Of course, I'm not saying you can't find gentility and sweetness on a Western male. My cousin, and my friend Mei, are happily married to Western men, who are tender and considerate. They also happen to be 50+ years old. Maybe nowadays young men just don't find it cool to be a gentleman. But I didn't want to think I should categorize, or pre-judge based on culture. Surely, I can find Western men who are tender and considerate and fit snug against the heart. Even after I went to China, I still didn't want to believe it.

And then there was Jeremiah.

How many more men do I have try to love and continue to fail?

In the western culture, and I'm not strictly speaking about Caucasian men, I'm talking about men who grew up or have been heavily socialized in North America, (forgive me for the generalizations, it's impossible to talk about culture without generalizations), while I felt a lot of pressure for immediate physical intimacy, achieving emotional intimacy with Western men is about as easy as flying to Mars. A most formidable distance.  Even though there's a lot to enjoy in their company, with their towering physique, their sharp wit, their ambling confidence , their openness, their humor, and in some cases very tight six-packs, but as one Chinese woman put it, "Western men are easy to like, but hard to love."

To understand why you have to first understand the modern dating culture in the west. A pick-up artist called Kane wrote, "In the west, women value more masculine traits, which means not being needy in behavior or conversation. Which can be done by acting aloof and saying cocky things." As soon as I saw those two words: "cocky" and "aloof", it was as if a lightbulb went on in my head. This hard-to-put-your-finger-on kind of feeling I've had for so long, is so precisely captured in those two words: cocky and aloof. Hence the limited texts, the limited phone calls, and the general sense of distance I've felt with the various men. I thought about them a lot, and longed for something hearty and substantial, but being with them felt like running on caffeine on an empty stomach, I couldn't shake this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

A technique to demonstrate your cockiness could be achieved in the form of a "neg" – a negative hit. Anyone who's read The Game would be familiar with this term. Negs originated in the pubs and nightclubs of L.A., where the most glamorous and beautiful women gather for planet Hollywood. Because these women, models and actresses, are so used to being complimented all the time, a negative hit, a tease, a subtle rude remark, hooks their attention. A neg could be blowing your nose at dinner, and then handing your date the dirty tissue. Or telling a girl who's an 8 that she's a 6.

The girl who doesn't realize she's being negged, spends her afternoon chasing around the guy who called her a six, demanding in near hysteria, "Why am I a six?" And the nice guys watching from the sidelines are scratching their heads going, 'How come the douchebag always gets the girl? It's so friggin' unfair!' What they don't see is, the drama they're witnessing is pretty much as good as it gets. He may have gotten her attention like a cartoon circus performer, he's not going to win her heart.

If I may make a side commentary here, negs, when done well, can be a friendly tease. But when done poorly, as it often is, can be very insulting. Not to mention hurtful, especially to girls who've just come out of breakups and happen to be re-entering the dating scene with shattered self-confidence. (Dating tip: ladies, next time a guy subtly insults your intelligence, body shape, appearance, or even the your pinky finger, just know you've been negged. Go ahead and call him out on it, or better yet, walk away, and find someone more nourishing to chat with. Please don't go home and dwell on it for the rest of time. Treat negs like Mission Impossible messages, let them self-destruct in 5 seconds.)

It wasn't until now that I understood why I was called conceited one minute and then complimented the next. At the time I was so shocked. How am I conceited? Who, Me? What did I do? But now as I look back, all I can do is laugh – what a waste of brain space trying to figure that out. My time would be better spent reading the Oxford English Dictionary. For pleasure.

However, as Kane noted, negs don't work in Asia. He goes on to explain that acting cocky and aloof works in the west is because the western culture is much more individualistic. The more you can stand out and stand apart of your group, the lone horseman saves the day, so to speak, the higher your perceived social value. With a neg, he places himself at a higher social hierarchy, by subtly insulting the other. This is masculine. And this is attractive. Whereas Asian cultures are more collectivist. Once rapport is established, it is rarely broken. A neg would mean immediately breaking rapport, thereby separating oneself from the group, moreover, it chafes directly against the Asian value of humility. In his decade long dating experience in Asia, Kane writes, "negs could cost you the girl."

Negs aside, even without the training of pick-up artists, cocky and aloof is still very much alive and well, filling up the world of dating the way Starbucks fill up the streets of Seattle. As Kane noted before, this has a lot to do with western individualism.

A recent article I'd read in the New York Times digs a little deeper. "We like to think of ourselves as unique, autonomous, self-motivated, self-made," wrote T.L. Lurhmann,"but the rest of the world see themselves as interwoven with other people, interdependent, not independent." Robust experiments back this observation up. The most interesting of which is how wheat farming and rice farming created the social worlds of individualism and collectivism.

Rice is a finicky crop. It requires complex irrigation systems (standing water), and a community of rice farmers working tightly together to plant and harvest. One farmer's use of water could affect his neighbor's yield. On the other hand, wheat only needs rainfall, and not irrigation. To plant and harvest wheat requires half as much work as rice does, and hence much less coordination and cooperation. Over thousands of years, the Europeans have grown wheat, and Asians have grown rice. Rice and wheat growing societies developed distinct cultures.

