If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Advice for Australian Filipina relationships

It doesn’t take long for a man to work out that there is often a great disparity between the financial position of the average Filipino family and himself back in Australia. Financially, Australia is definitely the “lucky country”, and it’s full of safety nets when things get really tough. Find yourself without a job, sick or old, or as a single mum? Hand out, and the Government coffers open up for you. The schools are free, and the doctor is only the swipe of a Medicare card away!

Not so in the Philippines. Many an Aussie man and future visa-sponsor is shocked on his first visit to see how little the girl’s Filipino family have. And of course when you care about somebody, it’s difficult NOT to try to help make life easier and to try to even out some of that disparity. That’s all fairly natural. Sadly though this kindness can be something that causes big problems in relationships, and can sometimes lead to them breaking up.

Cultural differences between Australia and Philippines

Main issue is that of what we consider fairly natural in Australia, and that is a sense of independence. Aussies generally stemmed from stalwart pioneering types, who did it all themselves and very proudly never took charity. For myself? I left home at 17 and made a life for myself without ever sticking my hand out, and I’m proud of that. Filipinos are different. Their society is very interdependent, and life is a series of helping or being helped. Filipinos help willingly, and also happily accept what we would consider “charity”. If they have a windfall of some sort, they share it amongst the family. And if someone in the family has a windfall, they expect to get their share too.

If you don’t play your cards right, that “windfall” will be you!

If the family is very poor, and you show up displaying a generosity coupled with a “don’t worry about it” humility, you will almost certainly be seen as a walking “windfall”, or even an ATM on legs. The more "easy" you seem about the whole thing, the more they will believe that it’s OK to keep making financial demands. So you can very easily build a big problem for yourself.

Be honest and clear from the start

There are not too many of us who are truly “rich”. A truly rich man is someone who is financially independent. You can keep on spending and never even come close to the bottom of the pot. I know that’s not me! If I don’t keep working and if I don’t watch what we spend, we could end up in trouble. And that’s most of us. If you open the financial floodgates, you could suddenly find yourself in trouble. And if you’re facing retirement in the next few years, the decisions you make now will affect the rest of your life once your earning ability is no longer there.

And we also know in ourselves how much and under what circumstances we are prepared to give. Myself? I’m happy to be generous, and I am regularly generous. We have a house full of borrowed and semi-stolen children, working students, etc, plus students in the province we support. But we do this when WE decide. Woe betide those who think they can take without asking, or who make wild assumptions about what they think we will do for them.

To my own credit, I eventually worked out how things worked. It took a few failed relationships over the years, but I ended up with a moderate level of wisdom by the time it came to Mila and her family. I had no intention of “marrying the whole family” as the poor-advice says. And I expected my future-wife to put me and our future-family first, and other relatives a clear second. And I made that clear right from the start. And today we have very little problem with relatives, because they know how it works. My wife is NOT the chink in my armour!

So my advice? Yes, you need to understand need when real need exists. If your wife-to-be IS the breadwinner, you can’t just take her away and expect that it will all be OK, especially if the rest of the family are either too old or too young to take over.

But at the same time remember that they managed to survive before you came along, and that they would have continued to survive if you never did. You didn’t arrive just in the nick of time to save the day. That was Superman……not you!