Some Common Misconceptions About Dating In The Philippines

People from other countries, particularly the men, think that the Philippines being a Third World country and situated in Asia is a country that is still very conservative and progressing slowly. They think that this applies to all areas even dating in the Philippines.

The Philippines is actually a very religious country, people go to church every Sunday to listen to the holy mass and say grace before every meal. The Philippines is also very rich in tradition and have some beliefs that are deeply embedded in their culture. But Filipinos are known to be very resilient and adaptable and through time people have learned to become accustomed to the way of the world and get a feel for the changing times.

Dating in the Philippines is one thing that has seen a number of changes over the years. But there are still a lot of common misconceptions regarding dating and boyfriend-girlfriend relationships up until now. People from other countries still think that Filipinos are still very old-fashioned when it comes to relationships and Filipinas are still very naïve and submissive.

Though some of these are true and some people are all these but a lot of Filipinos are already becoming very open-minded when it comes to a lot of things. Young people especially are very different now, maybe because of the advancements in technology, the Internet and other gadgets plus the influence of the media to their very young minds.

Dating in the Philippines is not like what it used to be a decade ago. A lot of changes already took place and people are catching up. Though some old people still insist of doing it the traditional way things just do not always happen the way they want it to happen.

Nowadays there are a lot of Filipinos who search for love online or through other means possible. Filipinos, both men and women, widen their horizon through opening their doors to meeting people from other countries. They already welcome the possibility of meeting the man or woman of their dreams online and eventually meeting someday and building a family.

Another common misconception that other people have about courtship in the Philippines is especially centered to the women. Some people think that women in the Philippines are very inexperienced and slow on the uptake. Most people get the wrong impression about Filipinas being subdued and good-natured, they think Filipinas do not know anything that is why they are quiet and they are just gentle because they lack confidence and do not have a sense of worth. These are all misinterpretations.

Dating in the Philippines is also sometimes being viewed as Filipinas just taking advantage of the money and all the luxury that men from other countries could give. Sadly though there are some women who are guilty as charged but this is something that does not only happen in the Philippines. People just sometimes generalize things and label the whole country as this and that when in truth only a few people are doing such things.

The Anatomy Of A Filipina Bride

Traditionally, Filipino men before asking for the hand of the woman they are going to marry or their Filipina bride, serve the family first by doing some household chores like chopping woods, scrubbing the floor, fixing the roof, do some plumbing, tending the farm, milking the cows and things like these. Of course this is not done anymore. We are already in the 21st century and there are other methods of doing things and wooing women.
The concept of a Filipina bride can now be looked at in different angles. Some still do the traditional way, particularly those who live in the countryside. Most foreigners do not get this idea very well since they do not practice this in their own countries.

And because the Philippines a predominantly Catholic country, every bride wishes nothing but to have the wedding of her dreams in a church attended by all her families and friends.

Weddings are actually huge in the Philippines, even though sometimes it can be very impractical because of all the money that the couple has to spend but tradition is tradition, it is something that is very difficult to break. There are actually some couples now who prefer doing the non-traditional ways like having a secret marriage or doing the marriage rights in front of a judge instead of having a very lavish church ceremony. Some even prefer to cohabitate for some time before really tying the knot and others, a very meager percentage just run away.

Things change and a Filipina bride is becoming just a concept or an idea but not really something that people have to practice strictly, especially nowadays that a great number of Filipinas marry a man of another religion or from other countries.

Although most Filipinas still dream of becoming a blushing bride and marching down the aisle, wearing a very gorgeous wedding gown with her entourage and an orchestra playing the wedding song and all the glitters and glamour of a wedding, most brides these days choose simplicity and practicality.

Men on the other hand, though they are not as enthusiastic as the ladies with all the concept of marriage and wedding still hope of marrying his dream girl in the church.

