The case for overseas dating and marriage

On promised lands and promised hands

Bryan Caplan has written about dating and looking for marriage overseas.

I thought I’d write a response, from the perspective of somebody who has done business overseas for 15+ years, and where my own and many of my friends’ relationships have been with foreign nationals as a result. I’ve lived in or done business in China, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Russia.

Bryan made a couple of great points regarding the advantages.

• Beauty is absolute and cross-cultural, yet Americans have a valuable passport and earning advantage relative to most of the world, so men can do relatively better overseas.

• You get a status premium in much of the world just by being a Westerner, versus in the West you’re basically a bottom-tier pyramid of boo lights if you’re white, straight, smart, in tech, in finance, or whatever else. But overseas, all of those things are pluses and status boosts to you instead of detriments.

And he even left off some really important advantages!

• Demographic pyramids are massively more on your side versus America, and as we all know, base rates matter.¹

• Women overseas are more willing to have children at all, and have a much greater willingness to have larger families, because they themselves were often raised in larger families.

• Women overseas have more traditional values. Speaking to Bryan’s “don’t be feminist” advice to his daughters for match quality, this means less feminist.

• Tying into the above, smart women overseas are not too entitled to cook or keep a good house, and are generally more happy to keep a good house (and if you yourself live overseas, maids and nannies are extremely affordable).

• Women overseas do a lot more to stay on top of appearance than US women.

• They have better child raising technologies via extended families, most of whom are baby-obsessed and want to spend maximum time with any babies.

• Women want to date “up.” Dating as a Western man overseas gets you something like a 2 point bump on a 1-10 scale. If you’re a 5 in the US, you’re a 7 in non-NATO-countries.

Because after all, what’s the deal here in the US?

• High human capital women are obsessed with careers, and never want to have kids when they’re at peak fertility and it’s best for their and the baby’s health, because they need to focus on establishing themselves in their “greedy careers.”

• Likewise, they don’t want to have a lot of kids, due to career impacts, and because they only start even THINKING of kids at around 30-35, because of health impacts.

• Women only ever want to date “up” in education, income, and status - this is fine if you’re a Masters or Phd guy working at a FAANG, but if you’re not, your options are limited and lower quality in the West because of this.

But the overseas girls don’t have those issues, because of different cultures and values, and because you’re coming in with a bunch of advantages, equivalent to a 2 point bump on a 1-10 scale.

All of Bryan’s objections to dating overseas come down to adverse selection - he’s afraid of them gold diggers!

Gold digger starter package

“If you’re an average American man, the average American woman is unlikely to marry you unless she actually loves you.”

“In contrast, foreign women who don’t love you have a strong reason to pretend they do in order to get your marriage visa. Which has to keep you wondering all the way to the altar.”

And I say, sure! That could be a thing. I think it’s much rarer than he probably thinks it is, but why not?

Let’s look at some data

Ryabov and Zhang looked at the Entry and Stability of Cross National Marrriages, 2019² looking at 3k (Foreign Born) + (Native Born) FB+NB USA couples (and ~40k couples total) to tell us:

• Those most likely to be “gold diggers” in Bryan’s sense are defined as “marriage migrants” in the study - those whose marriage was within a year of migrating to the US.

  • They were only 23% of the total cross national marriages

  • Excluding them didn’t materially change the results - “Therefore, we believe that our results were hardly affected by sham or ‘green card’ marriages.”

• Foreign born (FB) spouse to US national marriages are up 2x, 1995 to 2015

• FB+NB pairings are ~17% more likely than domestic marriages to end in divorce (with marriage migrants included), controlled for race / ethnicity and education

• FB+NB marriages last on average 10 years, to NB+NB marriages 12 years

• The positive factors that reduce your divorce risk:

  • Asian wife (21% buff)

  • White husband (17% buff)

  • Husband more educated (12%)

  • If you’ve both had at least some college (3%)

  • Having pre-school age children together (20%)

• The risk factors that increase your divorce risk:

  • Husband >5 years older than wife (19% detriment)

  • Wife has higher education (36%) or income (21%)

  • Both high school education or less (12-18%)

  • Any history of marriage and divorce before for either wife (38%) or husband (27%)

So what can we conclude?

