I Know What Boys Want...
Walking around the sandy streets in Mompiche, one of the first things most tourist girls notice is the number of local men who don’t wear shirts in public. Obviously, they’re out there daily showing off their chiseled bodies to as many women as possible. Six-pack abs. Bulging biceps. Smooth quads. Tight glutes. It’s hard to miss the eye candy on display. Only a blind person would fail to see how well put together the Mompicheros are. At a glance, they look strong and healthy. Most of them are surfers, and some are fishermen. Both their work and play demand a high level of fitness. They’re extremely pretty to look at… Until they open their mouths and you learn they are, for the most part, airheads. To be fair, the lack of education available to them is not their fault.
There’s a kind of boy’s club vibe in the village, particularly among the surfers, and seemingly a competition to see who can bag the most foreign girls each surf season. We collectively call them land sharks, always on the hunt for women. They have a kind of predatory look in their eye in social situations. If you know what to look out for, you can see it a mile away. More recently, these shark boys are finding themselves hunted by sexually assertive foreign women just as much as they hunt the surfer girls. This has caused some imbalance in the status quo that the boys aren’t used to. It’s fun to watch the descendants of the patriarchy wrestle with this new ideology and come to terms with the fact that they are the summer-fun toy boys for the women and not the other way around. One of the goals for some of these boys is to find a foreign woman who will either like them enough to stick around for a while or take them back to their home country with them.
A number of these young men enter into longer relationships with foreign women. Naturally, due to the massive disparities in income and local job opportunities, the women generally pay for everything in these relationships, like rent and food, beer and even travel, unless he already has his own successful business in the village and can pay his own way. Some of these flings last a few weeks, some go deeper for a few months, and some might run their course for a year or two. In my sixteen years in Mompiche, I have never seen a successful relationship between a local man and a foreign woman living in Mompiche. The eventual inevitable culture clash seems insurmountable. Although, you could also say that a lack of culture is the problem. In my observations, there is one exception. When the foreign women take their local boyfriends out of Mompiche, far from the boy’s club environment and away from the bad influences of their friends, these long-term relationships seem to fare much better. Travel is education. It’s an opening of the mind and soul and it forces the men to mature quickly. No longer surrounded by their home boys who encourage them to misbehave, they open their eyes to the bigger picture, grow up fast, and learn to respect other people and cultures.
There are currently a few Mompicheros at large in the world. One is in Italy. One is in France. Two are in Spain. Two are in Germany. Two are partnered with Uruguayan women and spend half the year there and half the year in Mompiche with their kids. These guys have grown into responsible family men who have mad respect for their partners and have developed a love for world travel. They’ve found employment, learned new languages, tried different cuisines, and have built friendships with people from all over the world. Taking them out of the Mompiche bubble turned them into worldly, educated, responsible men. It’s a joy to see them return occasionally for short family visits and see their personal development and growth in real time. It’s wonderful to see how much they have changed for the better while they were out in the world. Of course, some of these relationships still fail, but they seem to have a much better chance while living away from Mompiche.
Culturally, Mompiche’s women aren’t nearly as outgoing as the men so tend to find local partners and stay in the village. It’s not often Mompicheras meet a foreign partner and head across the Atlantic to live and have a family, but it does happen occasionally and this also seems to be a great recipe for a successful relationship. Anyone brave enough to travel far away, leaving behind the comfort of their own home and immerse themselves in a new culture to build a life and home with someone else deserves endless respect...