A Filipina bride above all is more than just all the extravagance of a wedding. She is more than all the gowns and jewelry put together. For a Filipina having all these richness and spectacle only think of one thing which is to marry the man of her dreams and being with him forever, growing old together and staying true to each others’ feelings. A wedding is actually just the beginning of a life that they would build as married couples. A Filipina literally surrenders everything, though it is said to be a sweet surrender but for a Filipina making the marriage work and building a family together are her duties first and foremost. And these are things that people from other countries love about marrying a Filipina.

Filipino Ladies: Beauty Like No Other

Nicole ScherzingerAfter being under the Spanish conquerors for three centuries, three decades and three years came the Americans who took control of the Philippines for a number of years and it just ended when the Second World War came about and the Japanese regime took over and triumphed over the Filipinos. But aside from these three big captors came a lot of people from different backgrounds and ethnicities. And it is because of all these that Filipino Ladies have very exotic and exceptional beauty.
Men from other countries find Filipinas very attractive and beautiful. They also think that they have a certain look that no women from other countries have. That is why many men from other countries fall in love with a Filipina.

Women from the Philippines are known to be very petite and have a very small body frame. Most foreigners find this very adorable. Most of them even those half-bloods still do not grow as tall as women from other countries. A Filipina’s body size is also very small compared to women of different nationalities.

The face of the Filipina ladies are also very distinctive, maybe it is because of the color of their skin that perfectly matches their jet black hair and everything is just very attractive.

Undoubtedly, there are also a lot of women from other countries who look so stunning with their towering height and voluptuous figures but nothing compares to the beauty of the ladies in the Philippines. The exquisiteness of their looks really stands out from the crowd that is why the Philippines have won many beauty pageant titles over the years. The Philippines already have two Miss Universe crowns and have also received a dozen or more awards from other beauty contests.

There are also a lot of Filipinas who are slowly making their names in the silver screen of Hollywood and other international events. Just like the half Filipina and leader of the very popular singing group the Pussycat Dolls, Nicole Scherzinger who also just recently won the first place in the very famous reality TV show Dancing with the Stars.

Another very beautiful half-Filipina who is making a lot of noise in Hollywood right now because of her very adorable personality and equally famous boyfriend, Zac Efron, is Vanessa Hudgens. Nicole and Vanessa are just two of many Filipinas who are joining the ranks of those rich and famous women of Hollywood.

Filipina ladies are actually not just all beauty but they are also exceptionally talented and very smart. So they are a complete package, beauty and brains. They are also not just beautiful on the outside but also very beautiful inside. Filipinos in general are very warm, genial and mild-mannered. Filipinas are also very soft-spoken and full of compassion. It has also been a very long tradition in the Philippines that women are trained to do all household chores they do all the cooking and other responsibilities.

Filipina ladies have beauty like no other and it is the kind of beauty that lasts forever. Filipinas are recognized all over the world as gentle, sweet and beautiful. Most people all over the world know that they are not just all glitz and glamour but they also have a heart of gold.

The Truth Behind Wooing Filipino Women

Who said wooing is ancient history? In the Philippines, Filipino women still melt at the thought of a man wooing a woman, especially if they are the one being wooed. Even though how much women declare that they are already modern women and dislike being old-fashioned, but deep in their hearts a small voice is still hoping for someone to woo her and sweep her off her feet.

Most people these days, particularly the young people, cringe at the thought of being wooed. They think it is very mushy and so obsolete. But there are still a few people who are still waiting for the right man to come and woo them like how it was done before.

Before, wooing someone would also mean preparing a song and serenading the girl of your dreams. You can either go solo, if you know how to play a guitar or you could invite some of your closest buddies to be with you and be your back-up singers and for moral support as well.
Wooing would also mean spending a lot of time preparing for a very dramatic and very emotional love letter. This letter would be the letters of all letters. Everything should be written nicely and sealed with a kiss for everything to be perfect.

