I’ve dated Jewesses, Negresses, Orientals and even the odd Hindoo.
Thankfully. Otherwise, I’d probably end up all lonely and wretched. And that, my friend, is a dangerous path to be on.
I’ve heard it leads directly to moderating IMHO.
Yeah, there are many factors that come into play. Poverty vs. affluence, rural vs. urban, degree of education, regionalisms if you’re from different areas…a lot of people don’t look very deeply. They figure the relationship didn’t work because the skin colors are different and that somehow magically explains everything.
One day, my (then-) wife said, “There’s an article in this magazine about how the expression ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss’ is no longer true.” I had no idea what she meant. According to her the article was saying that in the old days, you worked for a company and raises and other perqs came your way…that’s how you made money. Nowadays, a headhunter comes along and lures you away with a higher salary. You hop from job to job every few years and that’s how you make money. Moss=green, money.
I never thought the expression had anything to do with that. I thought it meant that if you move from one place to another, you don’t make social attachments or put down roots…you’ve already rolled on to some other location.
The older I get, the more I think that a person’s chosen profession gives a good general idea of what a person is like. E.g. a lawyer dating an artist…not very likely to work.
I’ve lived in Japan for a total of 20 years after first coming here in 1981. I would be strange to have not dated outside of my race.
I’m a white guy of Polish ancestry and my wife is a Latina who came up to the States from Peru when she was 12. We met via posting on the same internet forum for a couple years, starting to send personal messages discussing music and the rest is history. Her race was never a factor for me, positive or negative aside from hearing tales of South American living.
My family took fine to her, more concerned about the long distance internet thing than the Latina thing. Although I suspect that if it was a Mexican girl from Chicago instead of a Peruvian girl from Virginia there might have been more resistance. Her family didn’t seem to have trouble with the racial thing although being Catholic helped and, according to Mrs. Jophiel, there’s a drive to “marry white” in Peru so your kids will be as light skinned as possible. It’s almost a caste thing. Mrs. Jophiel wasn’t out to marry a white guy although she says that she made a point of not dating Hispanic men because the misogyny and machismo were all too rampant in the culture. I don’t get any real response from other people aside from “Hey, that’s neat” when they hear she grew up in Peru. Then again, she has indigenous features which, if you didn’t know better, almost give her an Asian or South Pacific look. She did once tell me that during a trip into Indiana some guys were giving her the ugliest possible looks as we ate lunch in some restaurant.
There’s some cultural bumps but no serious clashes. Mrs. Jophiel is family oriented in different ways than I. As an example, my mother always has an Easter egg hunt for my sister and I (and our spouses) in her house. She puts around $50 worth of small bills in eggs, hides them and has us look for them. My sister and I exhibit the sort of competition you might expect from a brother & sister in this. My wife hates it. She can’t imagine why siblings would want to compete with one another like that. To me, it’s all good natured fun, to her it’s some alien display of pitting family against family.
My marriage bookends my racial dating experiences with my first girlfriend being a batshit crazy Filipina girl in high school. I don’t mean to imply that one had anything to do with the other but there’s no denying that she was both. My mother hated her but, again, more because she was batshit crazy than anything else. In the middle, I dated a long string of white girls.
That’s kinky. Were they all tied together in some kind of order? Would you fuck one of them and then move on down the line? Did the string ever break?
I dated a black guy once. It was doomed from the start. I was barely 18, he was 28, had three kids, and was very recently divorced. This lasted all of 3 days because he got really weird and obsessive really fast, telling me he loved me on the 3rd date and would not stop pressuring me for sex.
His family members were cool but polite, and his cousin said, ''You’re not from around here, are you?" and left it at that. But his ex-wife was white too, so they were hardly shocked.
I’m attracted to all sorts of races and kinds of people; I wouldn’t think twice about dating outside my race (or age range, for that matter.) The fact that things didn’t work out had more to do with our our differing life stages and values than anything else. There are a lot of hardcore racists in my family but fortunately my mother isn’t among them–she raised me to see everyone as equally capable of a loving relationship.
My husband is 3rd generation Italian, I don’t think that quite counts, but being among his family members is always a trip. It is a notably very different culture and in family photographs you can always tell who’s related by marriage. 