The risk of gold diggers seems pretty minimal - 23% of the sample, it didn’t materially change the results to exclude them, and FB+NB marriages last 10 years vs 12 years for NB+NB in this sample.

But aside from that?

• Date in Asia

• Date somebody who is similarly or less educated than you

• Don’t go for huge age gaps

• Make more money than your wife

• Don’t date women who have been married and divorced before

• Have kids

Qualitatively, they advise that much conflict in FB+NB marriages stems from the woman wanting to escape a patriarchal dynamic to a more free and Western dynamic, and the men wanting a more traditional and feminine woman, and this creating conflict.

Given that I’ve pointed to one of the big advantages of dating overseas is that you get a more traditional woman, is this a death knell for the whole prospect?

No! The great thing about being a Westerner and dating in Asia is that the middle point is a strict improvement for both sides!

When Asian women move from “home culture” dynamic and more towards “Western dynamic” when they’re with you, they’re STILL significantly more feminine and tradtional than a Western woman!

It’s the quintessential “benefits of trade” sort of dynamic - they get a Western boyfriend who is less patriarchal and demanding, and more thoughtful than Asian guys, you get a hot more traditional Asian GF / wife who puts way more effort in and is more feminine than Western women. Both of you feel like you’re winning!

I will briefly caricature this, from more or less real-world examples:

• Western women are lounging around in ratty sweatpants³ staring at Tik Tok, snarling at you to “order the *$@# Doordash already, I’m HUNGRY!”

• Asian women are in makeup and a dress as they greet you at the door, and are asking you whether you want them to heat up some leftovers, then are so delighted that you propose a last minute switch to eating out at that new Argentinian restaurant, they jump up and down in excitement.

And I’ve got more news for you. You worry about adverse selection overseas?

US women who use dating apps are adversely selected too.

Formerly, in our golden Natufian age when old Okcupid roamed the earth, before the blight that is called “Match Group” darkened and stretched it’s sinister claws across all of the dating landscape,

women only responded to the top 20% of men:

Now that Match Group owns everything and all apps are Tinder clones, it’s gone down to only responding to the top 5%:

And dating apps are pretty much IT now in terms of meeting romantic partners, too!

Women are “the choosers” in a sea of infinite candidates, and anyone you’d want to date is deluged.

Not only can they choose to only ever consider the top 5% of men, every time they open their mailbox they have tens of new messages. So now they can choose the most clever and funny of that top 5%.

And you think they’re gonna marry YOUR median self?

When any woman worth marrying can open up an app exclusively populated by the top 5% funniest and wittiest men, who are already selected to be the top 5% in looks, education, height, income, and whatever other filters they wanted, and get a date with those guys any night of the week??

This isn’t even getting into base rates

All of which are massively against you and your future happiness.

• How likely they are to be feminist⁴

• How likely they are to be overweight or obese⁵

• How likely they are to gain significant weight after marriage⁶

• How likely they are to keep a good home⁷

That foreign “maybe a gold digger” is looking better and better.

At least you have an actual chance of getting married and having kids with her! Not to mention “foreign wife” base rates on the 4 characteristics above are much, much better (see the footnotes).

But wait, you say, I can use apps intelligently, and go for plain, 5/10 in looks religious / trad girls, and avoid some of those adverse selection effects.

Oh, and why couldn’t you similarly find a trad 8/10 girl in a foreign country and avoid those selection effects? Not to mention, it’s much easier to find religious or traditional girls in developing countries, the selection pool is 10x as big!

Wait, but don’t girls overseas use apps too? How am I supposed to meet them?

Yes, but now you’re +2 on the 1-10 scale and you’re gonna pass a lot more filters. It was basically pass / fail, remember? You’ll pass a lot more often, and the underlying population of eligibles is much bigger. Base rates matter.

Also, it’s WAY easier to meet people in person overseas than in the US.