Filipino women also expect to receive a lot of gifts during the wooing period there is the chocolates, candies and other treats, of course who would forget the flowers, dozens and dozens of roses. Some guys who really go all out would even give jewelry and other valuable things and accessories to the woman they are courting.

Wooing during those days can be short-term or long-term this would depend on how persistent and determined the guy is. Some would just last for a couple of weeks to a month others would go on for months and would take a year in some special cases.

The Filipino women of this generation though do not get wooed anymore, ever since the mobile phones became a trend and the Internet suddenly became the number one tool for communication and socialization, wooing suddenly became obsolete, especially with all those social networking sites.

Though a very big chuck still believes in going through the whole process, the getting-to-know-you stage, the courtship and the whole nine yards, there are already a significant number of women in the Philippines who do not see wooing as practical and realistic. These women are already very open-minded and liberated and they consider the whole courtship thing as very traditional or old-fashioned.

Filipino women because of their very warm and friendly nature meet a lot of people of different nationalities and sometimes their ideologies and other traditions become something more similar of that of the other people’s belief. There are a lot of Filipinas these days marrying foreigners and living happily ever after. But even if this is the case, at the back of the minds of majority of women still cling on to the idea of being wooed and be treated like a princess or someone who is adored and loved and given all the respect that one deserves.

The Way To A Filipina Girl’s Heart

If you fall in love with a Filipina then you must know the way to her heart. Ever since Filipina girls are known to be very conservative and very religious, they can also be very secretive especially when it comes to relationships and the matters of the heart. This is actually a result of the Philippines being a predominantly Catholic country where people as young as they could remember are already encouraged by their parents, particularly Filipino mothers, to go to church every Sunday to attend the holy mass and also during special occasions like Christmas, New Year and the like.

Filipinos in general are non-confrontational people. A girl may find a boy attractive but would keep everything to herself and just wait for the moment that the boy would take notice of her and their love story would evolve from there. So, a Filipina would find it attractive if a boy would be brave enough to be truthful with his feelings and speak up. This trait is something that most young male Westerners would not find difficult.
Wooing is a very traditional method of winning a girl’s heart. Even though it is already the 21st century and we already have all the gadgets and the advancements of science and technology, Filipina girls would still appreciate a guy who would sweep her off of her feet.

Filipinas would still look forward to one day receiving a love letter and some love notes of sweet-nothings and other display or endearment. Women from other countries find these things very cheesy or mushy but not to Filipinas.

Another thing that a guy could do to win a Filipina’s heart is to show respect and some love to her family. Families are very important in the Philippine setting. Filipina girls in general give a lot of significance to family get-togethers and family relationships. That is why a guy does not only woo the girl but the whole family as well.

A Filipino family does not only mean the mother, the father and some siblings. A Filipino family extends to the grandfather and grandmother, some uncles and aunts, cousins, sometimes even some nephews and nieces and the whole clan. That is why a guy should be prepared to love not just one person but the whole extended family.

But above all the way to any girl’s heart is just the sincerity and love that a guy could give to a woman. There is actually no secret formula of some sort or a guidebook that one can follow. A guy could find a way to a girl’s heart by being true to himself and showing the girl and the girl’s family and close friends utmost respect and concern.

Filipina girls could be traditional or conservative but in a nutshell Filipinas only look for true love and nothing else. And this does not only apply to Filipinas actually. Everybody is just looking for that something and for that special someone to come and give it to her.

Filipina Online: Finding True Love

Due to the advent of technology and the proliferation of dating websites finding love these days can be easier and more convenient than the way it used to. Filipina online can be your key to finding true love.

Children nowadays, even those as young as those who are in the early elementary years already know how to use the Internet. The world is changing right before our very eyes. And with the change in technology everything that is touched and affected by it also changes.

For those people who find it difficult to have a girlfriend or a boyfriend think that meeting someone online would suffice. Cyber love or cyber relationship is very common nowadays. Almost everybody has tried it in one way or another.