You are so funny!
The last black girl (girl=woman in her late thirties) I dated didn’t work out too well. There was some cultural stuff going on–she had been raised to expect all sorts of deferential treatment (she told me that her mother insisted that she be treated “like a lady” at all times, which was fine with me but a little weird to hear about as an explicit policy on the first date) and she had told me that her two previous (black) husbands had treated her abusively (not sure if both were physical–the first definitely had been). It struck me as strange that someone who made a big deal about being treated well (having doors opened for her, being ordered for in the third person [“the lady will have the hamburger, medum rare”]) would just have finely tuned manners, though I found she wasn’t especially considerate of my feelings (she was late for all three dates, without a word of apology) and I was surprised that she hadn’t been able to find a husband who was nice to her after all the fuss she made about demanding consideration.
I wasn’t sure if I could list this as a nutjob date or a cultural thing, but it was in either case, a mild example of whatever it was an example of.
I guess I’m the only doper who has never dated or even wanted to date outside of his or her own ethnicity.
I’m Whitey Whiterson from Whitesville, so opportunities weren’t around at home. Even in college, though, I’ve just never been attracted to women who aren’t white. That isn’t to say I don’t know pretty women who aren’t white; I’ve just never wanted to date anyone who isn’t.
Absolutely. Like lobotomyboy63, my tastes run to the exotic. I’m white American and I love black hair, brown skin and dark eyes. I’ve dated East Asian, Native American, Indian, Latina, black American, African and Middle Eastern women. Curvy, slim, hourglass and willowy. My last 2 girlfriends were latina, Venezuelan and Bronxa Rican. My first girlfriend (the one I should have married) was born in my hometown but her parents immigrated from Hong Kong in the 60’s. My parents were worried about the interracial aspect until they met Sherrie, then they loved her. Her parents were more resistant to her dating outside her race than mine. Right now I have a long-distance internet thing going on with an Indonesian girl who lives in Jakarta. I’ll find out how that works IRL at the end of August when I get off the plane in Bali.
My experience with white American women (besides the one I married) has been that they are cool and aloof and won’t show any interest unless they’re crazy about you. Black American women are more cool and aloof than white, and even a little hostile towards men. This being the dope, I’m sure that I will get a zillion replies from people who are or know white and black american women who are the most friendly, outgoing and aggressive people in the world. If that’s the case, then Asian and Latina women just like me more than white and black American girls.
On edit, I’ve experienced the same thing as **pseudotriton ruber ruber
** from black american women who date white men. I’ve also been treated like a walking wallet by women of several races, but mostly white & black American women.
Maybe if you lived in my neighborhood you would. Or not. I live in a poor, although mostly working class, neighborhood. It is predominantly Hispanic and African-American. Outside my window I can hear the neighbors merrily chatting away in Spanish, of which I have perhaps twenty words. Every few minutes, a car goes by blasting rap music. The African-American residents, while capable of speaking intelligible English, amongst themselves and with their Hispanic and few white neighbors tend to speak a language in which I, a former viable model for the Hitler Youth posters had I been born a generation earlier, can understand perhaps one word in three.
Don’t get me wrong. These are good people, most of them bright enough to be bi-lingual, which I sure as hell am not. They’re for the most part good neighbors, albeit a tad loud and a bit vulgar at times by my standards. Our concerns are often very much the same. But when it comes to sharing common recreational interests or a common culture? No way. If I were in the market for dating, this would not be my pool. Not because of race, but because of culture.
I’m 47 year old, conservative white (100% Irish, as far as I know) Catholic who was born & raised in New York City, and have lived in Texas for 22 years.
I have dated a few Asian women. NONE of them fit any “shy, demure, submissive, Oriental flower” stereotypes. I’m inclined to laugh at white guys who date Asian women HOPING to get someone like that. They’re likely to be very disappointed (and it will serve them right when they are).
I’ve dated numerous Hispanic women- and both of my wives have been of Mexican descent, though their backgrounds couldn’t be much more different. My first wife grew up in a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood, spoke Spanish, and associated mostly with other Mexicans as she grew up. My current wife speaks practically no Spanish, and grew up in an affluent white neighborhood.
