Eshin Direct

Being around family helped reaffirm things in me that I perhaps needed to see to know what it fully meant. Choosing to marry someone shouldn’t be a selfish affair for someone who was raised with quite strong family values, although he rarely will admit to it.

My mother had the opportunity to remind me of my obligations in selecting the future Mrs. Eshin. Of course, she didn’t quite phrase it that way but then my mother has this habit of wholeheartedly endorsing free will yet rationally eliminating what other choices detract from her obvious opinion. In this way, she is wholeheartedly Dutch and a product of a family who have all at some point, worked in advertising. Two of the things weigh heavily on me – stop dating older women and pick someone the family get on with.

Dating older women (I’m not partial to older women, it just happened that way since I’ve been in HK) is perhaps her way of saying you aren’t ready for marriage and kids. I know I’m not but I think its a testament to her ability to think outside the box when she herself had already been married at young age. She also knows me as well as myself although I hate to admit it. She’s right in that I’m not ready for all of that but does know that I want it eventually. All I’ll say is women who do want family and kids have certain time restraints on them to do so. Older women want that now rather than later.

Finding someone who will get on with my family was something I had largely ignored. My uncle doesn’t necessarily agree with my mother on this and believes that if two people love each other, then it shouldn’t matter. To a certain degree, he is also right but at the dating stage, you do still have the option out to pick a family-friendly girlfriend and future wife.

Is it important to pick someone who is agreeable with the family? Well, my family does have an interesting history of divorce and remarriage (ironic, given the strong family values) but it highlights the fact that family, in some form or another, will always be there. Of course, at the end of th day, I need to spend the most time with a partner in my life and time with the extended family are more like snapshots in time rather than a continuous. But I’m part of my family, and my family is important to me so essentially part of my happiness is someone that my family approves of.

More importantly was spending time with my sister and her family. She’s just had her second baby and her first is at the interesting age of four. It was the first time I’d stayed over at my sister’s place and it gave me a chance to see the importance of raising a family in the right way. The phrase, “the mother of my kids” was brought to a whole new level of reality in me in that I saw the responsibility of not only raising kids, but raising them in the fold of a family tradition. The opportunity to see how she is forming the next generation of my family, the people that eventually my own children will have the opportunity to bond and form relationships with, was almost poetry in motion.

Am I looking for a wife? As youth recedes and the innocence of fucking around is shed, I find myself knowing exactly what I want in a woman and what I don’t want. For some who know me, this is being picky and being nitty-gritty. The past year has seen me chasing after several women and when they haven’t been quite up to standard, I’ve lost interest. One can’t blame them for having this opinion of me but at the same time, knowing what I want is just as important as having someone in your life too.

Unfortunately, the casualty count has already begun.