Dating Daze

Lest you think otherwise, ladies and gents, let’s clear this up once and for all. Names matter. They’re important little pieces of data that deserve recognition in their own right. Just look at the name-letter effect and the studies that show we’re more likely to marry someone whose name starts with the same letter as ours or is otherwise similar.

They play a part in how we perceive other people too. And as much as I hate to do this, Jean Pierre gets serious points on the sheer sexiness of his name alone. His is still one of the best if not the best names I’ve heard to this day.

Why he shortened it to J.P. I’ll never know. He should have known better than to waste one of his biggest assets like that. Your name is Jean Pierre, Jean Pierre. Run with it. You’re only hurting yourself with your careless abbreviation. Your time would be much better spent handing out business cards with nothing else on them but ‘Jean Pierre’ and your number to every woman you see. Because is there anything else we really need to know? Nope, that about says it all.

Another name that springs to mind from my dating past is Valentino, although I must say I feel his parents were trying to do a little too much with that one. Valentino? Really padres? How is your son not going to grow up a ladies’ man when you go and do something like that?

Now technically, Valentino is his middle name and Juan is his first, which is actually worse, because if you take the time to put it all together, his full name is basically Don Juan Valentino, Latin Lover at Your Service. He lived up to its legacy too, with his long hair and salsa dancing and womanizing ways. Sometimes the name really does say it all. And it was all in that name. He never stood a chance.

I haven’t always dated guys with such memorable names though. At Cal, my boyfriend ‘Kevin’ was a fixture for a while, and Kevins are pretty common, right? A dime a dozen ’round some parts.

If you’re picturing a white guy though, let me set the record straight. Kevin was blatantly Asian, Chinese to be exact. (I’m 100% positive about that too. I have an eye for these things, unlike my Grandma, who, after spending the whole day with my black friend Janelle and I asked my mom, “Now, is Janelle black?”)

Please tell me you’re not shocked that ‘Kevin’ was Asian though. Remember, I attended Cal. ‘Nuff said. My dorm floor mates consisted of me, Janelle, one Latina girl, one Korean girl, and 25 Asian guys. That’s the honest-to-goodness truth. I have pictures to prove it and everything. We even put together a “Men of The 7th Floor” calendar that would have blown up in Asia had we had the right distribution. I mean that too.

So it’s makes sense that after months of late night Korean BBQ outings and viewings of ‘The Killer’ and movies with ‘Shaolin’ in the title, something would eventually happen between ‘Kevin’ Lee and I. Pretty inevitable that I would fall under the ‘Asian Persuasion’, which is defined by the Urban Dictionary as, ‘the spell cast upon an individual in love with a member of the Asian race.’ I sure was under the spell too with that ‘Kevin’. He was one of the nicest and gentlemanly-est guys I’ve ever been with. Treated me like a real princess.

I’ve been putting his name in quotes (or whatever those things are called, punctuation isn’t exactly my forte) because regardless of what a great a guy he was, I later found out that I didn’t exactly know him quite as well as I thought. There was one very important thing about him on which I was completely mistaken. Like, um, his name?

Which I realized when his Mom came to visit and couldn’t stop talking about ‘Poshun’. “Poshun this” and “Poshun that”. Now who was this Poshun and what did he have to do with me!?

Well, as I’m sure you’ve figured out, Poshun was none other than Kevin. They were one and the same. I was pretty surprised at first, as you might imagine. Because there’s just no way Kevin is a derivative of Poshun no matter how hard you try.

To be fair to Kevin though, he wasn’t the only Asian guy doing the little name switcheroo at Cal. I saw it time and time again while I was there. One day Doo-sun would decide to become ‘Derek’, and the next day we were just supposed to seamlessly make the transition into addressing him as such.

Yeah. I’m obviously generalizing here, but Asian guys do seem to be changing their names at a disproportionately high rate. Hiroshis shamelessly become Johns and Huis become Ricks on the regular. Happens every day.

What upsets me though is that they almost always pick the extremely common American (read: white) names like Jim or Mike or Tom. Can we show a little creativity please? Now I can see how assimilation is attractive, I really can, and I understand how mispronunciations must get old quickly, but still.

Have you ever considered taking advantage of this unexpected opportunity that’s come your way my Asian bredren? You’ve got a chance to do something really special here. Ignore it at your own peril. You too can be a Jean Pierre or an Adrian or a Raphael. The world is yours. You just have to believe.

This entry was posted Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 12:48 am and is filed under Asian Men. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.