"Asked to draw their social networks, the wheat-region subjects drew themselves larger than their friends; the rice-region subjects drew their friends larger than themselves. Asked to describe how they'd behave if a friend caused them to lose money in a business, subjects from the rice region punished their friends less than subjects from the wheat region did. Those in the wheat provinces held more patents; those in the rice provinces had a lower rate of divorce," wrote Lurhmann.

Hence the cocky and aloof approach. And the distance. Oh...the distance.

At first I thought it was just me, who's being needy and clingy, for wanting to feel closer with the men I dated. But as I talked to more and more women, reading their memoirs, their blogs, I realized, even western women have trouble with this unfathomable gulf of distance. Elizabeth Gilbert, confesses in her memoir Eat Pray Love, how heartsick she felt with her lover, David, who was "always disappearing from the room, from the bed, from the planet...in need of more personal space than a herd of American bison." Lena Durham, the producer of HBO series: Girls, chronicles in her memoir with heartbreaking honesty, her phase of one-night-stands with men. Which are supposedly fun and wild, but they didn't sound fun, not to her, not even while they were happening. They just sounded hurtful.

My friend Sarf said the reason dating is so difficult in Vancouver is because it's so multicultural. Men don't know which cultural standards/habits/behaviors to subscribe to, and what the women are expecting.

He tells me he's personally dated women who will insist on splitting the bill, who get offended when he opened the doors, and who genuinely prefer to ride their bicycles to dates. I believe him. There are women like me, who just like a good old-fashioned gentleman. I thought my kind of woman and that kind of woman must be totally different women.

But then I came across a revelatory blog of a western woman. A doctor, a business owner, a single mother, who's as much of an epitome of independent feminist as you'll get in America. She confesses that as a teenager, she resisted the idea of being "lady-like", she was repulsed by the Victorian rules of behavior. When she was 15 years old, she would scoff at her father who'd hold the door open for her. She worked on a farm, refused to shave her legs, celebrated farting in public. She "didn't want to be refined, elegant, or gain the approval of her very Victorian father." She was a feminist! But "underneath of that there was a small spring bubbling, an energy inside of [her] that actually craved to be perceived as 'lady-like.'"

Now at 35, she's grown into her feminine side. She pays close attention to which men hold the door open for her. Her eyes scan the streets or a store, and take moments of pause as she seeks chivalry. "And when those moments appear in my day, those seconds of interaction I share with a true gentleman, I simultaneously melt into joy and relax knowing that I have been seen and tended to, brief though it was."

If even she wants chivalry, then...

———-

I want to share here, a piece of research which is important. In Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington, developed something called – the Love Lab. "If he analyzes an hour of husband and wife talking", wrote Gladwell, "He can predict with up to 95% accuracy of whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later." After over 3000 couples, Gottman and his team have analyzed it to the T, categorizing every conceivable emotion that flash across the couple's faces. Of those hundreds of emotions, they have identified four that are detrimental to the longevity of a relationship. They call them the Four Horsemen. Defensiveness. Stonewalling. Criticism. Contempt. Of those four, the most deadly is – contempt.

Contempt is special. "It's trying to put that person on a lower plan than you. It's hierarchical...it is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community," said Gottman.  It is the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.

Gottman goes on to explain that the relationship between two people has "a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically."  The patterns of interaction a couple forges at the beginning of their relationship, as early as their first meeting often carries on throughout the relationship.

Here we have psychologists proving with 95% accuracy that contempt is poison to a relationship, meanwhile, masses of young men are going out of their way to be cocky and aloof in an effort to be attractive. If you put those two together, it ain't looking so good.

I think this cultural trend of acting cocky and aloof in dating hurts us more than it serves us. I think western women, despite their feminist exteriors, their independence, also long for tenderness and emotional intimacy. And the men suffer also. Because the western culture so heavily favors masculine traits, some men cannot tolerate any feminine traits within themselves. Fearing it'll be a sign of weakness, making them "less of a man" as Emma Watson noted in her UN speech. Elizabeth Gilbert, when she went undercover as a man to write an article for GQ, said, "Being a man felt so restrictive...as if I was looking at everything from 10 inches behind my eyeballs." Daniel Jones, who's been editing the New York Times Modern Love column for over a decade, writes, "A lot of men's stories are tinged by regret and nostalgia. They wish previous relationships hadn't ended or romantic opportunities hadn't slipped away. They lament not having been more emotionally open with lovers, wives, parents and children." Reading all this makes me more than a little frustrated and exasperated. I hope this will change. I hope the restrictive confines of culture that no longer serve us will be shed like dead skin. I hope we can all love each other a little more bravely, more tenderly, more closely. I hope chivalry will be cool again.

It took coming back to China for me to realize, the kind of emotional intimacy I want, the kind of gentleman I want, the kind of closeness I need in order to fall in love, is a lot easier to find in the Chinese culture.