When "Louise" relocated to Indonesia to take up a position as a senior executive in an international development organization, she was hoping for a certain amount of stimulation and excitement. Career-wise, she's been rewarded. But finding romance is proving trickier.

"I'm in a place for I don't know how long where there just aren't that many available guys interested in me," the 40-something divorcee originally from South America says.

Louise (all names in this article are pseudonyms) might be feeling a bit lonely, but she is not alone - many single women who relocate to Jakarta and other Asian cities for work find that while the experience meets their career expectations, their romantic hopes are soon dashed.

As the variety of personal stories shows, a myriad of factors affect their chances - cultural, social, religious, financial or sexual.

Time after Time

In Louise's experience, dating is difficult because, she finds, men - both Indonesian and expat - prefer women who are content with a casual arrangement.

"Really, why should a guy spend the time negotiating, trying to understand me, please me, impress when he can reach his ultimate objective [of sex] by going to the local bar and hooking up with a girl with no strings attached?" she asks. "Why invest the time and energy in a relationship when he doesn't really need to?"

Louise feels that in her case, her greatest assets - her experience, competence and independence - end up working against her.

"Who would be interested in a 40-plus woman?" she asks. "A wealthy Indonesian who wants to impress his friends with a smart, educated, well-traveled, well-dressed Western woman, at least for a while - until he finds out she has an opinion and purchasing power."

Younger expat women also describe their time in the country as loveless, including American Miranda who is in her early 20s.

"I feel washed up already. That is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous," says Miranda, who moved to Jakarta to take up a promising career opportunity at an NGO. "I'm not the only one. I have loads of gorgeous, bright, 20-something female expat friends here in Jakarta who are also single."

At first, her inability to pique anyone's interest confused her.

"You begin to doubt yourself. You think, 'Is this all in my head?' But then you go to Hong Kong or London or New York and you meet a guy, a nice guy, a handsome guy, in a flash, and he's really into you, and you say, 'No, this isn't just in my head. This is real.' This is a real phenomenon here in Jakarta," she says.

"That's the painful reality. The odds are completely against you. It's like being an actress in Hollywood or something."

While Miranda says her work in Indonesia, combined with the experience of living in a foreign country, has been interesting, the lack of dating options has prompted her to leave the country earlier than planned.

"To see so many women I know burned, to see so many texts and calls go unanswered, to see so much disappointment means that you have to set low expectations in Jakarta," she says. "So while I'm here I focus on work [and then] I'm leaving Jakarta, and I gotta tell you - I look forward to dating again."

On Her Own

The phenomenon extends across the region, with stories about the difficulties experienced by single Western women living in Asia being shared in articles and blogs by expats in most countries.

The experience is very different for expat men living in Asia, who have many more relationship options available, thanks in part to the perks and status derived from their positions in patriarchal Asian society. A 2003 article in the Wall Street Journal likened the difference to "heaven and hell".

Some expat women say they find it hard to compete with local women when it comes to expat men, because of different relationship expectations.

The argument may be that a country and its people owe nothing to those who choose to make it their home. You love it or you leave it. But the reality is that for those women who are interested in dating local men, there can be other obstacles.

For "Estelle", a 34-year-old from France with two years in Jakarta under her belt in the media industry, religious differences are also a factor.

"Pressures from family and society can make it harder for [Muslim men] to consider a future with a non-Muslim partner. I've met a few nice Indonesian guys here who told me they only wanted to marry a woman born Muslim, someone who could understand their faith and practice it with them."

Cultural differences too have proved a barrier, she finds.

"Dating is very different here. I've had to ask many Indonesian girlfriends what I should make of a man texting me all day, but then refusing to show any intimacy. Different attitudes to sexuality can also be a barrier."

She admits the experiences have affected her self-esteem. "It certainly made me doubt my looks. It made me think I wasn't good enough," she says, recalling meeting one of her countrymen who declared Frenchwomen had "forgotten how to be sexy".

And so a vicious cycle ensued.

"When your self-esteem goes down, the vultures can feel it. So you're likely to get plenty of the wrong attention - from married men or just the wrong type of men who will play on this low self-esteem. That is one of the big tests."

But in the absence of romantic relationships, Estelle has developed other meaningful connections.

"Being single for the last two years in Jakarta has brought me closer to my female friends. You develop stronger friendships with other expat women or Indonesian women who are not mainstream in their choices and are experiencing the same problem," she says.

"You adopt the 'We're in this boat together' attitude. And you just make the best of it. It takes a gutsy woman to come to Indonesia on her own as an expat, so you just become stronger."