If you are thinking of finding a Filipina online to be your girlfriend then it is very possible. Most people in the Philippines love to use the Internet, especially for chatting and other social networking sites.

The thing that most people ask about is if it is possible to find true love over the Internet. Well, there are a lot of success stories, of people meeting each other through some dating games or websites that would assist you in matching your qualities, personality and other essential traits to someone who more or less share the same things with you. But these are just stories it is very different if it is you who are in the situation.

Finding a Filipina online can be as easy as 1, 2, 3, you just basically need to go to a website dedicated for matters like this, and then you can already find a chat mate in no time. There is nothing complicated with the procedure. You just have to sign up and fill in some forms and then that is it.

So is it true love then? How can it be true love when you have never seen the girl yet? Maybe in a photo but it is different if you get to meet the person face to face and spend time together. But these days everything can be made possible. We have all the gadgets that we need to make a long distance relationship work. We have the mobile phones with video nowadays where you can call each other any time and see each other as well.

Finding a Filipina and falling in love and then building a relationship is something that is very special. Not everybody can find a Filipina and then feel the connection or the magic that happens when two people meet and everything just happens very fast. Finding a Filipina online and true love are feats that can be very difficult to achieve but sometimes whether you like it or not, even if you say you are not ready or you are too young or too old or whatever reasons you have, sometimes true love will find you. Wherever you are if it is the time and the moment then you do not need to go out looking for it. It will just come.

Virginity As Part of Filipina Culture

Virginity used to be associated with life itself for Filipina girls and women. You only lose it to your husband and you do not lose it before marriage. The moment a Filipina breaches this standard, it would be like virtual death for her. Losing virginity at the wrong time and letting people know it are an affront to family pride more than they offend personal well being.

In the Philippines, family reputation is sacred. Her family, friends and community would ostracise her. She could not look forward to a bright future. Flipino men, even those who engage themselves in pre-marital sex, would not find her worthy of attention.

That was then. It is quite different now. Today’s youth engage freely in sex. Girls hardly mind losing their virginity like they used to. Men are not as stringent in rejecting a non-virgin for a wife.

Cases of teenage pregnancies and single parents are on the rise. The phenomenon is significant enough to move the Philippine government to enact a law protecting the interests of single parents. Surveys after surveys are confirming research data that show majority of young people aged from 15 to 35 have engaged themselves in pre-marital sex for at least once in their lives.

Losing virginity and ending up a single parent, along with poverty, have been recognized as the single strongest force that pushed Filipinas to seek employment in the country and overseas. The rise in number of single parents has impacted on the workplace and on the dating habits of Filipinas.

Today, Filipina workers outnumber their male counterparts, and have proceeded to earn a distinct reputation for their diligence. Unfortunately, some of them could not do better than take refuge in girlie bars and prostitution joints.

Filipina single parents also comprise a large segment of the online dating community. Despite rapid changes in Philipine culture particularly in relation to virginity, Filipinas still find it culturally liberating to date with foreigners online.

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Through The Years: Filipino Customs And Traditions

Like most any other country, the Philippines is rich in customs and traditions handed down from generation to generation. While Filipinos were able to preserve most of these olden and even revered practices, some of the were products of foreign influence, assimilated in the native culture and nurtured through time.

Filipino customs and traditions evolved from religious beliefs and/or superstitions. They find expression in a wide range of daily activities, from farming to commerce, courtship, birth, marriage, family, death, relationships, among many others.

Interestingly, every region, province and even municipality in the Philippines has two or more customs or traditions that are uniquely their own. This is especially true in the countryside, where customs endure on the strength of collective acceptance by their people. Some of them have been institutionalized as annual events or festivals.

Two classic and popular examples of these showcased customs and traditions are the fiesta celebrations and the cenaculo. While the former takes on a variety of forms, themes, creativity and normally project a festive mood, the latter is a more subdued practice depicting the life and death of Jesus Christ. Both, however, have religious gist and history. Fiestas honor and thank the saints for a plentiful harvest and the cenaculo serves as venue for remembering the life, suffering and death of Christ. Both are occasions for collective or individual piety.

