Ligaw or Lager: A Tale of Two Mating Rituals

🇵🇭 Philippines 🇮🇪 Ireland

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Every culture has a courtship ritual, and every courtship ritual is, structurally, a hostage negotiation. The Philippines has formalised this with centuries of Catholic choreography and a word for it — ligaw — so at least everyone knows the rules going in. Ireland has formalised nothing, because formalising a feeling would require admitting you have one, and the entire national project since 1922 has been avoiding exactly that.

I have been propositioned in a Manila mall cinema queue with more sincerity than I have ever received eye contact in a Dublin pub. I say this not as a complaint but as a finding, filed under "things nobody tells you before you relocate for love, work, or the delusion that the two can be separated." Fourteen house moves in, I've learned that a country's dating culture is just its whole personality, compressed and handed to you across a candlelit table or, in Ireland's case, across a sticky one at 11:47pm while someone shouts about hurling.

Both nations, for what it's worth, are post-colonial Catholic-adjacent islands with a complicated relationship to the English language and a national drink that tells you more about them than any tourism campaign ever will. That's where the resemblance ends. One culture turns courtship into a formal, almost liturgical event with a family panel attached. The other turns it into an endurance sport that nobody admits they're competing in. Guess which one produces more weddings per capita.

Do's & Don'ts: Philippines

Do's & Don'ts: Ireland

Philippines: Courtship as Contact Sport

The Philippine Statistics Authority's marriage data tells you almost everything you need to know before you've booked the flight: in the most recent full breakdown, roughly 3.6 percent of registered marriages involved a foreign national, and the pattern among Filipino brides marrying foreign grooms skews heavily American, Japanese, Australian, British, and Korean, in that order. Translation: the Philippines has been fielding foreign suitors for decades, has built an entire social infrastructure around it, and has opinions about you that predate your arrival by several generations of in-laws.

That infrastructure is called ligaw, and it is not casual. It is flowers, it is formal dinners, it is being vetted by an extended family that will ask about your job, your intentions, and occasionally your net worth within the first sitting. Western men arriving expecting the breezy anonymity of swiping culture discover instead that Filipino dating is closer to a small-scale diplomatic negotiation, conducted with extraordinary warmth and an equally extraordinary amount of scrutiny. On the expat.com forum thread I read on exactly this subject, one long-term resident posting as flex14 compared the ease of meeting single people to "picking sea shells at the beach" — and then, six replies later, another poster named dirk.c. was warning that any serious relationship needs you to understand the family's financial expectations before anyone starts "falling in love quickly." Both things are true simultaneously, which is the whole country in miniature.

The warmth is not performance — GMA News reported survey findings suggesting a majority of expats found connecting with Filipinos straightforward, with a sizeable share wanting to stay permanently. But warmth and vulnerability travel together here, and the same openness that makes the Philippines genuinely one of the friendliest places on earth to be a lonely foreigner also makes it fertile ground for exactly the exploitative dynamics that forum veteran fixfireleo and Greyone48 both flagged bluntly, in rather less diplomatic language than mine. You are, to a meaningful minority, a walking visa and ATM. You are, to the actual majority, a potential son-in-law being evaluated with total sincerity. Learning to tell the two apart is the entire assignment.

Ireland: Love in the Time of Reticence

Ireland, meanwhile, is having a very public breakdown about dating that it refuses to discuss directly, which is itself the most Irish thing imaginable. The CSO's own loneliness figures, cited recently in the Irish Times by a writer who tried Bumble BFF just to make platonic friends in his thirties, found that fifteen percent of adults felt lonely at least some of the time in the past month — and separately, an EU-wide survey placed Ireland at the top of the regional loneliness table. This is a country whose entire cultural output is built on conviviality — pubs, trad sessions, the deranged tribal theatre of the GAA — and which is nonetheless, by the numbers, struggling to connect one-on-one more than almost anywhere else in Europe.

The marriage statistics confirm the mood: the CSO recorded 20,348 marriages in 2024, down nearly four percent on the year before and down 7.7 percent across the decade, with the average bride now 35.9 and the average groom 37.7 — both roughly three years older than a decade ago. Nobody is rushing anything. Civil ceremonies have all but overtaken Catholic ones, which tells you the institution people are still choosing is marriage, just stripped of the religious scaffolding that used to make it compulsory.

What foreigners discover, fast, is that the Irish social scene is a masterclass in indirection dressed up as the warmest hospitality on the continent. Everyone will talk to you in the pub. Nobody will tell you they like you in the pub. An ExpatExchange thread on Dublin's social scene produced two completely contradictory verdicts from two different expats — one calling the city "vibrant, diverse, and welcoming," the other noting flatly that "it's very difficult to become friends with natives, so the expats are all that are left." Both are correct, depending entirely on whether you've cracked the code: that Irish affection is expressed through piss-taking, showing up repeatedly, and never, ever stating your feelings in a way that could be used against you later.

A Reddit thread on r/AskIreland, started by a 25-year-old Dubliner asking why dating apps weren't working and why plans kept quietly dissolving, is the national condition in miniature: nobody ghosts you out of cruelty, they simply never develop the vocabulary to cancel properly, so the plan just evaporates. You are not being rejected. You are being absorbed into a culture that would rather let a plan die of natural causes than say the word "no" out loud.

The Verdict

If you want to be courted, go to the Philippines. If you want to be slowly, almost accidentally absorbed into a social ecosystem over eighteen months of pub quizzes and never discussed again, go to Ireland. Both systems work. Neither is designed for people in a hurry, though the Philippines at least has the decency to dress the delay in flowers and formal dinners rather than deflecting silence.

The Philippines wins on sheer velocity and warmth — you will have more genuine human contact in your first fortnight in Cebu than in six months in Cork. But Ireland wins, grudgingly, on durability: the relationships that survive the Irish reluctance to ever say anything plainly tend to be built on real compatibility, because nobody got swept into them on vibes alone. Suki's verdict: Philippines for the thrill, Ireland for the marriage that lasts because you were both too embarrassed to leave.

What Nobody Warned You About

expat.com forum, Asia > Philippines thread — fixfireleo: "the majority see you as a walking ATM and will 'date' you for the money."

ExpatExchange.com, Dublin social scene thread — anonymous expat: "It's very difficult to become friends with natives, so the expats are all that are left."

Reddit r/AskIreland, "Dating in Dublin" — paraphrased from the original poster's account: dating apps have mostly gone nowhere, plans with matches routinely fall through, and finding someone decent in your twenties in Dublin feels harder than anyone warned her it would be.

Conclusion

Here is the thing nobody puts in the brochure: dating abroad is just regular dating, with the added humiliation of doing it in a language and value system you're still reverse-engineering in real time. The Philippines will hand you more affection than you know what to do with and ask you to prove you deserve it. Ireland will make you work for three pub quizzes' worth of eye contact before admitting, very quietly, that it likes you. Choose your discomfort. Just don't, under any circumstances, call either country "exotic" while you're swiping — you'll out yourself as the problem before anyone else has the chance to.