Someone, Please Save the Dates

Dates, weddings, and frustrations that came with being a gay single man in Manila

I started writing this in Bali, where we spent two weeks on this beautiful island after a week in chaotic Manila. B and I were on our annual summer leave, and we planned our trip to Southeast Asia around the wedding ceremony of our friends Amy and Wira here.

Speaking of weddings, we recently celebrated our second anniversary. Two years breezed by, and I sometimes feel like a part of me is still stuck in that hole that was the pandemic. When I try to recall the things that happened from March 2020 to the half of 2021, there’s a blurry cloud punctuated by pin lights of very specific events: My friend Nancy and I doing the grocery at Landmark in Makati, saying, “Blessed be” instead of “Goodbye,” referencing the dystopian “The Handmaid’s Tale” life we lived then; ending my work with gay app Blued and then starting my work as a communications consultant for a project by the UK and the Philippine governments, marking my entry into the public sector; spending a socially-distanced birthday with Gretchen and Mela at The Grand Kitchen in BGC (I thought they still had the vegan buffet then but they shut the buffet section down during the pandemic.) I also remember the last few days I spent in Gretchen’s flat while I had mine renovated, just a few weeks before I finally left Manila for London and Montpellier.

I haven’t returned to Bali since 2019, when Amy pulled me and her sister Kristine for a vacation. She was planning to get married then and said she wanted to party before that happened. I said yes because it seemed a decent enough excuse to take a vacation. I was also single, tired of the dating scene in Manila, and wanted to meet new people. A few months before this, I went to Hong Kong to meet an ex-date to watch a HONNE concert, which unexpectedly rekindled some feelings in me, which he politely but pointedly dismissed. I felt fragile and vulnerable. So I took the gym seriously, became conscious of my macros, and tried to get lean and ready for the beach. The validation you get from being treated like some precious object can be intoxicating. This was when I understood why some influencers get stuck in the desperation of constantly upping their engagement counts.

The thing about being single and suspicious was that your neediness for human contact directly conflicts with your natural suspicion of said human contact. During that trip, I was catfished by a person from Grindr using a photo of Brazilian model João Lima. The conversation was as dull as oatmeal, and he kept making excuses for being unable to meet up, but I was smitten and was willing to overlook these red flags. He continued the charade until after I was already back in Manila, sending me photos of his adventures in a cliff or forest somewhere supposedly in Bali. At the nth “I can’t do a video call because the signal is horrible,” I grew tired of his flakiness and decided to do a reverse Google image search of all the photos he sent. I realized I’d been duped.

Would I have been married now if that random guy hadn’t catfished me? To some degree, I think that was my penultimate frustration with the dating scene, which led me to my last ex, G, the one I was with before B. I remember when Mela introduced me to G, and we went to Bank Bar in BGC one evening to have a couple of drinks. There, I found out that G & I shared the same birthdays. I thought it must’ve been a sign. I didn’t and still do not believe in signs or astrology, but I wanted some mystical explanation to convince me that I had found the right person. In hindsight, that was a bit delusional – but as they say, hindsight is often 20/20, and people tend to think the red flags had always been obvious. I think this is self-flagellation, and those who criticize themselves too much can get stuck in this “I could’ve done better, but I didn’t” way of thinking. (I know this because I am very self-critical.)

Mela had tried to set me up with different people before, but G was the nicest and the most positive of these (dare I say) prospects. Perhaps he was too nice even and willing to rationalize his friends’ faults to accommodate their presence in his life. G was also self-critical, but he had a tendency for pep talk, and he liked to give these punchy affirmations to people. I guess it came with his work territory as a fitness instructor and also (then) a radio DJ. I thought it was nice, but the longer we were together, the more I realized I couldn’t handle it. When faced with failures, I couldn’t stomach rationalizing my way out and easily forgiving myself for failing. Months in, I realized an obvious mismatch in our personalities and aspirations, something that having the same birthdate couldn’t gloss over.

I met B years back, even before meeting G, but I never seriously considered that we would be together. He was in Manila for work, and I knew that at some point, that work would end, and he would have to return to London. The logistics of dating a foreigner were so troublesome that I only mildly entertained the idea, like a cute dream I filed in my head. We reconnected just before the pandemic. Stuck in my studio flat in Salcedo Village with nowhere else to go, my conversations with B eventually became a long-distance relationship: talking to each other daily, discovering how much we had in common (like being vegan, for one.)

I can list down in bullet points all of the things I find amazing in him, but one of the things that truly stands out for me is how he struggled to succeed: a farm boy from a small town who clawed his way out. Sure, he was smart, but I’ve dated clever people, and clever is good for dinner talk but never for survival. I didn’t grow up rich (I came from a middle-class family who often fought about money), and I empathized with being able to pull yourself up from one’s financial morass and being independent. I trusted B because his advice always came from a well of experience, not from some cute but hollow Instagram motivational reel. There was legitimacy to it. I loved that.

As I got older, I realized I wanted less and less the cutesy stuff and more things that meant something beyond one’s relationship. B had plans, and his plans were bigger than himself. I liked that because it made me believe I could also try to work for something more meaningful in life – something that could mean something to others. And I’m not saying that influencers who post motivational posts don’t bring something good to people’s lives, because maybe they do, but I somewhat think you need to earn the advice you give.

I think B & I being together has been a happy surprise (at least for me; he keeps telling me he worked hard for us to be together.) Frankly, the dating scene in Manila was just so soul-crushing it came to a point that I promised never to be serious about it anymore. You can only go on so many dates and fleeting encounters until you are literally meeting the same people over and over.