Just another twist on this. I have an acquaintance who went this route. He ended up falling for a Philippino gal. She's in her late 20's and he's in his late 50's.
Now I knew this guy was a gentle soul, and more aware than most people, so I did not think he was trying to be lecherous. But I had to ask -- we live in Phoenix, what the heck is wrong with the local girls anyway? It's not like there's a shortage here. His response is that they seemed shallow and uninteresting, and his motivation in taking a foreign wife was to "find someone who can appreciate what I have to offer". To me this had trouble written all over it, as I feel that just because you marry someone below you on the social or financial ladder does not guarantee respect, and besides, once they marry you they move up the ladder with you anyway.
Well he's been married twice before, and wife #1 was Thai, so I think he has a taste for exotic foreign women. And he has a brother with a Philipinno wife, so knows something about the zietgiest of the whole thing. But still, I thought: a 57 year old with a heart condition would look pretty good to a 27 year old who wants to escape living in a house with a dirt floor.
I walked away from that thinking, "There's no fool like an old fool". But it turned out a little differently. He went to meet her, they decided to get married, he came back to the States to work on her citizenship papers, and after a couple months of this she admits she is homesick at the prospect of leaving her extended family. So my friend ends up moving to the Philippenes, and they were married a couple of months ago and living there now. And not in Manila, but on one of the smaller, more rural islands, where she's from.
All of which goes to show that you can't make too many assumptions about people's motives, one way or the other. I personally wouldn't do something like this ... but it *can* work out for the right people, about as well as anything else. Of course that begs the question again: what the heck is so wrong with the local girls???
Oh well ...
--Bob
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