Just three years ago, Paul Leszczynski found himself in Los Angeles, feeling disillusioned and financially strained. As a dreamer who seemed to have lost his way, he believed that the modern dating scene in America had left men like him adrift.
As a Polish-American screenwriter, Leszczynski lamented that American women were either too difficult to engage with or solely focused on financial gain. This dissatisfaction coincided with his own struggles to find a clear path forward in life.
At the age of 32, Leszczynski decided to make a drastic change. In April 2023, he took a leap of faith by booking a one-way ticket out of California. This bold move immersed him in the burgeoning world of the “passport bros,” a trend gaining traction online.
Fueled by platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, the “passport bros” phenomenon involves American and British men seeking romantic connections beyond the confines of Western dating norms.
Now 34 and known to his online followers as Passport Paulie, Leszczynski shares his newfound perspective from Poland, where he resides with his wife. Speaking to the Daily Mail, he expressed a sense of liberation and fulfillment.
“Many men can’t comprehend just how much better life can be abroad,” he stated, emphasizing the transformative impact of his decision.
Leszczynski embraced the lifestyle completely, spending months traveling through Colombia, Brazil, Thailand and Indonesia, where he bedded one, sometimes two or three women a day.
Then, in a bar in Asunción, Paraguay, he met a quietly spoken Venezuelan woman and woke up the next morning knowing she was the one.
Living large overseas: Austin Abeyta, a 32-year-old from Colorado Springs, and his Filipina girlfriend Jewel Clyte
Paul Leszczynski says he’s never looked back from his decision to leave California and search for women and adventure overseas
Mike the Maverick, a California passport bro living in Thailand with his fiancé
He canceled ten days of pre-arranged dates – including a professional model – and never looked back. They were married months later.
Leszczynski is just one of several members of a fast-growing online community that advocates for young men to venture overseas, where money, status and dating prospects stretch considerably further.
For critics, being a passport bro is simply old-fashioned male entitlement wrapped in viral online content, fueled by economic inequality, misogyny and fantasies of submissive foreign girlfriends.
Those who promote the movement however promise something modern life supposedly no longer offers young men: purpose, adventure, affordable living and women who actually appreciate them.
Many self-labeled passport bros describe themselves as ‘digital nomads,’ working remotely for US firms and collecting dollars that go a lot further abroad.
Austin Abeyta, a 32-year-old from Colorado Springs, Colorado, posts about a typical day in the life of a passport bro in the Philippines.
A little work over morning coffee, scooter rides to a secluded surf beach, an eight-dollar bottle of whiskey over lunch and a torch-lit full-moon beach party at night.
He and his Filipina girlfriend, Jewel Clyte, are currently creating social media content together in a Vietnamese beach city. Being a passport bro, he said, is the ‘ultimate life-hack in 2026.’
Others in the movement stress that the appeal goes deeper than cheap whiskey and warm beaches.
A Californian bro known online as Mike the Maverick posts about how his Thai girlfriend Pafan makes him feel ‘appreciated.’
In one video, she smiles and greets him with flowers at the airport. In another, she cuts his nails on the sofa of their Bangkok apartment.
‘Most Thai women bring this kind of soft, feminine energy,’ Mike posted. ‘It feels good being a traditional man who protects and provides – and actually getting that traditional feminine energy back.’
The movement was born out of deep and growing frustrations with modern dating norms, shifting gender roles, and the widening political gap between young men and women in America.
Young women are now outperforming men academically, with higher college enrollment and graduation rates, and are earning more in entry-level jobs, federal government data and an analysis by Pew Research Center show.
Meanwhile, young men increasingly report depression, social isolation, and a grinding inability to get a job – let alone a girlfriend, research from Gallup and the American Institute for Boys and Men shows.
Politically, younger men tend to skew more conservative, while their female peers are far more likely to be progressive Democrats rallying against what they call ‘toxic masculinity.’
A Western man passionately kisses a Thai woman in Pattaya, Thailand, a hotspot for passport bros
Austin Abeyta says that becoming a passport bro is the ‘ultimate life-hack in 2026’
Attracting women overseas is ‘like fishing in a barrel – in the right city,’ said Leszczynski
An older foreigner walks hand-in-hand with a younger Thai woman past a law office specializing in marriage for foreigners in Bangkok
A 2026 Ipsos survey across 30 countries found that 61 percent of Gen Z men believe women’s rights have ‘gone far enough’ – higher than any other generation.
A similar proportion said women’s equality had come at a cost to them personally and around a third said they wanted a traditional setup where wives defer to their husbands.
Leszczynski said his focus is kept more on the type of life that awaits men willing to book a flight, rather than the bleak prospects of dating in America.
He advised newcomers to learn from his experiences and skip the big-name destinations – Medellín, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Bangkok – which he said are overrun with passport bros and, in some cases, outright sex tourists targeting underage girls.
In Medellín – a hotspot for a spate of dating-app robberies targeting American men in 2023 and 2024 – Leszczynski was drugged and robbed on a date.
He woke up 14 hours later to find his wallet, cards and laptop gone. He wrote about it in his book ‘How to Find Your Latina Wife.’
‘Definitely don’t bring a girl back to your apartment before going out,’ he advised. ‘It’s probably bad news.’
He steers his followers toward what he calls ‘tier-two cities’ – places not yet flooded with Westerners, where being American is still exotic rather than an eye-roll.
He described arriving in one such city to find his phone ‘overheating’ from the volume of matches flooding in. ‘It’s like fishing in a barrel – in the right city,’ he said.
His experience echoes a notorious viral clip of a man in Singapore’s Changi Airport, swiping furiously to the right on Tinder while waiting for his luggage.
Leszczynski said the thrill of meaningless promiscuity began to hollow out after a year and a half. He became more religious and ready to settle down.
‘It’s like the dog that chases the truck,’ he said. ‘Once you actually go do it, you realize how fleeting and inconsequential it is.’
Not everyone is charmed by the movement. Julia Meszaros, a sociology professor at Texas A&M University, calls it a modern evolution of the mail-order bride phenomenon, repackaged for the social media age.
A Thai woman bar worker hugs a tattooed Western man in one of Thailand’s red-light districts
Leszczynski has visited Costa Rica, Poland, Brazil, Peru, Thailand, Japan, Indonesia, Cambodia, India, Morocco, Spain, Croatia, Greece, Paraguay, and Colombia
Abeyta and Clyte are currently creating social media content together in a Vietnamese beach city
Social scientist Katie Jagielnicka, who has watched bros aggressively pursuing women in her native Poland, offered a more blunt take.
It is a ‘disgusting, predatory and heavily misogynistic practice,’ she has written, ‘that only further fuels the already widespread fetishization of women from developing countries.’
Critics have also pointed to murky overlaps with the ‘manosphere,’ incel culture and the red-pill movement – and note that many influencers are as motivated by monetizing their audiences as by any romantic ideal.
Leszczynski was recently banned from Instagram – his main income source – something he blames on a coordinated mass-reporting campaign by feminists who, he said, bombard him with death threats daily.
The ban has derailed the couple’s plans to move to Spain and start what they hope will be a large family.
Leszczynski said his wife, a Venezuelan woman he keeps carefully anonymous online to protect her from abuse, is the driving force in the relationship.
She proposed he become an influencer. She insisted they care for his dying grandmother in Poland. She chose where they live. It was her idea to get married in his mother’s hometown.
Leszczynski insists the movement was never really about bashing American women, but focused on helping others find escape – from loneliness, depression and a life that had stopped making sense.
‘I really want to help guys who are in a really bad depressive state in the US get out and live a happier life abroad,’ he said.
