Observations about Polish people / women in the UK

Hello.

I've worked in many warehouse jobs in the past 10 years. Next year I'm off to university, finally, to better my employment opportunities.

In the past 15 years I've met a lot of Eastern European people, especially Polish. Ive got a few questions about commonly observed behavior.

1) Women:

Some of the most beautiful people I've ever met. But....why the unhappy faces? Very cold exterior. No smiling. Certainly no laughing. And amongst the most unwilling of people to learn English. Is it because you view English men stereotypically as drunken slobs? I could understand that.

Yet Polish men are very easy to get on with and I have made some really good Polish male friends.

Are things like, walking through a doorway and letting the door slam in the face of the man behind you, or not saying thank-you when someone holds it open for you, as rude in Poland?

Smoking:

Never met a Polish girl who doesn't smoke. Are cigarettes not seen as harmful as they are in the UK? Like I said, Polish girls are nearly always so beautiful, yet they drink and smoke heavily.

Pakistani/Polish:

Noticed that Polish women do much prefer Pakistani men to English men. Smiles happen, jokes are told, English is spoken. Dating happens. Why is that?

That's just my experience of them. I'm sure it's probably just something I've observed and a coincidence that it's been my main experience with Polish women.

They're quite different to the other eastern European women that I've met and dated. For a start I feel a Polish woman just would never date an English guy.

There was one I met years ago and she was so sweet. She used to run and hug me on a Monday morning.

Have I just been unlucky with those I've met? I'm sure there are many many lovely Polish women out there.

What made you decide to post on this forum?
What was your intention?
And what sort of reaction were you expecting?
Please answer or we will continue to ignore your post.

Well, it's a forum for Polish people living in the UK.

My intention was to find out answers to things I've observed particularly about Polish women. I'm curious, because they're very closed off.

I don't know what sort of reaction I'd expect. That depends mostly on peoples interpretation of my post.

It's actually an American-run forum for anybody interested in discussing Poland and Poles in the English language. That also includes any Poles (or anyone else) in the UK who want to take part however only a few UK-based Poles do; there are several fora specifically for Poles in the UK. They are however obviously in Polish.

Yoiu seem quite a keen observer. One thing I've noticed is that the nationals of any given country often behave abroad differently from at home. Also expats are not always a typical demographic; their life experiences differ hugely from those of people who haven't moved abroad. In short, it changes you.

Poland is a country of 38 million people, with vastly differing outlooks on life, social class, political views, level of education, etc. There are also regional differences, albeit not as marked as in England due to post-reunification assimilationism, wartime tragedy and post-war movement.

Some people observe that Poles are more traditional than Brits; that's a false comparison. Poland is a more rural society (around 40% of people involved directly or indirectly with agriculture) whereas the UK is more urban. Urban Poles aren't necesssarily more traditional than urban Brits, and in my experience rural Brits are if anything more traditional than rural Poles.

About your "drunken slobs" statement, it's rather subjective, however there's certainly no shortage of heavy drinking among Polish men; you'd be surprised at the amount of vodka that some local shops, especially in depressed areas, sell. One key difference is that Poland doesn't really have the traditional pub culture that Britain still has; people tend to drink at home with friends and family.


In Poland, people are very warm and friendly with people they know and like. They don't however feel the need (this is not unique to Poland; you see this in some other cultures) to be artificially polite to people they dislike or to spend time smiling at strangers. There's quite a dichotomy in Polish life between the private and the public.

About holding doors open etc, some do, some don't. In Poland it's usual to say thank you when leaving a lift (after many years in PL I do it myself). It's less usual to speak to or even acknowledge neigbours, especially in towns and cities.

About Pakistani men? You mention warehouses etc so you're talking I assume about people from the post-2004 wave of migration who are mostly younger and poorer as well as living in in cities. People meet and date those around them. If you were talking about people who'd moved to rural Lincolnshire for agricultural work, I suspect there's a very different pool of potential dates.


I wondered about this too. I think he's genuinely asking and is curious about the Poles he's met in the UK.

Although it has been many years since last in Poland, almost twenty to be precise, I can only imagine that the English learning abilities of Poles has changed somewhat in that time:-)

Probably after the collapse of Communism, what you say was true. When I visited the country around the mid-90's, I too didn't encounter a single Pole on the streets of Szczecin, a medium-large city, who spoke any language but Polish.

I must add too, that stereotypes and cultural fallacies abound on both sides.