Is the Philippines ready for a straight dating app?

MANILA, Philippines - Finding someone online is virtually unheard of in the Philippines. There are the few cases you hear about, yes, but strangely despite our strong and dramatic addiction to Facebook, we still like to go about meeting our dates the traditional way — in person.

It’s true that Grindr is a hit with the local gay market. It’s not unusual to be having a soulful late night coffee session with a friend, and then bid him goodbye a few hours later as he heads to his booking. But if the friend in question were straight, and he/she started talking casually about all these people he/she meets online, I imagine it would land differently. And indeed, it’s something that I have to imagine, because I’ve never seen it happen.

I’ve often told my gay friends that I thought their relations to be generally a lot more free compared to what’s available to straight people. It’s hard not to envy how easily they can flit around and meet as many people as they can, by any means available, and do pretty much whatever they want. They can go about it actively, purposefully, and no one will tell them they are being desperate. Even comparing the atmosphere in a gay bar, where you have hot strangers walking up to each other, to a straight bar where people largely stick to their groups and stay coy and pretend to be oblivious, tells you a lot. Somehow the straight dating scene isn’t as gung ho.

So despite the success of the Grindr app, I thought there were a million reasons why Paktor, which promised to be its straight counterpart, wouldn’t take off here. Created by Joseph Phua, Paktor in Hokkien means “to go out on a date.” It enables you to like people in the vicinity according to your interests, and if the “liking” is mutual, you can start to chat and get to know each other. The anonymity feature also provides a certain security against the common fear of rejection and investing more emotion and ego than you’d like to put out while testing the waters. It has been likened to seeing an attractive stranger at the club, and walking up to them to strike up a conversation.

The Filipino dating scene

On top of the gender roles, differences, societal norms, and expectations that often complicate the straight game, socially Filipinos are very cliquish. Regardless of the enticing scenarios that our beer commercials have painted for us — the stranger following a sexy woman all around the bar, suddenly sidling up to her to whisper into her ear — at a real party that would be creepy shit. In real life, we have social barriers that aren’t that easy to cross if you want to get to know a person across the room. Often, it depends on luck — on having the right setting/opportunity, having common friends present to make the bridging seem natural and non-intrusive, or on the object of your affection having drunk enough to be friendlier than her usual scrutinizing self. Otherwise, you need an extraordinary amount of suave to get past our cultural discomfort when it comes to talking to people we don’t know. Incidentally, this is what I appreciate the most about foreign guys. They don’t have these issues. They’ll just go for you the minute they think they’d like to get to know you.

But indeed, most, if not all, the straight people I know who are dating met as friends, or classmates, or work mates, or through any of the other activities that enable two people to get to know each other in the day to day. In other words, they got lucky that someone happened to be in their immediate vicinity. And in Filipino straight-ville, not chancing upon anyone this way is considered a decent copout to not seeing anyone new. Not that it’s something that ought to be required, but what if you genuinely wanted to? And your reason for not meeting anyone interesting was your creative job, where all your colleagues are gay? Or that your preferred workout is yoga, where all your classmates are girls and moms waiting to fetch their kids?

By a certain age you’d already figured out that the club is usually, in Rihanna’s words, a hopeless place. Maybe someone will tell you about this group that you ought to join, but then you’d feel guilty about joining it just for meeting possible mates. In fact, you’ll be made to feel guilty about wanting someone at all. You know, all that talk about being independent and loving yourself and being the kind of person who doesn’t need someone else in the equation. It’s a simplistic value we’ve been taught, disregarding that it’s possible to be your own person and to want to share yourself and make connections at the same time.

I still honestly have no idea whether or not Paktor and our local dating scene will click. In my opinion, ours is not the ideal market for it. There are many concerns still, especially in a country where Quezon City being listed as having some of the hottest guys in the world caused a massive female outrage for truth in journalism. What if a manyak is on the other end? What if he’s jejemon? Aren’t the undesirable kind the only ones who participate in such apps? These, if I’m not mistaken, are our usual notions. But then, what if he’s not? What if he’s articulate, perfectly decent, and just open to this particular medium? What if desirable people got off their high horses and decided to just participate, and search when they felt like searching, instead of locking themselves up in some tower of being too good for the general population? What if we didn’t take ourselves too seriously and were free to just check things out?

I realized that I’m also interested to see how Paktor pans out. Whether it will indeed be defeated by our more or less traditional ways and views, and by the limits which maybe a lot of us would like to stick to, or if it will manage to coax us to check out possibilities that are just slightly beyond our comfort zones.

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