April 7th, 2013

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As a foreigner, it’s sometimes a little intimidating meeting Danish men. Here are these guys, clearly out of your league anywhere else in the world, treating you like you belong in the latest Ralph Lauren catalogue with them.

Not that I mind of course, but coming from a country where looks-wise everyone knows what league they play in, and stays within it, to a land where men who are strong 8s come and play with women who are solid 5s is thoroughly bewildering.

I’ve come to conclude that Danish men must have a skewed perception of how they look. In Western worldly standards, they’re averaging a 7 or an 8 (out of 10), but this doesn’t seem to overtly influence their decisions when picking the one they want.

You see, they don’t necessarily go for the classic beauties even though they’re surrounded by them. It’s more a girl’s style and image they’re attracted to. Take a good friend of mine, for example, who only wants the Stine Bramsens of the world: cute girls with balloon dresses and short hair.

So is it just me who’s the shallow one here?

Perhaps I’ve been conditioned by all those years of high school hook-up games where you scored points depending on how hot the guy was that you scored.

Even now it still feels like we’re “playing hook-up with hotties”. When I make the annual visit back to New Zealand and pull out a picture of the latest Dane I went out with, I’m always met with exclamations of “How did you nab him?” Ten points for me.

I’ll never forget Mr Aquatic Eyes aka Mr Part-Time Model. When I was 21, he set the bar high. I like to think that when we were together we looked like one of those fun couples in the Tommy Hilfiger ad … I think in reality it looked more like I was the photographer’s assistant keeping the model company in between shoots.

But from that moment on, I realised that when it came to looks, I could always attempt to play outside my league here, even if I didn’t hit a home run.

However, things aren’t the same for foreign men when it comes to nabbing Danish beauties. Their saving grace, though, comes in the knowledge that women generally choose partners based on personality rather than looks.

You’ll therefore find a plethora of Danish women with ‘Wind in the Willows’ type characters they’ve dragged back from England. However, I do feel for these loved-up foreign men who move here and then spend the rest of their lives admiring women 50 times hotter than their wives.

Moral of the story: if you’re a foreign woman here, you can nab a hot one for at least a few months. If you’re a foreign man, however, just have a few jokes up your sleeve − you won’t beat a Danish man in the looks category, but you can in the personality stakes.