The Chase

A Story from the Wandering & Wooing Series

Written by Joni Roberts

Traveler, storyteller, and public health advocate

One of the biggest cultural adjustments I have made while traveling has nothing to do with food.

Or language.

Or transportation.

It's dating.

Or perhaps more accurately...

Being dated.

Back home in the United States, if I tell a man I'm not interested, the interaction usually ends.

Not always.

But often enough that I expect it.

"No, thank you."

"No problem."

Everyone goes on with their day.

That expectation followed me overseas.

Until it didn't.

The first time a man kept pursuing me after I'd said no, I remember thinking,

"Did he not hear me?"

The second time, I thought,

"Okay...maybe this is just this guy."

By the fifth or sixth country, I realized I wasn't looking at individual personalities anymore.

I was looking at different courtship scripts.

The script had changed.

I just hadn't been given a copy.

One afternoon, after politely declining a man's advances, he smiled and asked,

"So...how long are you here?"

"A week," I answered.

"Good," he said.

"I still have six days."

I laughed.

Because he was serious.

And because, strangely enough, he wasn't being aggressive.

He was optimistic.

From his perspective, the story wasn't over.

It had just begun.

That interaction has stayed with me because it forced me to ask a question I'd never considered before.

What if persistence means something different depending on where you are?

In many Western contexts, persistence after rejection can feel uncomfortable.

Sometimes even threatening.

We've spent years encouraging people to respect boundaries, recognize consent, and understand that "no" is a complete sentence.

Those lessons matter.

Deeply.

I teach sexual health.

I believe them wholeheartedly.

And yet...

Travel has reminded me that social behaviors don't emerge in a vacuum.

They emerge from culture.

In several places I've visited, courtship seems to be understood as pursuit.

Not harassment.

Pursuit.

The chase itself is part of the performance.

The banter.

The negotiation.

The back-and-forth.

The persistence.

Walking away too quickly might even communicate a lack of genuine interest.

That doesn't mean everyone enjoys it.

Nor does it mean every interaction is harmless.

It simply means the social script is different.

The challenge, of course, is that travelers don't arrive knowing the script.

We respond according to the one we've spent our lives learning.

So when a young American woman says no, she may mean,

"This conversation is over."

A man raised with a different script might hear,

"I need to show her I'm serious."

Neither person realizes they're speaking different cultural languages.

And that's where misunderstanding lives.

I've experienced this over and over again.

A man compliments me.

I decline politely.

He compliments me again.

I decline again.

He laughs.

I laugh.

He continues.

At some point, I realize we're participating in two entirely different conversations.

I'm communicating a boundary.

He's communicating commitment.

Neither of us necessarily intends harm.

But our intentions don't magically erase one another's experiences.

As I've gotten older, I've become less interested in deciding who's right.

I'm far more interested in understanding why.

Why does persistence communicate love in one place and pressure in another?

Who teaches boys these scripts?

Who teaches girls how to interpret them?

How much of this is culture?

How much is gender?

How much is personality?

One of the things I appreciate most about traveling is that it constantly interrupts my assumptions.

It reminds me that behaviors I consider "normal" are often just familiar.

Someone else's normal may look entirely different.

That realization doesn't require me to abandon my own values.

It simply asks me to become more aware of the lenses I'm using.

My boundaries haven't changed.

I still don't do married men.

I still don't give out my phone number to strangers.

I still believe no means no.

Travel hasn't made me more permissive.

If anything, it's made me more intentional.

Because I've learned that clarity is one of the kindest things we can offer each other.

When I say no, I mean no.

Not maybe.

Not convince me.

Not ask again tomorrow.

No.

And I can communicate that respectfully while still recognizing that the person in front of me may have learned a very different script.

That's one of the tensions I live with as both a public health educator and a traveler.

I don't want to stereotype cultures.

I don't want to romanticize harmful behaviors.

I don't want to assume that because something is culturally familiar, it's automatically healthy.

But neither do I want to judge an entire culture through the lens of my own upbringing.

Holding those tensions isn't always comfortable.

It rarely produces simple answers.

But maybe that's exactly the point.

Sometimes I think about all the ways we prepare students for study abroad.

Vaccinations.

Passports.

Packing lists.

Emergency contacts.

We spend so much time talking about what to bring.

I wonder if we spend enough time talking about how to be pursued.

How to navigate compliments.

How to respond to persistence.

How to recognize the difference between cultural norms and personal comfort.

Because here's what I know.

You never have to abandon your boundaries to be culturally respectful.

Those two things can exist together.

You can appreciate another culture while still saying,

"No, thank you."

And you can say it as many times as necessary.

The more I travel, the less interested I become in judging the script.

I'm far more interested in learning it.

Not so I can perform in it.

So I can understand the people who do.

That understanding doesn't obligate me to participate.

It simply makes me a more thoughtful observer.

And perhaps a kinder one.

What I'm Still Wandering...

Who taught us what romance is supposed to look like?

How much of what we call chemistry is actually cultural conditioning?

When does persistence communicate genuine interest?

When does it become pressure?

Can we prepare travelers to understand different courtship scripts without asking them to compromise their own boundaries?

And what would happen if we spent as much time teaching intercultural communication around relationships as we do around language, food, and etiquette?

I don't know.

But every conversation leaves me with another question.

Another story.

Another piece of data.

And another reminder that wandering has taught me just as much about people as it has about places.

I'm still collecting data.

And I'm still wandering.