For our weekly top picks and freebies straight to your inbox, sign up here.
Hollywood love stories are seldom found on the betel-stained streets of Yangon.
A process, an overlong and tedious amount of forced platonic awkwardness, defines the local dating scene. Then, by chance, you confess your love three years later by text, and, three years after that, tell your parents—that is, if you have the smallest grain of affection left.
Polar opposite but at the same time just as awkward is the world of Tinder and Grindr—the go-to apps for instant gratification or disappointment that are increasingly used in Yangon, like most other cities in the world.
So while we sit cross-legged in front of our computer screens, slurping away at our cup noodles, fantasising about the ideal bae, we wonder where our life would be if we were living in another country.
Fantasise away folks, but the bravest among us attempt to fill the voids in our souls by meeting each other and pretending to be interesting and normal in a nontoxic sort of way. (Not me, I am confined to the panic room in my house).
A 28-year-old expat who self-identifies as *Pierre has been on date after date and if you think Yangon is “fun and games,” like most Southeast Asia countries, he says, “it’s really not.”
Pierre has dated several Myanmar who have been educated abroad, where they grasp the western concept of dating from the windows of their studies and return even more sexually repressed, he says.
For Pierre, Yangon is better enjoyed as a couple, and the single life combined with a language barrier and cultural differences pushes out some foreigners.
Friedrich, 36, wants more dates to feed his perennial search for someone to enjoy Yangon with.
“I just haven’t met enough potential partners,” he says. “Because it’s a small sample size and because I probably haven’t put myself out there enough.”
There is one gin-and-tonic slamming “really gorgeous girl” who bowled over Friedrich.
“Maybe it wasn’t love, but it was awesome,” he adds. “I keep hollering at her now though and she never has time for me. Womp womp. The search continues. As soon as someone flirts with me, I’ll let you know.”
Some local men, such as Kaung, 18 who haven’t dived into the hook-up culture acknowledge that the odds are against them when it comes to getting laid.
“That doesn’t mean it’s not at all possible,” he says, adding that social people who attend events regularly will “find it easier to be in the game."
If Kaung tried Tinder here, he would soon realise that a lot more men use it, and that some women write “looking for friends” in their bios.
Tinder is arguably the wrong place to find friends, and some interviewees for this piece found that frustrating, like someone bringing a basketball when you've planned to play football.
Twenty-something expat Jane has dabbled in Yangon Tinder, which has brought out an “alarming amount of creepy men,” she says.
“There’s already a small community in terms of men, but with women who are also into women, have similar interests and are here more than a few months, it’s difficult,” Jane explains.
Complicating things further, says Jane, is that when men find out she is bisexual, she becomes hyper-sexualized, "which just adds to the challenge faced."
Also facing her fair share of dating challenges is Myanmar-born Hla, 22, who often plays the “stranger danger” game.
“Your luck of finding a bae at a bar depends on correctly assuming whether the person you are pulling is well-cultured or illiterate, drunk or on party drugs, and then guessing how far they are willing to go,” she says.
Like many other expats, Jake, 36, believes his foreigner status gives him the edge in the dating scene.
“Being an expat here has, if anything, increased the likelihood of finding good dates,” he says, adding that the foreigner community is small but most people are keen to know each other.
And another 20-something, a Myanmar guy who is part of the growing gay dating scene in Yangon, describes Tinder as “shite,” preferring to use Grindr.
“Yangon is an incestuous hole where everyone you know has slept with everyone you know,” he adds.
*All of the interviewees wanted to keep their names anonymous (see quote above).