Chilean men--or lack thereof

This post is part of a multi-blog blog (like that? an English teacher using a made-up word as both a noun and a verb in one sentence?). Essentially there are masses of us gringos blogging away here in Chile (there it is again). Why? Inexplicable. Maybe it's because you can't throw a stone here (if you were inclined to) without hitting one of Pablo Neruda's houses. Or maybe we're all just exhibitionists. Can't really say. I for one was entirely against the concept when I moved here (see post numero uno for proof). I like to write, though, and as I seemed unable to put pen to paper without going on for pages about emotional ups and downs, I figured measures needed to be taken to ensure that I would have some writing of value to represent my Chilean Years (as the book of my life will label them).

That's fab, Meredith, you may be thinking, but what's this multi-blog business? Or, you may be thinking, are you capable of writing a sentence without a parentheses in it?

To the point. A woman who writes a really interesting blog in Santiago has organized a project of having various Chile bloggers writing on the same subject all at once, then inter-linking the results. I think this could yield some really interesting results, so I'm jumping in and hoping to see more of this in the future. You can check out the other posts through her blog.

The topic for this particular post was set as "Chilean men." I sat down to think about what I had to add to this discussion, at first I thought, "not much."

I slowly realized though that that, in and of itself, is a bit of an oddity.

I came to Chile alone. I've been here for over six months and I am single. None of this is particularly shocking to me, other than the fact that I've managed to avoid starting a pointless relationship simply out of boredom (a vice of mine). Everyone else in the country, though, seems to be completely blindsided by my manless-ness.

It is apparently very difficult to stay single in this country. Walk into any park and you are in danger of tripping over a tangled couple. When my students talk about themselves, if there is a girlfriend or a boyfriend in the picture, you know about it by sentence number two, because every free time activity involves him or her. (sample conversation: Me: "What did you do last weekend?" Student: "I went to visit my boyfriend. I watched a movie with my boyfriend. I went walking with my boyfriend....") People's significant others call them and ask simply, "Where are you?" This is not a simple request for information...this is shorthand for "disclose your location, because I'm coming, and I don't intend to ask what you think about that because we are dating and therefore you want me present at every moment." Basically, codependency, like awkward, is not a word that would make sense here. It would translate roughly as "in a relationship."

In a climate like this, it makes sense that everyone who is not in a relationship tends to be actively seeking one with the intentness of a job hunter. I once had someone explain to me that he had recently ended a two year relationship, but he was ready to get back on the market because it had been over two weeks since the big break up. Plenty of alone time to think things over.

So when I say that I'm not really looking because I "recently ended a relationship," and then am pushed into disclosing that "recently" means six or seven months ago, people just think I'm out of my mind.

I should mention that one of the myriad of benefits of living in a machisto culture is that everyone I meet, particularly men, asks about my relationship status on first encounter. Even if I work with them. Even if I work for them, for that matter, or if I am their teacher. So this topic comes up pretty frequently.

Explaining that I am a disaster in the Spanish language (see: title bar of this blog) doesn't help me out much either. In the roughly translated words of one well-meaning interrogator (with whom I have a professional relationship which would have precluded this conversation in other countries): "What are you talking about?! You're very pretty! You don't need to be able to speak well!"

I actually prefer to be able to communicate with romantic partners, thanks. I'll leave my response at that because I'm sure you can imagine what the rest of it would be.

I had one private lesson that pretty much consisted of me spending 90 minutes, three times a week, explaining all of the ins and outs of my relationship status. No joke. I'd tell him to practice asking questions in the simple past, and the first one he'd come up with would be, "Why did you break up with your ex-boyfriend?"

The unintelligible quality of my single status comes from two main angles, as I see it. First, I'm 25, which means I should be husband-hunting based on common logic. A friend told me that she was recently reading a women's magazine which had conducted a survey in which Chilean women were asked what they were most afraid of. One of the top ten was not getting married. So when people hear that I'm not dating anyone, they go into a bit of empathetic panic. Some people I've talked to seem to equate my current state of mind as the equivalent of a near-suicidal giving-up on life.

Secondly, I'm a gringa. Living in Chile. But not because I am dating or married to a Chilean man. I've touched on this before: this is totally incomprehensible to 99% of people that I meet. To be fair, I myself know very few foreign women who are living in Chile for reasons other than a Chilean partner. Many came for other reasons, but stayed for a relationship. So the fact that I don't have a departure date OR a boyfriend is just an unreal combination.

Well, Chile, get used to it. I spent a whole bunch of years being completely undiscerning in my choice of men. The old criteria was pretty much: you're here, you like me, let's date. In short, when I was living in the United States, I dated like a Chilean. Now that I'm in Chile, I am planning to be picky and date like a gringa.