Hi all,
A couple of months on and I thought I'd update this thread.
I still chat on QQ to the first lovely woman I met there, although we have no long term future, we are just good friends now. I have not been to China yet but when I do I'll be trying to get to meet her for sure.
Meanwhile I gave up on chnlove and never got any satisfactory resolution to my complaints. I know when to cut my losses and move on.
I joined a couple of other sites, but the best one I found was chineselovelinks. I lurked there for a month before trusting it enough to pay for a 1 month subscription. Within days I was flooded with messages and replies to my 'interests'. After 1 week I had to shut it down even though I paid for a month.
Since then I have been chatting regularly to a few of them and things have developed to the point that I will have to make some serious decisions soon about who to carry on with. Before anyone gets hurt which I have no intention of doing.
Incidentally one of them who seemed very prim and proper and well spoken (she's an English teacher), just asked me if I would help her by sending her money to buy a new phone because she dropped her old one accidentally in her bucket of water when mopping the floor. I have stalled her as I do not want to be doing that so early in our relationship. SO maybe that is an easy one to eliminate now - a pity as she was so lovely otherwise. I told her that maybe she should buy a cheap phone for now, and when I come to China to visit her we can buy her a decent new phone together. We're not talking a lot of money here - she wants 1850 yuan, but I think it might be the start of a slippery slope considering we have not met or chatted on a webcam yet - just lots of emails and a couple of phone calls over about 8 weeks.
Can you guys tell me if it is common for Chinese woman to not consider sex before marriage? There is one lady in particular I am getting on extremely well with. She says she loves me and wants to marry me. When I said I would come to visit she said she would take me to see the sights and places of historical interest. I jokingly asked does her bedroom count as a place of historical interest, whereby she said she was a good girl and that we would not be married at that stage so I would be in a hotel. Any thoughts? I'm 53 and she is 44 and we've both been through a failed marriage. From a Western point of view, staying together would have been the norm I feel, but I'm happy to just go with the flow with her.
This is in stark contrast to some of the other women I have chatted to on QQ, but then again they are not the ones I feel I might have a long term future with.
Oh, and the translation issues that I started this thread with: not really a problem any more as I have got used to what type of language translates well and what doesn't and I structure my words to suit. I also use the built in QQ translate as well as Google plus other engines if I find any misunderstandings. This reinforces in my mind how fraudulent the chnlove EMF emails were with so-called professional translators, whereas I have no problems communicating and joking with women on QQ that speak no English at all.
cheers,
Steve