Most non-NATO cultures are much more people oriented. To give an example: one of my family members visited me once while I was in the Philippines. He is an archetypical dork - 330+ lbs, goofy humor, no job, no style, likes manga and video games, the works. Multiple times, in person, mothers were falling over themselves to introduce their daughters to him, people (in person talking to him) were messaging remote cousins to exchange pics, getting his Facebook so they could message, etc. This happened at least 3-4 times. So even with negative game, and every possible archetypically bad dating signal, people were falling over themselves to provision him with a younger, much-hotter-than-he-is girlfriend, largely due to the Western bonus.

Finally, if you know selection effects are a thing, you can take steps to mitigate them.

• Follow the bullet points earlier that give you marriage buffs - dating in Asia, to women who have never been married, etc.

• Go over there and spend real time there - this is fun and a good idea for several reasons, not just dating, but it really pays off there, too.

• Date educated girls from good families - put that +2 bonus to good use!

• Talk frequently and at length and gauge your true compatibility.

• In the limits, you can propose only after they get pregnant! Kids was one of the biggest buffs!

Then you have guaranteed progeny, with somebody who is notably hotter, smarter, and higher SMV than you could have gotten at home.

Maybe the marriage won’t last forever - but most don’t,⁸ even local ones to other US citizens. And at least you got kids out of it, and they are also *higher quality* kids which is worth a LOT.

Seriously, read Greg Clark’s The Son Also Rises (or my review) to get an idea of how impossibly tightly people optimize mate quality when having kids, over hundreds of generations. My favorite factoid is that even 900+ years later, the descendants of the Norman conquerors are something like 2x more likely to get into Oxbridge. You’re getting a leg up on a competition THAT tight, which is a huge deal.

So sure, adverse selection might be a thing. But it’s a thing in the US too, and arguably to a greater degree! And due to the dating market disparities, you can get something overseas much easier than you can in the US: true biological wealth. I’m talking CHILDREN, in as large amounts as you want, with high human capital women.

And all true wealth is biological, at the end of the day.

1. I mean, just do the math. I once calculated there were at least a million attractive women between 18-24 in each city of Tokyo, Manila, Shanghai, or Bangkok, and most of them are single, and most of them would love to date a Westerner. How many of those do you think you have in YOUR city?

2. DOI 10.1177/0192513X19860186 - https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/soc_fac/4/

3. Oh sorry, *athleisure wear,* not sweatpants. Because some clothing companies were smart enough to deduce that an ~$80B opportunity existed in selling women basically sweatpants, but without the cultural affiliations of sweatpants.

4. “I define myself as a feminist”

US: 31% agree

Japan: 18% agree

5. Less than half the incidence in Asian countries: https://imgur.com/a/nxQsCn9

Also, look how Asian weight changes with age vs White, Black, and Hispanic populations (green line, Other=Asian): https://imgur.com/a/CE6ySL9

6. Married weight gain is a fairly strong effect seen in practically every country in the world, even after controlling for genes and personalities - for example, identical twins, one of whom marries and the other not, the married one gains weight. 

The meta analysis here, with ~200k couples and ~100k matched singles across 18 countries, shows a pretty strong effect size of marriage on obesity - 1.7 odds ratio, up to 2.5 odds ratio in economic downturns. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/39057117/

It also points at a less quantitative meta analysis finding the same thing: "Dinour, L. et al. (2011) conducted a systematic review consisting of 20 studies on BMI results before and after marriage. The data for these articles were gathered over a 40-year period, from 1966 to 2004. According to Dinour’s results, marriages were associated with an increase in body weight, whereas divorces were associated with a decrease in body weight, both in males and females."

And of course, base rates matter - it’s much easier to gain weight if you’re already overweight or obese, and that’s more than twice as likely in the US vs Asia.

7. Time use surveys tell us average hours spent on housework and cooking:

US: 2.6 hr

UK: 2.5 hr

Singapore: 2-3 hr

China: 3.5 hr

Japan: 4 hr

Philippines: 4-5 hr

Thailand: 4-5 hr

8. 42% vintage divorce rate, plus half that again in “net miserable” marriages that are miserable for both parties but NOT divorced gets you to a strict ~2/3 “marriage failure” rate in US-US marriages.