utterly sans any activities including women.
I pissed away a bunch of calendar time trying to convert each of these women in series towards a more complete relationship. Then I woke up to the real situation.
As applied to the OP:
You mention
My caution here is "Don’t let this occasionally happy but mostly unsatisfying stagnant placeholder of a relationship (like I had) keep you away from the real thing. This isn’t the potent drug of love; this is methadone - stops the shakes, but there’s no high.
And despite your enthusiasm for all things Javanese, a real relationship with real commitment and real attachment and real togetherness a decent fraction of the days of the year is going to require you two be co-located.
Maybe you have the life situation to be able to move to Java semi-permanently. But I rather doubt it, on statistical grounds if nothing else; darn few 51yo people are so situated.
Best of luck whatever you decide. The last day’s posts of yours clarify a lot of things and ISTM you’ve got part of this totally figured out and are clear-eyed about it. But there are other aspects of your attitude that suggest you’ve got a lot of willing suspension of disbelief going on. Which will bite you. Hard.
The reason for that stems from her unexpected and confusing come back in September.
I loved the time we spent together, I was undoubtedly fond of her, but I also remember not taking it all too seriously then. My plan was to move on with my life, come back the following summer, and text her a couple of weeks before I arrived to see whether she still wanted to spend some time with me again, as we had agreed when I left.
Her texting me in September threw me off. It made no sense to me. As I wrote above, I was going to be on the other side of the world for the coming 11 months. If she wanted a hook-up, I was not the right person to contact at that moment. That led me to think that she wanted to connect more deeply, which may have been correct to a certain extent but I now think I read too much into it. And her ardour at the beginning gave me the impression that it could work.
She ressembles this, except she has very little social activities as far as I know. Her life revolves around her high-stress, high-responsabilities job and her children. In the 8+ months I’ve been in touch with her, she has mentioned seeing friends 5-6 times at most.
As I’ve said, I now suspect that the purpose her presence on the dating app was to find hook-ups with foreigners. Starting a committed relationship wasn’t part of the plan.
Somehow, it happened with me. She told me many times that she found me attractive immediately, but that it was me being gentle and respectful with her that seduced her as she wasn’t used to that. It probably made the idea of us being together tempting to her, but it was not enough for a sustainable long-distance relationship.
Very well put.
It’s probably the classic three-way fight between what the brain knows (it’s not going to work), what the heart yearns for (finding the person I’ll spend the rest of my life with) and what the nether regions need (the sex was great, I want more of that).
What are her explanations for the ghosting? Is this a red flag for you, and if so, will she commit to not doing it again?
My theory: you’re one of several guys she’s keeping in her harem. When she ghosts you, it’s because she’s involved with some other dude.
That’s a fine relationship model if everyone involved is fine with it and knows about it. If she’s doing it on the downlow, though, it’s sleazy and unfair. You gotta decide whether you’re okay not being her main priority.
It doesn’t matter why her life is full. Work, kids, or social all amount to the same thing: not you.
I dated a fine woman for a while who had a difficult high stress job, an aged ailing live-in Mom, and a handicapped live-in young adult relative. And substantially no social life. It was quite a fluke how we met at all.
She was real grateful for me as a diversion from her ceaseless toil. But again she was only able to spare a day or two per month. Which very much enriched her otherwise bleak utilitarian existence. But which left me loving those two days and hating the other 28. Despite me greatly admiring the selfless dedication she showed those other 28 days. To somebodies else.
Relationships have to work for both parties.
Fer sure.
My overarching point is that every day you’re thinking / yearning for her is another day you’re not out hunting in your local hunting grounds for something that’ll actually work out for all three of your departments. Kick the methadone habit.
Lots of words have been typed. Using imprecise words myself, she seems too flakey/high maintenance/insecure/unreliable to consider any longterm relationship. If you agree, then what are you getting out of any continued relationship/contact with her? No need to criticize her - you 2 are just not a good fit. No blame on either of you - just end this chapter and move on.
What effect is any time/thought/$ you spend on this woman havig on your ability to pursue whatever else you wish?
The first time, before we met, she told me she’d had an accident. She’s been ill at some point almost every week, her medication is making her sleep all day, she’s overworked, she was buying a new scooter, she broke her glasses… Yeah, I know.
While I wouldn’t have liked to think about it too much, I’d have been mostly fine with it if we had stuck to the original plan. 2025 was fun, I’ll be back in 2026, so let’s meet again then. In the meantime, we both live our lives in our respective little corners of the world.
But her September text blurred the picture, for me at least.
True.
Excellent advice, thanks.
Actually, I’ve started doing just that. Last Sunday, I went on my first bicycle ride of the year with friends, and on Friday, I went to a party for the first time since September. I’m going to be doing more of that.
Out of the three belligerents I mentioned in my previous post, it’s the nether regions that refuse to surrender. Keeping contact leaves open the possibility that their demands will be met.
It has zero effect on my ability to use dating apps here, but it severly limited the possibilty of going on actual dates for months because we were texting and calling each other so often every day. But the latter has changed, so the former may too now.