Part 1- How Long Does It Take To Know A Filipina?

I hear time and time again how in order to get to know a woman before marrying her, you need to spend several years getting to know each other, maybe five years or so.

The idea is that it takes that long in order to reveal some kind of character defect. What I’m going to say today will be unlike what you will hear elsewhere but I want it to be food for thought. Subscribe to Love Beyond The Sea and get to know ways that can help you have a lasting marriage to a Filipina. Get notifications for upcoming videos by tapping the bell and I am sure you have thoughts on what I am going to say so please let me hear them.

I hadn’t had a girlfriend in thirty years when I got married to my Filipina wife and the thought of spending several more years dating her or anyone else was absolutely unappealing.

It only took 54 days from the time I winked at her and we were pronounced man and wife. In between was about 9800 flight miles to overcome. We have been married since May 10, 2015 and it has been all I had hoped for and more.

Here are a couple of questions you might want to think about as I proceed. I will re-ask them later.

What is your opinion of how long a foreigner and Filipina need to know each other before getting married?

What was your thought process if you are married to a Filipina? What did you think you needed to know about her and what was the most important thing you needed to know?

Here are my thoughts on why it isn’t necessary to spend years of time getting to know someone.

1. How is that time actually being spent? If it is mostly having fun and not engaging in serious talk about relationships, then to me, the process of getting to know a woman is stagnant, stuck in the mud.
2. Being together in person can lend itself to avoiding serious talk about what it would be like living together in marriage. The reason is it is so easy to just get together and go to a movie, watch television and prolong the dating process by not communicating, just getting along.

I noticed in the 18 days I spent getting to know her before she accepted my wedding proposal, that since we were so far apart, we could not spend time side by side, together; “killing time”. It seemed natural to me that we would need to focus more on getting to know each other by asking questions, rather than being in each other’s presence. I also never felt like I was interrogating her. I was pursuing someone to marry.

Maybe this made it easier to discuss serious issues like the purpose of marriage, the roles of the man and woman in marriage, my needs and her needs, even our pasts. Perhaps that is easier than doing it sitting in the living room together, although you might have been doing that, only on Skype.

3. I had paid for a lifetime membership on Christian Filipina and that had given me some hope that I still might be able to find someone to marry. The purpose of paying for an international dating site membership is to find a wife. Much of what I initiated talk about revolved around marriage. That’s not a turn off to the woman because she is also there to get married!
4. I knew there would be an immigration process even after we got married and that sped up the process because the quicker we got married, the quicker we could be together here in America.
5. About getting to know each other well-Sometimes I think people want to know everything about the other person, or at least the man does. Ultimately, you only know what you see and what they reveal to you, but I don’t know how it would be possible to know everything about someone.
6. They say “you never really get to know someone well until you live with them”. That’s probably true. Many years ago I knew two guys who had been friends for a long time throughout school. They became room-mates in their twenties and discovered they didn’t know everything they thought they did.

The Bible talks about the “troubles in the flesh” in marriage, when the sin natures of two people “rub against each other”. That’s going to happen anyway. It is easier for two Christians to handle because through the Holy Spirit they can learn to manage their differences.

7. The main point for me in getting to know my wife was “What did I need to know? I didn’t want or have years to invest in the dating process so what were the “must haves”, the “deal breakers”? It came down to only one thing-That she be a Christian. A Christian is someone who has confessed and repented of their sins and through the Holy Spirit desire to walk obediently to the word of God. They are forgiven by God and saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Such a woman will have the same God and the same truth as me, and the help of God to make our marriage work. Since that was the only essential quality, here is what was not essential-

Her education (at least finished high school), her IQ, her job, her bank account (I wanted a poor woman), where she was from, her hobbies, her interests, etc.

I am much more interested in her reputation than her skills and so on. This is difficult to ascertain from such a long distance but it helps if you can somehow communicate with people she knows.

Come to think of it, I had her do a Skype with my pastor as she wanted to, and I could have done the same with her pastor or someone who would stand to be a sponsor should we get married. If they cared about this woman, they would be honest with a potential marriage partner. Why wouldn’t they?

We continued to learn about each other during the immigration period of about eight months and of course, continue to even to this day. How much fun would it be to figure everything out about someone after years of analysis, and then get married? It seems anticlimactic. But that’s just theory, because if you really took the time to learn everything about someone, you’d run out of time, or you would decide you don’t like them!

I admit I wanted a younger woman around 20-30 who I was attracted to, but it is a given (and important) for a man to be attracted to the woman he marries. That part was not difficult since Filipinas are beautiful, but I needed someone with beautiful character too.

In the next part I will talk about ways you can know you are with the right Filipina.

More in part 2 of how long does it take to know a Filipina here on Love Beyond The Sea.