Dating & Romance
A South American paradise. Really.
Put simply, dating Venezuelans is great if you are after a casual fling or a holiday romance. It’s when you enter into a proper relationship when the problems and cultural differences emerge.
Venezuela is an extremely macho country and girls almost expect their men to treat them badly. They expect them to periodically leave them at home and go out drinking all night with their mates, wind up at a brothel, and come home in a mess the next day. Then they will have an insane shouting match where things get thrown about, she ends up in a huff and he goes out on the piss again. Eventually they will make up, and they will be so in love it will make you sick until the next time he goes out to screw hookers.
When a Venezuelan girl doesn’t get this from her foreign boyfriend she will be very surprised and will either ask to marry you on the spot, or spend months trying to figure out why she isn’t being taken for granted. For some girls, haranguing their boyfriends is their second favourite pastime after gossiping, so they may miss the melodrama when they date a man from a country where women expect to be treated as equals.
For a foreign woman dating a Venezuelan man the relationship works in reverse. He will most likely be unfaithful to her, but will still rely on her to perform all manner of domestic duties. She may even find him turning up unannounced at her house with a huge bag of washing and a shirt missing a couple of buttons. Any attempt to engage in a discussion regarding gender equality will fall on deaf ears and will be dismissed as foreign nonsense.
There is a thriving gay scene in Caracas, catered for by a fair selection of gay bars. If you are lucky, you will find one playing host to a karaoke show featuring drag queens and transsexuals grinding away in enormous spangley stilettos to Madonna classics and “Sobrevivire” – “I Will Survive” in Spanish. It may seem unusual to find a lively gay scene in such a macho country, and although the word “marico” (queer) is a common insult among men and even women, the attitude of straight Venezuelans to homosexuality is typically one of slight amusement or bemused indifference, rather than the jeering ridicule you may expect.
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