I have never dated a black woman. I’ve been attracted to black women many times, but never met one who was interested in me.
I have no hard data to offer, just a general impression: within both the black and Hispanic populations, women are FAR more likely to go to college and become successful professionals. Hispanic woman who become successful professionals will find that MOST of the eligible men they meet are white, and will tend to date/marry white men. NOT because they’re not attracted to Hispanic men, but because they’re more interested in marrying someone in their new socioeconomic class than someone of their ethnic group.
Successful, professional black women, on the other hand, STRONGLY prefer to date and marry black men, and will usually choose black men of lower incomes and lower social status over white men.
Of all race/gender combinations, black women seem to feel the greatest “loyalty” to their own race. They are more likely than any other race/gender combination to look down on people in their own ethnic group who marry outside that group.
I dated a chinese girl for a while (I am a hienz 57 of northern european, north american (including native american 5 generations ago)). We got along fine, but her dad would not have ANY of it.
She basically had to “drop” me or drop her family was the ultimatum he gave her.
And he wasn’t kidding.
This was back in the late 1980’s
We lost touch after that, and I just hope she wound up happy.
I don’t worry about ethnicity , skin colour or things like that. If I like a person, I like them… for me its all about personality and “fit”… are we comfortable and happy with each other?
FML
And what was odd about her? I’ll bet there’s a great story there. 
There seems to be a xenophile gene in my family. My grandfather’s brother packed up for Indochina (in what’s now Cambodia), got married to a local and raised a large family. My father met an American girl who was working as an elementary school teacher on the military bases, and ended up traveling to the US to marry her (no racial differences, but lots of cultural ones).
Me? I’ve actually never been involved with a white girl. Not for lack of trying, but the only dates that went anywhere happened to be the interracial ones. I had two serious relationships in college, one with a black Jamaican girl, and the other with a Chinese-American girl. After that, I moved to Japan, where it’s been all Asian ever since.
My wife is kind of the same way. She dated Japanese guys through high school, but caught the gaijin bug somewhere in college.
I’m Indian and I don’t believe I’ve ever been attracted to an Indian guy. But I don’t know if that’s because there’s something I don’t like about Indian guys in general or because the ones I do know are just not my type. As far as I know, interracial dating is really not a big thing here. It seems pretty common, at least in my circles. I just broke up with an Irish guy, but he was born and raised here in NZ (and I’ve lived here for almost my whole life) so is pretty much just another Pakeha.
I’m a white guy who more or less came of age in racially segregated Texas back in the 1950s. I never attended school with anyone other than white kids, nor did I ever work with non-whites until after I left Texas. Even though I’ve since had friends and neighbors who are non-white, I’ve never dated anyone who wasn’t white. I wish things had been different when I was growing up; segregation cost all of us very dearly.
At 42YO and still not married, I’m in no position to be picky about the ethnicity of the women I date (if I actually ever had a date, that is) :D. If I had to state a preference, it would be in the form of “non-American” rather than “non-white (or whatever ethnicity)”. I find Asian women quite appealing … as long as their from Asia. The attraction has to do with the way, say, Japanese women do their makeup/hair/clothes - a Japanese-American woman, born and raised in the USA, tends to do all those things “American-style”, and so to me is less appealing than an actual native Japanese woman. Similarly, I’ve more recently discovered that I find Eastern European/Russian/Ukrainian/etc. women extremely attractive. They tend to be whiter than white, but again, they do their makeup and such differently and thus appear more attractive to me. So maybe it’s the “exotic” factor that I’m into - American women of whatever ethnicity tend to fall into a “norm”, appearance-wise, that bores me. Maybe this is also what makes “Goth” girls so attractive to some of us - they look different.
That said, the dating pool available to me is mostly “all-American”, and I wouldn’t have any issues with dating women of a different ethnicity within that pool.
I’m a total cliche: a white guy who thinks Asians are cute, but who “just isn’t attracted to” black women. There are certainly exceptions, but it’s pretty rare that I see a black girl and get a memo from my gut that I want to throw her down on the floor and [transmission interrupted].
I don’t think it’s any kind of insidious racism on my part – although, if it was, I wouldn’t know, right?