West vs East : Relationship and family values.

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Good thread Boo.

I am just in the middle of my first real friendship with an Eastern female so am coming accross these differences in conversations. I saw nothing you wrote that didn't match what I have observed so far.

I am thinking on the subject now and might have something to add, but for the moment just one observation comes to mind. You touch on it lightly when you say men anywhere would probably like sex when they can get it.

What I see (but admittedly with only a limited view) is distinct double standard when it comes to men and women and sexual activity in the East. It seems to be generally accepted that men can have premarital sex with whomever they can find. Women on the other hand are kept to a much stricter standard and are expected to be virgins at marriage. To make up for the mutually opposite systems, Eastern men seem to treat Eastern women as one thing, but any foreign, particularly western women as another and fair game for advances. Also, when eastern men are in the west they often persue activities prohibited at home, such as porn, strip clubs, etc.

My initial conclusion is that Eastern and Western men are pretty identical in nature and only conform to societal norms for the sake of fitting in/working within the structure they were handed at birth.

^ This is all.... true.
Stud/slut double standard exists almost everywhere but it gets amplified the more the culture is reserved and macho, and it's no secret that Eastern cultures are more macho than the West.

I re-recite an incident I talked about here: Back in the university, my clique of friends tried to drag me to go with them to a known brothel (brothels and massage parlors are common where I live); they all had gfs and I was like "but you have gfs" - they laughed.

Obviously they weren't having sex with their gfs.

This surprised me a little because as RetroGamer87 pointed, the stigma of living with parents seems to be still there in the West despite this is happening a lot nowadays?

Because really, I have seen female members here saying how they don't like guys living with parents and how is considered an unattractive attribute.
So as a foreign observant, I thought that moving out at young age it is still a standard in the West.




In the East, moving out happens only if:
- Marriage.
-The child is studying in a college away from parent's home, but once finished he/she returns to home; and expected to return on weekends if not so far.
- If he/she is working abroad.

In fact....there's an opposite stigma here, if a guy is living alone then he's often thought he did something really shameful to get expelled from family.

Yes, the moving age has changed in the USA at least. I think it was mostly financially driven. Actual wages buying power has deteriorated slowly but surely over some 3 decades. So kids are less able to afford a place of their own at starting wages. Also, better paying jobs have been more difficult to get, for 1 1/2 decades (outsourcing and recession).

But your right in that the negative stigma of 'still living at home' has persisted longer.

The average marrying age has drifted older and older too. Like my parents generation married around age 20, my gen around 25 and this gen closer to 30.

I think you can blame the American sub prime rate loan housing bubble for an increase in housing costs throughout the western world. Another reason is population increase, for which housing has not scaled proportionally.

In the city I am in, there is no space to expand, so to increase housing, one structure must be torn down, and a taller one must be built, and they also must build underground parking. That's all very costly, so developers have no choice but to charge high rents. Additionally, a lot of people want to live here. So it comes down to supply and demand. Short supply + high demand = high prices.

That's it, only the stigma remains but the reality has not. The majority of people I know who are my age moved out at twenty-something. The exception being one girl I knew who lived in a small country town and had to move to Adelaide to attend university (in Australia, only people who live in the country leave home to study, if you live in a city, you attend university in your city while living at home (I'm really confused by the American notion that everyone has to live on campus, it seems like it would make college more expensive but it could be that in Australia more than half the population lives in five cities and the Eastern half of America has a more even population distribution, meaning that not all of them live within half an hour's travel of a university).

I've noticed the stigma comes mostly from older people. Middle aged or older. I've had old men call me basement dwellers. I overheard a middle aged lady at work express a similar sentiment. She moved out of home at 18 but that was in a different time.

The trouble with a lot of people is they think of young people in terms of how things were when they were young. The stigma remains because middle aged people may have been able to move out very cheaply when they were young. Nowadays young people have a hard time affording to move out. So older people judge them by the standards of when they were young. They forget that things were much cheaper in their time.

50 years ago college tuition was cheaper. You could work your way through college. Nowadays it's impossible without student loans or outside help.