Other well-known Filipino customs and traditions include the selection of godparents along with marking the significance of baptism as one’s anointment into the Christian world. In courtship, the serenading and voluntary housework of young men as a way to win their lady’s affection was common in the olden times.

In marriage, the groom-to-be is restricted from seeing or speaking to his soon-to-be bride on eve of their wedding day, in the same way that the wife-in-waiting is restricted from trying on her wedding dress on that same day, for fear that the wedding itself may not materialize.

These and other customs and traditions define the uniqueness of the Filipino people. They reflect their history and the social evolution they went through.

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The Filipino Family: A Family Like No Other

The Filipino family is a unique family. Here, most households do not simply comprise what is considered the normal composition or make-up of members seen anywhere else around the world. While most families elsewhere are composed of a father, a mother or the parents and their children, a Filipino family would normally go beyond that structure in one household.

The grandparents of one of the parents are sometimes part of the Filipino family. Even nieces and nephews of the parents or uncles or aunts of the children may live in one household apart from the “basic family”, that is, the parents and their children.

Further, it is not unusual especially in the rural areas for two or more Filipino families to share a common house or attend to common household chores. They may also be found working together in livelihood activities like farming, fishing or small family enterprises.

The father in the Filipino Family often takes the role of primary provider. He is the authority figure, the acknowledged counselor and disciplinarian. The mother or wife takes the key responsibility for homemaking or household management. She is the moral compass and the children’s first academic mentor. But there have been changes in the home front. Parents today seem more open-minded, having evolved from being too disciplinarian to being an older type of friend for their children.

Although some parents these days still get a little uneasy with this “leveling-off” behavior towards their children, more and more of them have seen the positive impacts, like closer ties, better communication lines, higher levels of mutual trust and, more importantly, deeper respect and love for one another.

While some grandparents and other members of the “extended” Filipino family gets drawn to this relational unraveling, in some cases it is still on a much more conservative level. This is understandable since grandparents were born and reared in family traditions and culture steeped in more conservative and stringent manners.

Nevertheless, it is an amazing discovery how the Filipinos, with both their traditional “extended” family structure and continuing social evolution are able to survive in spite of these seeming incongruent characteristics of both the old and the new.

But then again, the Filipino family is unique.

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Traditional Filipino Wedding Customs

Filipino wedding customs combine both colonial influence and traditional beliefs. The more common Filipino wedding customs include choosing where to hold the wedding church and who the officiating priest will be. Couples who belong to prominent families usually prefer holding the wedding in an ancient Spanish-time church and enlist a well-known personality for an officiating pastor. Some say the ambiance generated by a Spanish-era church adds to the grandeur and solemnity of a wedding.

On the eve of a wedding, the bride-to-be is forbidden to see the groom-to-be. She likewise cannot try her wedding dress for fear that the wedding may not push through. On the wedding day itself, the bride usually wears a white-blue gown. There is preference for one that is borrowed. On exit from the church, the newlyweds go through the traditional throwing of coins, rice grains and flowers. This practice is said to induce abundance or wealth, as well as promote loyalty and abiding love between the couple.

There are sights of a wedding that make them distinctly Filipino. Example is the overflow of crowd witnessing the wedding rite, from the church to the reception. A Filipino wedding is never good enough if the crowd is not big enough. Filipinos after all are clannish people.

Post-wedding rites continue with undiminished festivity. The father of either bride or groom reads a wish list and toasts the wine, all in a gesture of ushering in a bright future for the new couple. The wedding dance brings the clan together, latching money bills of different denominations to various parts of the newlyweds’ clothes. It is a sign of sharing responsibilities among family members.

While some customs are unique to a certain province, the traditional Filipino wedding remains as one of the most valued occasions in the Philippines.

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