All of our lives, we girls have been told that big, strapping men are the best. That we will and should fall in love with a man who’s taller than us, stronger than us, heavier than us. So when we girls meet guys who don’t fit that criteria, we aren’t interested. We expect a guy to be able to throw us over his shoulder, carry us over the threshold on our wedding night, and not have to use a step stool to get something off the top shelf.

Biology has a say in this too: we want big strong men because they can protect us. Big strong men can also produce big, strong, healthy babies.

Concurrently, it’s portrayed that our mate will be our same ethnicity and that he’ll speak our same accent-less language. To add to that, I grew up in a small town thats population is probably 95% white and accent-less. Same goes for my college and the town I lived in after college.

Like Eric, Aladdin, and Prince Charming, our own prince charming will be a babe – an 11 on the babe-o-meter.

With everything I was told – from the media, by my friends and family, biologically, etc. – I had this picture in my head of a white, tall, strong, English-speaking hunk of a man whom I’d marry.

And then…life hit. I moved to Hong Kong where I met men from all over the world. I was exposed to more than the storybooks and more than my sweet little hometown produced. My “who I’m going to marry” picture flipped on itself. There’s a whole world of attractive, funny, kind men who don’t look like me, whose first language isn’t English, and who aren’t taller/stronger/heavier than me.

I am attracted to these men, yet I find it hard to shake this idea of the dream package of a man I was supposed to meet, fall in love with, and marry. So when I meet these shorter, darker, linguistic men, I’m mostly intrigued, though slightly worried that they aren’t the one for me. I’ve been told for 32 years that I should think one way and that I should meet a man who looks a specific way.

Through all of the trials and tribulations of my dating life (good golly, if you’ve followed along for the past 6 years that I’ve been chronicling them, you’re a saint), I have realized that there is SO MUCH more to a man than his height. I want a man who is kind to me. I want a man who is cultured, well-traveled and worldly. I want a man who loves and likes his family. I want a man who wants me for who I really am. These are the things that truly matter – not the color of his skin, his shirt size, or his rating on the babe-o-meter.

Even if my future mate isn’t everything I always dreamed of as a little girl, I sure do hope he’s everything I dream of as a big girl.