pa mangar mi visa

I feel a little guilty for having made all my blog posts so heavy thus far, especially when I'm not normally that profound or introspective of a person. So to show my gratitude to you, my faithful blog readers, and lighten things up around here, I'm going to embark on a new topic: dating and relationships in the Dominican Republic. From a purely anthropological standpoint, of course.

Ways Dating/Relationships Differ in the DR*

1. When someone wants you, you know it. Whether they see you in a bar or on the street, if they're interested, they let you know immediately. Honestly, I don't think many of them have a fear of rejection like in the US. There's an honesty here that I've never encountered before. In the US, dating is a game and the players have to play their roles perfectly or the game is over. You like someone but pretend you don't. Then you try to read their signals for the next few hours or days or weeks. Do they really not like you that much or are they pretending they don't because that's part of the game? Do they want to commit eventually or are they just in it for fun? Dating in the US can be exhausting just from trying to figure out what each other wants. Not the case here. When a Dominican man likes you, he makes a beeline for you and lets you know (sometimes in excessive detail) just exactly how he feels about you. One day I'm going to count the number of piropos I get per hour walking down the street. But that leads to my next point, which is
2. Although it's nice that people are at least straightforward here, most of the time their motivations aren't too pure. When someone "likes" you, it is probably because you are American, and he wants a visa.  This can be a touchy subject as this is where some people depart from their previous transparency. "I don't just like you because you're American! Maybe other guys do, but I'm different." Riiiiight. Seriously though, even guys who already have visas love American girls. They think that white skin is just gorgeous (ironic, since in the US being pale is not considered attractive, and just goes to show that beauty is culturally constructed and is closely related to power dynamics).
3. Relationships move very quickly here. This is probably related at least partially to the fact that Dominicans don't have the whole "chase" stage of relationships. Here is a perfectly hypothetical example: Say I went on a date with a Dominican guy (let me emphasize ONE DATE) and told him that I can't call or text often because it costs too much money. And say the next day he tried to buy me a phone with a plan so I could talk to him all day every day, and became bewildered when I insisted that was inappropriate. When that didn't work, say he attempted to convince me to travel to the other side of the country to meet his family. All after one date. (Of course I am not necessarily speaking from experience, I'm just saying that something like that could happen.)
4. Dominicans use remarkably strong language to describe their feelings. While sometimes this gets annoying, I'm not going to lie: I swooned a little bit the other day when the incredibly handsome guy at the copy center addressed me as "mi amor". But that was just to ask how I wanted my book bound, so you can imagine how Dominicans speak when they actually like you, or say they like you. Remember my previous hypothetical example, and imagine that I hypothetically told the same hypothetical guy that it wasn't going to work out. Then imagine an incessant stream of phone calls and texts with such desperate, melodramatic statements as "I see in my future that I will never find love again". Haha. I feel a little guilty about the endless laughs I've gotten out of that one, but it really does go to show the huge cultural discrepancy between here and the US. Because that kind of sentiment would never be appropriate to express in the US after knowing someone less than a week. Claro.

I've been here for 23 days now. In that relatively short amount of time, I've grown to appreciate some of the ways Dominicans do things differently, especially because I've found the dating scene in the US to be pretty frustrating at times. Yet I can also say that dating here is exhausting and outrageous in its own way. I'm starting to think that maybe this is something that transcends culture; relationships are complicated the world over. But I said I wasn't going to try to go deep and profound on this one, so I won't continue making any grand assessments. I'll just say that personally, I'm a little tired of trying to maneuver through the tricky, risky business of dating in a foreign culture. So rest assured, dear friends, in knowing that I will return home sin un novio in tow. These guys are just gonna have to apply for that visa all by themselves.

*Disclaimer: All of this is admittedly stereotypical,  so take it with a grain of salt and don't cite me on this. But this is what I've gleaned from my own personal experience and conversations with locals, and let's face it, most stereotypes at least have some basis in truth.

**This is a link to a song that's very popular in the DR right now. The words mean something like "I want an American woman so I can swipe a visa". Hahaha. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRVLPmdVwRA