As a parallel to the Great Debates thread on Asian men and black women being at a disadvantage on the dating scene, I thought I’d start this thread for people to chime in with their opinions and experiences.
If you have ever dated outside your race* I would like you to share with us how this came about. Were you seeking someone of that race or did it simply happen? What did other people say? Did you marry him or her?
If you haven’t ever dated outside your race, would you consider it? And if you’d never consider dating outside your race, why not?
Right off the bat I think we should agree, as a ground rule, that attraction is a funny thing. We can’t explain why we find some people attractive and others not. Can we agree to be keep the accusations of racism out of this thread? It’s just a “Green Eggs and Ham” question: either you like it or you don’t, so let’s not be judgmental.
All right. I’ll start:
I’ve dated once outside my race, an Asian woman I met in Seattle. We had Thai food; I lent her a book. We didn’t really hit it off, so we didn’t date again.
Now that I’m back on Match.com, I confess a little trepidation at dating women other than generally Causasian. There aren’t many black women in Olympia, for one thing (we’re an extremely white part of Washington State); I also worry about being perceived as The Guy Who’s Into Asian Chicks, so I hesitate to send emails to them. (I’m sure they get enough as it is.)
Not only that, but it seems to me that dating a black woman or an Asian woman would be a lot more work — we might have less in common, eat different foods, enjoy different things; and we’d certainly face much more scrutiny from friends, family, and total strangers. I’m a little intimidated by how difficult I imagine it to be to build both a relationship and a bridge between cultures at the same time.
Anybody else want to share?
*Race is an artificial construct, genetic blah blah, culture is the blah blah, how dare you use divisive language like blah blah blah. For the purposes of this discussion we all know what race means, right?