I was out with a group of guy friends the other night, drinking and trying to demystify the world’s most nebulous enigma. Chicks. There’s nothing unusual about that. All around the world men set out every evening to help each other come to grips with the female mind. Just as often the sun rises on those conversations with no deeper understanding having been achieved. It’s the universal male pastime—beer and quack theories.

When expats do it though there is an extra level of opacity between them and their love interest—culture. It is truly hard to know if the craziness is cultural, clinical bonkeritis, or female. As someone who has spent his whole life among expats I can tell you that these discussion focus heavily on the cultural. Sometimes the discourse can get quite sophisticated. Guys trying to add their own refinements to the scientific advancements being made by comedians working on the Hot-Crazy Matrix (Video). A friend once eloquently argued for adding a third axis to the Matrix to plot cultural factors, kind of an index of Chineseness. Beer doesn’t just produce pee; it produces brilliance.

On this most recent night of drinking, it landed like a bombshell on the evening’s drunken social psychological analysis of my bud’s wife when it was realized that she’s crazy. No cultural component involved. The bias towards cultural factors is so pervasive in these late night philosophy sessions that it took twenty-odd years of marriage, and discussion with the bros, to cut through the cultural noise and recognize a psychological issue.

The tendency to give primacy to cultural factors is natural. Expats live in an environment where the prevalent culture affects every aspect of our lives, sometimes in confusing ways. We’re used to dissecting the effect of Taiwanese family dynamics, education, interpersonal relationships, and other cultural norms on our lives. Often expat men are slow to realize when the problem isn’t that she’s Taiwanese; it’s that she’s a woman.