I knew about nothing about the culture or language before proposing to her. Hadn't even met her in person yet. This year will be six years of marriage. I couldn't have located the Philippines on a map, I was just on a mission to not miss out on getting married. I can tell now that I was for sure missing out when I was single (unwillingly) for so long. I proposed on day 18. I never felt like that was crazy, I thought being single at 53 was crazy.
Proposing marriage after 18 days of being together in person is like playing with matches. Glad you did not get burned.
Three expats I know are in a terrible mess after video chatting, coming over for 2 weeks to a month, returning to US to sell everything, then return, only to find out the GF is bipolar/BPD/narcissistic/sociopath/psychopath. Most women with the above can hide it for a while.
The first expat's wife goes to the gym, but will not tell husband where it is located, and takes off wedding band when leaving the house. She also embezzled his money during the lockdown when she had his debit card. Says her back hurts, so cannot do laundry, but is at gym every day. The expat has bought her a house, a car, and now she is demanding that he buy her land. The expat doesn't realize that she is picking his carcass clean, then she will discard him, and replace him with another victim.
The second expat''s GF is paper married with 4 kids who hate his guts, and admitted to meeting a foreigner she had been chatting with on a dating site while the expat was living with her. She says she is heavily in debt, but has expat's debit card. Left one weekend, did not return calls, made up a BS excuse that the expat buys. Has repeatedly asked him what he would do if he caught her cheating. Have tried to tell him that her asking that is a veiled admission that she IS cheating, but he is too deluded to see that.
Met the third expat on a ferry to Cebu who married a young Filipina, they had an argument, she left 7 days, and 9 months later had a brown baby. He let it slide, so now he is sending her to college, where she is probable getting plenty of horizontal exercise. He is attached to kid that is not his, so that is why he has not broken up with her. Personally, I would have walked when she left for 7 days, much less when the baby was not mine.
There are some Filipinas who are the real deal, but most of the online dating sites are full of scammers and ladyboys.
What I do not understand is with the millions of nice Filipinas here who treat their men like royalty, why these expats resign themselves to such abuse.