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Comment by Paul12345534 | Hacker News Reader

Once upon a time, I was seeking a Filipina gf. At the time, DateInAsia didn't have any good search interface but it was a good place to meet people if you weeded out the scammers.

I was looking for very specific things (Catholic, educated, no kids, 25 or older, etc). I scrapped (slowly) the site content and threw all the fields in a database so I could query it locally :)

I filled out my profile as complete as possible about myself and who I was looking for. DateInAsia lets people know when you viewed their profile... so my Python script automatically viewed all the profiles that matched my search queries. Many of them viewed my profile in return and those who were interested messaged me. I met some nice ladies that way but it turned out to be a Filipina lady I met in an unrelated chatroom who I fell in love with.

My own more humble attempt at mixing geekdom with love :) but love comes in unexpected places not ruled by math

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My current girlfriend is Cambodian, and we met via OkCupid. I noticed that of the ~1000 Cambodian girls using the site, none of them matched above 80% with me. I disregarded this and I'm really glad I did. Personally, I was searching for someone who seemed sweet, adventurous, and spoke English well.

I think I read through just about every one of those 1000 profiles, but my girlfriend's stood out... in a way that I could not have discerned computationally. Our match percentage was around 60%, for instance. She was the first/only girl I messaged. Things are still going great!

I'm gonna assume you and Paul12345534 aren't white dudes b/c that'd be a behavior for creeps.

I'm a white dude. Why is that creepy? Because I'm dating someone of a different race/culture? She's exactly my age, college educated, speaks excellent English, makes more money than me, etc. I was explicitly trying to minimize any sort of power differential (which is part of why I looked online in the first place, the subset of women who are computer literate tend to be more affluent / socially mobile).

By the way, I live in Cambodia... what the fuck am I supposed to do? Not date anyone? I guarantee you I would be more likely to end up with a mismatch of power if I stuck strictly to IRL dating.

Not going to go into personal issues on an open forum :) but you're pretty quick with your assumptions. The gf isn't poor and only trying to escape and we don't have a large gape.

ugghh, typing before morning coffee, I meant age large age gap hahahha

There's a big difference between dating someone specifically because she's Cambodian and dating someone who happens to be Cambodian. If I read the GP right, he's talking about the latter.

I happened to have made hundreds of Filipino friends online beforehand, the Philippines speaks English, there's a large % of Catholics, and I find Asians attractive in general. I don't live near a big city and I was looking for someone who's a devout Catholic, educated, reasonably attractive, without excess baggage (kids, prior marriage, etc) so it seemed like a reasonable choice.

Is there anything actually wrong with dating specifically because they're Cambodian? Anymore than dating someone specifically because they have a certain body type, or certain hair color, or certain sports team affiliation?

Limiting your dating pool to just Cambodians is just as stupid as limiting the pool to just blondes or just Yankees fans. Because in the long run, these things don't matter. Unless you're a special little snowflake who just can bare to sleep with a Mets fan.

I can see body type making a difference, because it's important to find your mate attractive. But even then, don't harp on it too much. I know a guy who refuses to date any girl who isn't a size zero. Unsurprisingly he gets no dates. If he just gave other girls a chance, he might discover that he's attracted to a wider variety of body types than he thinks he is.

I agree with everything you said, but it seems as though dating someone because they're Cambodian is often judged more harshly than dating someone because they're blonde. Yet, from my uninformed guess, I'd speculate that people from a specific country have more specific cultural or personality traits than people of a certain hair color or sports fandom. For example, despite millions of exceptions on each side, Australians are more extroverted and gregarious than Swiss. I can imagine an extremely extroverted Swiss person trying to find a similar companion saying, "I'd like to date an Australian person" instead of the much more complicated process of finding similar personality types among their compatriots.

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