Asian Men Are More Dateable Than Ever
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 27 Aug, 2025

Thanks to recent growth in positive media and real-life visibility, Asian men are enjoying a much improved reception on the American dating scene compared with a decade ago.

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who genuinely enjoys online dating.  Much like, say, waiting in line at the DMV or spending significant time with your mother-in-law, there seems to be a general consensus that most would rather avoid the activity, if possible.

But for as rough as the practice is for everyone, it has historically been particularly bad for two groups:

Asian Men and Black Women.

The plight of Asian men on the dating scene largely came to people’s attention in 2014 when the dating website OK Cupid published some of their data.  Per the site's founder Christian Rudder, “Asian men get the fewest messages and worst ratings of any group of guys.”

These issues also extend beyond just online dating.  Look at reality TV dating shows, for example.  While The Bachelor is about as good a representation of real-life dating as American Ninja Warrior is of my own masculinity, it generally attempts to capture real-life public sentiment.  The dramatic lack of representation for Asian male contestants is likely what the producers think the public wants. 

Across the first twenty seasons of The Bachelor and Bachelorette, there were a grand total of five Asians. That’s a choice.

Fortunately, if they take recent trends into account, we may be seeing better representation in future seasons, because from the looks of it, there has never been a better time to be an Asian man on the dating scene. 

Negative Stereotypes

Let’s start with some of the supposed reasons for which Asian men get a bad rap:

They’re nerdy.

They’re scrawny.

They have no game.

Their food smells bad.

They’re unathletic.

They have small penises.

So much for the white supremacist narrative. 

Obviously these things aren’t any more true for us than any other group.  Those racist stereotypes are losing currency fast after Americans are exposed to Jeremy Lin, BTS, Dev Patel, Raymond Lee, Shohei Ohtani, among a surging list of Asian male celebs.

And the world is finally waking up to that.  There are currently number of things that are making Asians cooler than ever before:

K-Pop

Calling the popularity of K-Pop, the Korean music genre, a global phenomenon would frankly be putting it mildly.  Bands like BTS, BlackPink, Seventeen and others are contributing to K-Pop’s approximately one billion Spotify streams per month. 

More often than not, the name of at least one of the band members is a trending topic on Twitter. And when the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon held a “BTS Week,” their social media engagement was up 1300% from the previous week, making it the show’s best online performance ever. 

It’s reminiscent of Beetlemania and the thousands of women that would throw themselves at John, Paul, George, and to a lesser extent Ringo. 

But now it’s Jungkook, Jimin, and Kai.

Any questions about the sex appeal of Asian men can be put to rest. 

Cuisine

I’m also constantly hearing about how obsessed women are with “Romen.” But then I remember that my name shares the same phonetics as the popular Japanese noodle dish, ramen.

I’ve even seen shirts that say “My favorite type of men is ramen.”

Suffice it to say, the popularity of the cuisine is on the rise, at least in part to viral TikToks about fun ways to prepare the cheap store-bought version of the noodles.

Taken with sushi, pad thai, chicken tikka masala, and dumplings, Asian cuisines have cemented themselves as among the most popular in the world.

Obviously eating udon doesn’t automatically create the desire to throw yourself at Asian men, but it all contributes to the narrative that we have something cool to offer the world.  It also turns a weakness into a strength. 

Many an Indian kid, for example, has stories of being bullied in school for the pungent aroma of whatever meal their parents packed into their lunchbox that day. 

But in this day and age, people have become familiar enough with Indian cuisine to understand the ludicrousness of thinking that a bologna sandwich would be preferable to a butter chicken and naan lunch.

It’s true that the world may still not be ready for the texture of chicken feet or the scent of a freshly cut durian, but any guy whose Tinder profile mentions his ability to cook ddeokbokki or mapo tofu should merit an immediate right swipe.  

Media Representation

I might go as far as to say that a rise in media representation is the biggest factor contributing to a change in attitudes towards Asian men on the dating scene. 

We have long been stuck in a vicious cycle: Asian American men are not well-represented in the media. As a result, people are less familiar with them and less interested in dating them.  As a result of Asian men being less familiar, shows like the Bachelor choose not to cast them. 

But over the past few years, there’s been a change in the media landscape.

In 2007, AAPI characters on TV and in film accounted for just 3.4% of the cast. Fifteen years later, by 2022, that number jumped to 15.9%.  That's a staggering increase of nearly five fold.

Some of this may have been a result of executives choosing to finally look at the data and see that we’re watching TV and movies like everyone else, if not moreso.

Part of it may be that social media has finally allowed us to take content creation upon ourselves.

In 2014 when a Sony email leak revealed an exchange in which writer-director Aaron Sorkin accurately pointed out that “There are no Asian movie stars,” screenwriter William Yu started the viral #StarringJohnCho campaign. 

Yu photoshopped Korean American actor John Cho’s face into movie posters for James Bond, Mission Impossible, and the Avengers. Thanks in part to Yu’s top notch photoshop skills, Cho looked so natural that it became tough to question whether he — or other Asians — would be a suitable lead for any Hollywood blockbuster.

Since then, we’ve seen box office and awards show domination by films with AAPI-heavy casts.  

I say this is a straight man: try and tell me a shirtless Henry Goulding in “Crazy Rich Asians Asians” somehow has less sex appeal than Leonardo DiCaprio. 

Even just a 20 second scene can offset decades of a narrative that desexualizes Asian men.

TV shows like “Kim’s Convenience” and “Fresh Off the Boat” have gotten renewed for five or six seasons. Netflix’s “Beef” with Ali Wong and Steven Yeun was far from a cultural expose on Asians. It was simply a story of two pretty flawed people who happened to be AAPI. And it quickly became a phenomenon. 

Nerdy is the New Loaded

Obviously most of us can’t compete with John Cho in the swag department.  But we might not have to. 

At least, not if we’re loaded. 

Sure, one might hope that humans aren’t so superficial as to put a premium on income and financial assets when picking a partner.  But reality may beg to differ.  And if so, that’s good news for Asian Americans.

On average, Asian American men earn a higher personal income than any other demographic.

Some might say that offsets the stereotype that we’re nerds. Or it goes hand in hand with it.

We have long been thought of as hard-working and studious people who value studying over socializing.

That may not be such a bad thing when you hit a point in life where stability from a partner outweighs beer pong skills. Not that both wouldn’t be nice.

More Generations, More Exposure

When most Asians in this country were first generation and still getting a footing on the language and culture, it was hard for them to be full-on members of society.

Decades later, that’s all changed. We’ve got second, third, fourth and even fifth-generation Asian Americans who can go toe to toe with anyone boasting ancestors on the Mayflower voyage. 

We’re visible in prestigious roles like doctors, lawyers, professors, tech executives and in positions of authority that might have been harder to attain when our ancestors had just arrived here. That social status surely helps on the dating scene.

But even just being an everyday American guy who you sit next to in a college class or ride the bus with not only normalizes us but puts us in the running for that coveted meet-cute.

And back to online dating:

The dating app Coffee Meets Bagel, which was founded by three Korean sisters, recently boasted that “Our data shows that AAPI men now rank better in 2024…compared to the other dating app’s data from 2014.”

It certainly seems like their findings are part of a broader trend. 

And who knows?  Maybe when Asian men become as visible in the online dating eco-system as everyone else, the practice of swiping will suck a little less for all involved