After 50 Countries, I Realized American Dating Isn’t Normal; It’s Cultural

The woman on the train in Kuala Lumpur changed how I understood love

Photo by Canva

I was somewhere between Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur when I met her. A Malaysian woman, early thirties, easy to talk to in that particular way that long train rides make strangers easy to talk to. We introverts respect people who can initiate conversations without the awkwardness.

We talked about travel, about family, and about the strange freedom of being in motion through a country that isn’t yours. At some point she pulled out her phone and showed me a photo of her husband.

I noticed my reaction before I could stop it.

I was surprised.

He wasn’t what I expected. Not because there was anything wrong with him, but because nothing about him matched the invisible checklist I didn’t know I was carrying. He wasn’t what American media had quietly told me a woman who looked like her should have chosen.

I sat with that reaction for the rest of the ride. Because the reaction wasn’t about him. It was about me. About where I was from. About the specific distortion that American culture puts on your eyes when it comes to love.

The young lady was very attractive. Thinking with my shallow American mindset, I expected a man with Hollywood looks and the appearance of money.

In the USA, many attractive women usually date and marry this particular archetype of man.

That’s when it hit me; my own prejudice shows itself in three seconds of surprised silence.

That was the beginning of a long unlearning.

What 50 countries taught me about desire that America never could

Let me say the uncomfortable thing first:

Americans are some of the most media-programmed daters on earth. Not because Americans are shallow people but because the machine that shapes American desire is more sophisticated, more pervasive, and more invisible than almost anywhere else I’ve been.

The media controls what is considered attractive to both men and women.

Hollywood, reality television, and R&B music that equate love with obsession. Dating apps that turn human beings into a scroll. A cultural narrative that ties self-worth to being chosen by someone who looks a certain way, earns a certain amount, projects a certain image.

Most Americans don’t know they’re running this program. I certainly didn’t until I noticed that I was attracted to a certain look.

I discovered this by having a dating journal. This was not to embarrass others but to understand my own habits, blind spots, and thought process.

I thought my preferences were mine. I thought what I found attractive was personal. I didn’t understand that personal desire is always downstream of cultural conditioning and that the only way to see the water you’re swimming in is to spend enough time on dry land.

It took me 50 countries to notice that I was looking for the same woman.

The pattern I kept seeing everywhere

Here is what I noticed, city by city, culture by culture, conversation by conversation:

The stronger the cultural cohesion, the less media dictates who people choose.

In countries like Malaysia, Egypt, Japan, and China where family, community, and tradition are prioritized over individual preferences, the Hollywood model of an ideal partner is hardly relevant. Instead, people choose partners based on different values such as legacy, compatibility, family harmony, and cultural preservation. This type of pragmatic love isn’t less genuine than passionate love; it’s simply rooted in different principles.

This is not a ranking. I’m not telling you arranged marriages are better than love marriages or that collectivist cultures have figured out something individualist cultures haven’t. Every system has its cost. In places where family controls your choice, the cost is autonomy. In places where media controls your desire, the cost is depth.

What I’m saying is this: when you’ve seen both operating up close, you stop pretending that your preferences were ever entirely your own.

This isn’t something I saw on YouTube, heard on a podcast, or saw on TikTok. This is a repeated pattern I saw over 50 times in 50 countries.

America’s specific distortion

The United States is the most individualistic dating culture I’ve encountered anywhere in the world. And individualism in dating sounds like freedom: you love who you love, you choose who you choose, nobody’s family gets a vote.

But here’s what I observed underneath that freedom:

Americans don’t actually date freely. They date according to what freedom is supposed to look like, as defined by Hollywood, social media, the playlist that was playing when they first fell in love, and the celebrity whose face became the face of desirability before they were old enough to question it.

I had an ex once who told me, casually, that she’d been attracted to me because I resembled a musician she loved. She meant it as a compliment. What it actually was, and what I couldn’t name at the time, was a window into how thoroughly American culture outsources desire to image.

In the countries that shape my writing, such as Brazil, West Africa, Southeast Asia, Southern Europe, this kind of admission would be genuinely strange. Not because people there don’t find anyone attractive. But because attractiveness in those cultures is constructed differently. It’s relational, contextual, embedded in a community’s values rather than a media cycle’s preferences.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying the media doesn’t have influence over other cultures, but what I am saying is that being heavily influenced by the media is American culture.

What Brazil specifically decoded for me

Brazil is where I’ve done the deepest living outside America, and Brazil is where I had to confront my own American dating programming most directly.

Brazilian romantic culture is warm, physical, expressive, and present in a way that genuinely unsettled me when I first arrived. The touching, the sustained eye contact, the directness of interest, none of it had the hesitancy or the performance quality I was used to from dating in the States.

What I initially read as intensity was actually just honesty. Brazilians feel love out loud. Out in the open, you will see Brazilians kissing like teenagers behind the bleachers in high school.

What this means for how you date

The woman on the train didn’t teach me that one approach to love is right and another wrong. She taught me that desire has a passport, that who we find attractive, what we value in a partner, and what we expect love to feel like, all of it is shaped by where we grew up, what we watched, and what we were told was worth wanting.

Fifty countries didn’t give me a better dating philosophy. They gave me the ability to see the ones I was brainwashed by.

Once you can see the water you’ve been swimming in, you get to decide, consciously and deliberately, about how much of it you want to keep.

The deeper pattern

The experience of desire, attachment, longing, connection, these are not cultural inventions. They are human constants.

But the container that holds them, such as the rules about who is acceptable, what signals attraction, how that attraction should be expressed, what the purpose of a partnership is, is entirely cultural. And every culture on earth has a different one.

The American container is not more evolved than the Malaysian one. The Brazilian container is not more honest than the Japanese one. They are each shaped by different histories, different economies, different relationships between the individual and the group.

What 50 countries gave me is the ability to hold more than one container at a time. To look at love not through the lens of what I was taught to want but through the wider, clearer lens of what human beings, across every culture I’ve moved through, have always been reaching for.