What’s a ‘passport bro’? The controversial TikTok trend, explained

There’s a name for almost everything on TikTok, from trends and food preferences to types of people, turn-offs, and even personality traits.

If you venture into the video-sharing site’s depths, you’ll find references to “pick me” girls or “fitness neeks” running rampant within the comment section and tag pages, and a recently-added classification now highlights “passport bros.” This new identifier has grown into an all-out trend among many American men, fleeing the bounds of TikTok to become a nationwide phenomenon.

What is a passport bro?

Passport bros aren’t an entirely new occurrence, but they have somewhat changed shape in the modern age.

For decades now, lonely American men have sought out companionship outside our country’s borders. After trying, and failing, to secure an American partner, many men historically turned to a practice typically referred to as “mail-order brides.” The largely-abandoned practice saw men seeking out interested women from distant countries, and shelling out the cash to relocate them within our borders. From there, they typically married their new paramours, and those relationships — built on nothing but disposable income and loneliness — promptly fell to pieces. Not all of them, of course, but there’s not much of a foundation for any marriage built between effective strangers.

Passport bros took this same idea and flipped it, and they’re becoming a full-blown trend in the States. Instead of locating and transporting a bride from another country into ours, our men are becoming the “brides” themselves. They’re leaning on those handy passports to travel to a foreign country of their choice — often Southeast Asia or Columbia — in hopes of finding a suitable partner far from home.

This practice isn’t exclusive to men, of course, but they’re more commonly noted as participants. A surge of women has likewise been engaging in the “passport bro” movement, particularly in Korea, where many K-Pop stans desperately seek out a Jimin of their own.

In other countries, however, men are far more likely to be found wandering new streets in the hunt for a new paramour. The reasoning behind this global dating scheme is mere speculation at this point, but a few TikTokers think they’ve got it figured out. The general consensus — among women, at least — is that American culture, and the cost of living in the U.S., forces women to become earners and so-called “career women.” When men don’t then live up to women’s expectations, the fairer sex looks elsewhere, leaving “inadequate” men with no option but to look overseas.

That’s a pretty harsh theory, and almost certainly isn’t true for every “passport bro,” but a growing incompatibility between American men and American women likely is. That or men are simply increasingly interested in women from a different culture, which — at base — isn’t a bad thing. Once the more negative potentials of this are considered — like rumors that men are largely traveling overseas to find more submissive partners — however, it starts to feel more insidious.

We’ll just have to see how it shakes out in the long term.