“I’ll be coming to the restaurant from work, so I apologize if I smell like incense.”

A few months ago, our Japanese-language reporter and eligible bachelorette Asami Oshima decided to dip her toes into the world of online dating. Up until now, most of Asami’s romances have been with coworkers at previous places of employment, but with no such sparks of mutual attraction arising between her and her fellow SoraNews24 writers, and being in a bit of a rut as far as meeting prospective romantic partners in her outside-the-office daily life, she figured it was time to take the modern approach of registering for a dating app.

She’d rather not say which dating app, but she assures us that it’s one of the major ones that’s gained mainstream respectability. It’s not some shady cover for the sex trade or a pool of data-mining bots, nor is it a specialized service for people with specific niche interests or lifestyles. So while she found it unusual that one of the profiles she was looking at, for a guy we’ll call B-san, didn’t list his occupation in his profile, she wasn’t necessarily suspicious. Yeah, his clothing in some of his photos were a little rock star-ish, and he had a shaved head, but he didn’t project a bad-boy image in the text messages they’d started exchanging. If anything, he gave the impression of being a thoughtful and considerate guy, and they started texting each other more and more.

But she was startled when they had this exchange:

B-san: “What do you have planned today?”
Asami: “I’m going out for drinks with some friends. How about you?”
B-san: “I have a memorial service scheduled.”

Asami’s initial impulse was to offer her condolences to B-san on the loss of his friend or relative…until she thought for a moment more about his phrasing. He didn’t say he “going to” a memorial service, he said he “had one scheduled,” implying that he didn’t have a personal relationship with the deceased, but was going to be there for work. Did he maybe work in a funeral home?

Not quite, because it turned out that B-san is a monk.

A unique aspect of Buddhism in Japan is that monks aren’t required to be celibate. Yes, there are supposed to be virtuous in their conduct, but romance, and even sex, aren’t considered inherently immoral, and so monks in Japan can date, marry, and even father children, and apparently just like people in other professions, there are now Buddhist monks who use online dating apps too.

And to be clear, B-san wasn’t on the app to promote his religion or recruit people to worship at the temple he’s affiliated with. He didn’t sign off from chats telling Asami to be sure to pray or avoid evil thoughts. He was just a nice, friendly guy, though his lifestyle did mean that, when talking about their days, he’d sometimes say things like “We chanted our sutras while walking to work this morning,” and he had a habit of using such polished phrases as “Thank you for your meaningful time today.”

After a few days of messaging back and forth, B-san took things up a step and asked Asami out on a date. Asami said yes, and though he ended up having to cancel because he was suddenly called on to perform services at a wake (an unexpected complication that comes with dating a monk), they quickly rescheduled and met up.

And no, they didn’t go for a hike to a sacred mountaintop or mediate silently – they went out for yakiniku.

“I’ll be coming to the restaurant from work, so I apologize if I smell like incense,” B-san texted while en route to the restaurant, marking Asami’s first time to have someone express this particular kind of courteousness to her.

B-san turned out to have been very open and honest in his text messages, and in-person he was the same interesting but sincere person he’d come across as in written communication. He didn’t discuss his specific sect or its beliefs, but just as an organic part of talking about their daily lives and personal histories, he’d often mention things about temples or the training he’d undergone to become a monk, and it was genuinely fascinating.

▼ He even did a fortune-reading for Asami, based on her Chinese zodiac animal.

Asami and B-san went out a few more times after that (he was surprisingly a bit of a picky eater, so yakiniku and Thai restaurants became their go-to spots). But while they enjoyed each other’s company, in the end they didn’t become a couple, and have since parted ways amicably.

From Asami’s perspective, there wasn’t anything wrong with B-san. He was charming, good-looking, and fun to talk with. However, while B-san himself made for an attractive partner, Asami didn’t feel as strong an allure to the long-term realities a relationship would entail. For monks, their lifestyles and schedules really do revolve around the temple’s services and activities, sometimes requiring them to stay on the premises overnight, often in lodgings where women aren’t allowed. It’s not really the sort of profession that people leave once they’ve gone into it, either, so if you’re going to date a monk, you need to be committed to working within the lifestyle’s framework.

That wasn’t something Asami could see herself doing, but this isn’t to say that she’d come to a definitive conclusion that B-san wasn’t worth the adaptations a serious relationship with him would require. Actually, Asami’s biggest takeaway from the whole thing was that she’s not really cut out for online dating.

Like we mentioned above, up until now most of Masami’s boyfriends have been guys she met at work. Spending five days a week in the same office, she feels, lets you really see a person’s full character: what gets them excited and fired up, how they react to adversity, how they handle stress, how they treat people. Because the office isn’t an inherently romantic environment, all those interactions and observations organically form her impression of a person, and, sometimes to her surprise, they create a sense of attraction that she hadn’t really realized was building up, and sometimes that attraction has become strong enough that she’s ready to act on it and enter into a relationship.

With a dating app, though, the process felt like it was reversed. From the very first message, there’s the understanding that “We’re talking because we think we might want to date each other,” and while that does kind of kickstart things, it also means that Asami is thinking about long-term issues while she’s still getting to know the other person. She had the same feeling on the dates she went on with people she’d met through the app other than B-san too. The question of “Are we going to become a couple, or not?” was looming over their interactions, but it was still too early for Asami to know enough about the other person to feel like she’d be willing to make the adaptations anyone has to for a serious relationship, and so the potentially budding romances all petered out.

None of this is to say that Asami thinks dating apps in general are a bad idea, just that they’re not a match for her, just like how ultimately she and B-san weren’t a match for each other.

Photos ©SoraNews24
Illustrations: Irasutoya
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