Love confessions

I remember when I was still new to Japan and still new to dating girls in Japan. I had a lot of learning to do in the area of culture and especially dating culture. Something that I wasn't used to was the 告白 or 'love confession'. In fact, I'm still not at all used to this concept and I don't like it.

I had been on 2-3 dates with a 26 year old. I was probably 23 at the time. We had made out a lot and she had been over to my place and things had progressed towards sex, but not all the way. One night we were drinking with friends at a bar and I felt the timing and mood was right for us to head towards home. I offered her to come to my place but she stopped me and said, "I can not go with you cause you will try to have sex with me. I can't have sex because you don't seem to love me."

It was so serious, intense and presumptuous I started to laugh, but at that same moment some saliva got caught in my windpipe and I just started choking and coughing. I was turning red and struggling to breathe yet with every inhale I managed to get into my lungs, out came profuse laughter spiked with coughing. It was embarrassing and hilarious at the same time. Tears were welling up in my eyes and sweat started to perspire from my forehead.

In the west, we don't meet someone and then fall in love with them after hanging out 2-3 times, especially in the absolute party environment I had been in before I came to Japan. This is just not a concept that occurs. Even in the movies some sort of drama will occur between the hero and heroine before they realize their differences, accept them and fall for each other. I had a couple of dates with this grown woman and she wouldn't come over to my place because I didn't love her?

After I had recovered from my coughing seizure and regained my composure I responded from instinct without thinking about her position or her reason to say what she had said. Insensitively enough I said, "Of course I don't love you. We only just met. Do you expect me to love you already? Do you love me?"
She gave a shock horror, "No." response that told me she was a bit embarrassed about what she had asked or implied for me to be feeling. I was very gun-ho about my principles back in the day and gave her the serious straight talk there and then;

"There are a few things that I look for in a relationship. One of them is trust and another is being able to have a good time with the other person. I also think a very important thing for me in a relationship is sex. If you aren't interested in enjoying sex with me, I don't think we should be together. I will still respect you as a friend however. Goodnight."

And I promptly said goodbye to entertaining a grown woman who should have been mature enough to realize she wasn't living in a Disney movie. Funnily enough she called me up suggesting to meet for sex, but I was too awkward about the whole thing and just politely refused. She later bumped into me at a social setting and kinda hassled me a bit but I was with someone else romantically and had lost all interest in her.

Now that I know what I do about Japanese culture and how important it is to create a superficial face in order to communicate effectively, I rethink the way I handled that situation. Going through a superficial procedure of what is expected to be be said, might have worked best. Really, the girl wanted some positive reassurance before she got into anything too deep. This is to say, she wanted a 告白 or 'love confession'.

I don't like this idea because it holds me to make some sort of monogamous commitment towards the girl, even if I don't know her well enough to make that level of commitment while she makes none. With the love confession, I feel I have to throw away my sense of virility and sexual allure that is what a single man is. If I find that the girl is not really my type, and I want to date someone else, and do so, I will be a cheating bastard and she has reason to hate me because of my character faults. It is much easier to blame a guy's character rather than look inside at your own character and ask why he cheated in the first place. Why wasn't he satisfied? What did you do to actually keep him interested?

Another thing I don't like about Love confessions is the fact that I have to say things that are in-genuine to me. I think each person's concept of love is different and mine is also pretty vague, but by saying, "I love you. Please go out with me." to a girl before she can justify sleeping with me is low. Conversely, it is expected and the number one thing I hear from Japanese girls in their list of things they want in life is someone who loves them, not necessarily someone they love. Next on the list is to raise their child to be the best. No dreams of their own. That is the role of women here. They need to have a fucking female power revolution and stand up if you ask me.

Anyhow, I'm starting to think that the girls I really want are hard to get, not because I'm not cool enough, but simply because I don't play their game well enough. I think that this love confession is somehow needed or at least expected and if I don't do it the girl will feel like a slut that has sex just for fun and not for love. I dated a handful of good looking girls after my breakup last year and they faded out, partially cause I wasn't entirely interested in mailing them all the time, and I'm also guessing it's because I didn't do a love confession. I'm a guy that is happy to sleep around, but I want to know what I'm getting into before I make a commitment like that.

In a sense I do love each girl I want to sleep with, the way that I love all nature and beauty, but not in an exclusive western monogamous ideal. Should I just lie and say "I love you" to a girl so we can enjoy sex together?