I've seen people middle aged or older say that young people nowadays are too soft. In some ways they are but not when it comes to money. Young people face much greater financial challenges nowadays. Everything is more expensive. Housing, education, even getting married costs more than it used to.

I've seen old people chastise young people and boast that they were financially self-supporting in their teens but nowadays it's less practical to support yourself using unskilled labour. 50 years ago an unskilled labourer could earn enough for himself, his non-working homemaker wife and his four kids to live in comfort, while paying off a mortgage. I know because that's precisely what my grandfather did in the 60s while working as a janitor.

Nowadays unskilled labour is not a financially viable option if you want to live independently. You must learn some sort of skill and that means going to college. Not only does it mean you have to put yourself in tens of thousands of dollars of debt before you enter your career but it also means 4 or 5 years of not working full time, the the 4 or 5 years of study is 4 or 5 years in which you have to live without earning a significant amount.

Also to raise a family and/or buy a house, means not only having a skilled job but your wife must have a skilled job as well. Gone are the days of the nuclear family. The next generation may spend more time in daycare/after school care than with either of their parents (this is bad news for introverted kids) and the next generation may be raised by middle aged parents who have a lengthy checklist of stuff they have to do before they have kids (get promoted, buy overpriced house, etc).

So older people shouldn't be so hard on twenty-agers. Older people don't worry about the cost of housing when they've already paid off their mortgage. Instead they congratulate themselves for living in a house that's quadrupled in value in the last 30 years.

Some old people don't realize that if their house has quadrupled in value that young people hoping to buy a similar house will have to pay four times as much. Did it never occur to them that their fortune could be someone else's misfortune?I've seen that as well. I was trying to chat up this Philipine girl. She was 29, single and still lived with her parents. I told her I live by myself and she was shocked. She said it was very cruel of me to leave my mother alone and said I have to move back in with her.

^This is a truth I hate to admit.

Yeah. When I read that I wasn't sure whether to feel horrified or jealous or both.

On the bright side it inspired me to spend most of Sunday studying for my ISTQB exam. To my dismay I wasn't able to study effectively until 2AM. I couldn't concentrate after 7PM and I had to go to bed at 10:30PM.

I'm a morning person. I'm like a zombie in the evening. I think that girl must be both a morning person and an evening person. How I envy her.

Wait... Drawyer, something tells me you have first hand experience of that.

I got it. You're Korean. You actually lived through that.

^ Since being a person who knows only three countries of NorthEast Asia, and one of them happens to be SouthKorea (No, my knowledge is stuff I've never trusted tho..) I wish you wouldn't mind if I replied on behalf of Drawyer . However, I think I need time to verify qualification to answer after some research. So..Wait.

I wouldn't mind at all.

^ Very nice dude! For some reason I knew it. Anyway I'm thinking it would be kind of me if I could give you some detailed information so..wait..until I'm ready. I'll be being so tired for couple of days.

East....Meets West.....LaChoy makes Chinese Food

That would be kind of you. Take your time. I'll wait.

Another difference I notice between West and East is the traditional marketplaces.

Western traditional markets are usually kiosks or kiosk-like tents, side by side and one after another, displaying the products on the sites of the window or at the sides of the kiosk's door, it's more indoory.

Middle Eastern souks and Asian marketplaces are more chaotic and open-air marketplaces, traditional Asian marketplaces are very similar to Arab traditional souks in the way of displaying products.

Philippine:


China:


Dubai:

Actually, Rome has a very similar-looking indoor marketplace to the one whose picture you posted. And I would call it pretty "chaotic." The similarities are striking, actually.

In New York, in Chinatown, it's very similar as well. People bump into each other without regard for other people. I work in Chinatown; I would never shop there until after 5. I believe it's taken for granted that it will be crowded, and that people will be bumped.

^ Mediterranean cultures (Greece and Italy) obviously share some things with nearby eastern cultures.
Like the sour yogurt for example. :p

Also I often see northern-european women saying that Italian guys are more mama boys. So I guess italians move out late.