Check Mate

Sarah, an Australian journalist who was single during her one-year stint in Jakarta, agrees that the dating scene is difficult for expat women in Southeast Asia, but believes finding someone is possible. The 38-year-old found a partner after relocating to Singapore.

"After ending a relationship 18 months ago, I had honestly resigned myself to remaining single while I chased my career dreams [in Southeast Asia], and I was OK with that decision," she says. "Then I got lucky. I met someone my age, single and with similar interests. We've both been in Asia for the same period of time and it works."

She says that living in this region as a single woman, especially in her late 30s, threw up a number of challenges in terms of developing a new social life and meeting someone to date long term.

"With regard to meeting like-minded Indonesian men, my language skills, or lack thereof, presented an enormous challenge for me," she says.

As for expat men, Sarah found that most expats who could have introduced her to single men her age were married and busy with family life, while single expat men she did meet had other priorities.

"Single expat men who became good friends and who enjoyed being 'out and about' in Jakarta were generally focused on having as much fun as humanly possible while their 'hardship' posting lasted," she says.

"And who can blame them? Jakarta is a fabulous party town filled with gorgeous, fun, educated and available Indonesian women. And a lot of [them] are pretty keen to meet and party with expat men."

She sees the same in Singapore. "Other expat men who come to Singapore single, and who enjoy getting 'out and about' socially, also end up settling with local girls."

Nevertheless, the situation in Singapore differs slightly.

"The expat candidate pool, so to speak, is much larger. There are a lot more expats from all over the world in Singapore and there are more single men here," she says.

"There is a very small handful of single expat men I've met who end up settling with expat women."

FINDING LOVE

It's not a total wasteland for single expatriate women in Southeast Asia. Some do find partners, whether with fellow expatriates or with local men.

"Cynthia", a scholar and communications worker in her late 20s from the US, is one of the latter. She is in a relationship with "Anton", a journalist and activist originally from North Sulawesi. The couple celebrates their two-year dating anniversary in June.

I certainly did not come here looking for a relationship.

Not too long before Anton and I got together, I'd gone through the very painful process of ending a relationship largely because the two of us couldn't imagine any future in which we'd both be happy living in the same country. I swore I was never going to put myself in that kind of situation again, that I would find some nice American boy who wouldn't mind if I wanted to travel a few months a year. But, of course, life never works that way, and when you feel strongly enough about someone, the rule book goes out the window.

When we met, I'd been coming back and forth to Asia for a few years, mostly to the Philippines, and never even came close to getting involved with anyone while I was here. Not for lack of opportunity - if any expat women think Asian guys, as a whole, aren't into white women, a quick holiday to Manila will cure them of that notion. I've never gotten so much attention in my life. But I'd always felt like that interest was because of what I was (white skin, pointy nose, carrying a blue passport), rather than who I was. Exoticism can definitely go more than one way.

With Anton, though, it's never been an issue at all, I think because we got to know each other well as people before the relationship took a turn for the romantic. It has never been something I felt like I needed to worry about.

I think it's much more about the two individuals involved in our relationship than it is about Asian vs. Western or local vs. expat.

In many ways, of course, we've led very different lives, but we have a lot of things in common as well. For example, we both started out as activists, and later transitioned into media work. Our basic moral and political beliefs are very similar, and we both tend to be fairly quiet, intense and serious, so our personalities are compatible. Overall, I think that weighs more heavily than the wider cultural contexts in which we were raised. That said, the fact that he speaks English (and that I speak a bit of Indonesian) is, of course, hugely important. You can't have much of a relationship if you can't communicate.

Also, it makes a big difference that with my academic and professional background, basing myself in this region was a reasonable option, at least for the near future. So, even from the beginning, it was always possible to imagine the some kind of shared future.

He told me he finds it easier to deal with me than Indonesian girls he dated.

When there's something wrong, or I'm upset about something, I just tell him, instead of hiding things, playing passive-aggressive games or making him guess. Getting into gross generalizations here, I think it probably also helps that he's East Indonesian, and that he grew up in a family that is a lot more comfortable with conflict, argument and plain-speaking than, say, a typical Javanese household. Our communication styles are not actually so very different.

Communication and frustrations …

When it comes to language, we mix it up. Anything serious, it's always English, because his English is much better than my Indonesian. But for everyday small talk - where do you want to go, what do you want to eat, how are you feeling - we tend to use Indonesian.

Mostly, we just try to be kind to each other. Sometimes, of course, we fail, but the relationship is strong enough to survive it.

A successful relationship is about shared values and individual personalities.

I don't want to minimize the very real cultural differences between us, or how different our experiences have been and our expectations can be, but at the same time, two people could grow up in the same city, with the same ethnicity and the same economic circumstances, and have much, much less in common than the two of us do.