Good morning everyone, I (27M) moved to Japan in August and it's coming up to 5 months of living here now. Prior to moving here I worked for a Japanese company and my Japanese is pretty good, so I've been able to make friends here and my day-to-day life is good too.
However I'm also keen to find a long-term relationship soon, not because of Japan but just personal reasons (I'm not really "old" by any stretch of the imagination but I feel like now's a good age to think seriously about relationships) and so I looked into the options for serious relationships in Japan. Before I moved here I had okay results with Hinge, so I found out that Pairs was the "serious" option here.
In the 4 months I've been here, I have gone on dates with 4 different women. One of them actually turned out to be really cool and we're friends now (don't think there's anything romantic there but we meet up whenever we can for drinks), one I went on two dates with, 1 I've also been one 2 dates with and I just went on one for the first time with a woman on Sunday. The one who I went on a second date with, we had a really fun night doing karaoke and drinking, but after that night we never met up again… And she was the one who kept messaging me prior to that about how excited she was to talk to me/meet me.
Other than the one woman who I now consider one of my best friends in Japan so far, I found that for all the other women they were
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Interested in me originally
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Super communicative when we'd meet up, conversation also flowed naturally
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Usually always down to go someplace else. I ended up going to a bar and then karaoke with one woman, then on Sunday we moved from the cafe to an izakaya for a few drinks.
And I always end up getting their Lines. The issue is, I'm not sure why but after meeting most people the text conversation – which starts off super interesting and frequent – immediately becomes less frequent and maybe even less engaged after the dates? I totally get that people here are super busy with work and so I make sure to respect boundaries, but then because I try and reduce my own frequency to "match" them the whole thing just ends up fizzling out. This makes me super sad because these people are super interesting and I find them all attractive, but it also has me feeling very demotivated and almost a bit depressed? Am I too direct? Is there something cultural I'm not getting?
This last woman I met, she had lived in Europe for many years and told me about how she prefers direct communication, as well as about her hopes and dreams regarding marriage and kids etc. At the end of the night, I told her that I really enjoyed my time with her/talking to her and we exchanged contacts, but because of work she's busy for a very long time after this and I live pretty far away…
Also, the conversation started off with her being interested and messaging me a lot, but now I've been left on read after asking how her day was?
This has all got me thinking, do I message too much? Is there something fundamentally wrong with my approach? I find it really draining, I understand dating is really a "numbers game" in terms of just trying again and again until someone sticks around pretty much, but it is still pretty defeating to get all green flags from someone only for them to stop talking without even giving a reason why. I would even prefer if people told me why they don't want to see me anymore, that would hurt a lot less than the ghosting that seems to be common here.
This was just a rant about dating and using Pairs I guess. I will say it feels a lot less dehumanising than Tinder or Bumble but dating apps just seem like a crapshoot across the board.
by Electrical_Cell_8212