[Two Pronged] Looking for a wife

Rappler’s Life and Style section runs an advice column by couple Jeremy Baer and clinical psychologist Dr. Margarita Holmes.

Jeremy has a master’s degree in law from Oxford University. A banker of 37 years who worked in three continents, he has been training with Dr. Holmes for the last 10 years as co-lecturer and, occasionally, as co-therapist, especially with clients whose financial concerns intrude into their daily lives.

Together, they have written two books: Love Triangles: Understanding the Macho-Mistress Mentality and Imported Love: Filipino-Foreign Liaisons.

Dear Dr. Holmes and Mr. Baer,

I am a 46-year old Filipino lawyer based in Washington DC, living here for the last 20 years, ever since I got my first job straight from College in Manila. I own my own flat in Virginia, am doing well in DC, so what is the problem? I want to get married but cannot find any one interested in me. Not among the girls I could be interested in myself.

I don’t require many things. I just want a wife. I want someone educated, very attractive face, even just a college degree. I want someone I can have a good conversation with, and a pretty face. Pretty, not necessarily a Miss Philippines. And a nice body… not a Coca Cola body, not what we used to call a 36-24-36 body. Just not obese, and who can still wear a bikini and not be embarrassed.

I have tried dating apps and all the American women on it just want to be wined and dined, always with me paying. The Filipinas here do not speak good English. I need that for my job.

I am thinking of going to the Philippines and finding a wife there. But I worry that I will come across as a passport bro’ and I am not. Any advice you both can give me will be welcome.

– Dan

Dear Dan,

Thank you for your message.

Before the internet turned the world into one large village, where everybody could be in touch with almost everybody else at the click of a mouse, we relied on a network of family, friends, and places like churches, offices, clubs, and the like for our social connections. Even chance encounters in the mall, coffee shop, bars offered possibilities. All these still exist of course, though the focus these days has transferred to the so-called improvements offered by the internet.

Your description of your ideal wife is revealing. Having characterized your requirement as “just a wife”, you go on to add: educated, very attractive face, college degree, good conversationalist, nice body, and who can still wear a bikini and not be embarrassed. Furthermore, you have written off American women and decided you want a Filipina — and from the Philippines at that. This is very specific and most definitely not “just a wife.”

If you are to set out on this quest, perhaps you need to employ a combination of the “advances” that modern communications have brought us and the older methods. Try the apps and use your networks as well so that when you return home you have a chance to see whether there is any chance of matching a real person with your ideal. As for your worry about coming across as a passport bro, there seems little chance of that if your description of your ideal wife is genuine and actually reflects your search criteria.

Best of luck,

— JAF Baer

Dear Dan,

Thank you very much for your letter. Let us focus on you first, ok? On who you are as an individual — at least, on the bits of yourself that you have chosen to share with us. You are a lawyer who’s spent the last 20 years building a successful career in the United States.

At 46, you probably thought it was now time to have wife and sire some children before it would be too late to fully enjoy what you had to give them and they to give you. Other people may find that too “transactional,” but I don’t… as long as ok, ok, maybe the transactions are not ONLY materialistic and certainly not too “county” (as in: the more money I have in the bank, the more inches I can insist not be on her waistline).

In my clinical experience, many relationships seem and probably start out as transactional. EXAMPLE: I will go out with you because you can take me to nice places and, like me in a bikini, ???? you do not embarrass me with your dance moves. But while it may begin this coldly, often love – or at the very least, like (?) affection(?) – takes over and it is these warm emotions that are there when people make long term commitments like (but not necessarily limited to) marriage.

You have not had pleasant experiences dating American women; you are not the only man who has felt that way. The more immature ones perhaps become incels or do nothing to change their fate. The more mature ones get proactive, doing things that maximize their probability of achieving their goals.

It makes perfect sense for you to go back to the Philippines and find a wife there. Notwithstanding your last 20 years being in the US, your first 26 years – when you grew from a toddler where you absorbed the cultural do’s and don’t’s unthinkingly, to being an adolescent, where you questioned most givens (but the “givens” were still against a Philippine backdrop), to early adulthood where you decided what many of us did — to work in America where an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay was more attainable than this politician-infested country.

You will probably have a lot more in common with a Filipina here, than with a woman born and raised in the US. But even if you don’t, why not? There will be many smells, beliefs, situations that make you laugh or agonize over, that you need not explain to each other…you will both just know and feel it. Who would blame you for not wanting a life partner like that?

“If THIS makes you a passport bro’ then why the hell not?” I say.

Not only does this NOT make you an object of derision; it in fact makes you a hero to be admired. Someone who had a goal and did all he could to attain it.

Good luck in your quest and may you have many years to get and give the love you seek.

— MG Holmes

– Rappler.com