Young Love Knows No Race -- by Anne Shier

(Inspired by an article in South Asian Generation Next, Vol. 5, Issue 224, February 10, 2011.)

First of all, as a young person, have you ever been in love? Is the person you are in love with someone you would be more than happy to introduce to your parents? If not, is this person more likely to be someone of whom your parents might disapprove simply because of his or her skin colour, race or cultural background? The funny thing is, young love knows no race—meaning that if you’re going to fall in love with a member of the opposite sex, there is no “higher power” telling you that it’s wrong to fall in love with someone of a different skin colour, race or cultural background. If there were such a higher power, surely the religious leaders of the world would be using this fact to preach in church to their congregations what is deemed right and wrong when it comes to falling in love with someone. But I have never heard of such a thing. Even if there were such a thing, young people would probably still do what seems to come naturally to them: falling in love with a young, attractive person with whom they can share something wonderful, whatever that might be.

My name is Thomasina (“Sina”). The day my father found out I was dating a guy named Terry, he threw an absolute fit. “But, Sina, he’s white!” he said as if that should be my one and only reason for dumping him right this minute. It did not matter that he was well-read, funny, smart and had a great job with a well-known pharmaceutical company. He was also a true-blue person and never once tried to seduce me into bed for a “quickie” sexual encounter. Believe me, he was so beautiful, sex could very well have happened between us. I wouldn’t have objected.

When the relationship fell through a few months later, my father said, “It would never have worked out, Sina. He is white—we are brown.”

I told him, “That’s not why we broke up, Dad. It was just one of those things that happen between young people.” Sure, I remember the curious stares we got whenever I was walking with him, holding hands, but I think that was mostly because he was six feet three inches compared to my five feet one inch height.

In retrospect, it was not really his skin colour that my father was referring to, but his culture. My father always insisted that any daughter of his had to marry someone from an Indian background such as ours so I could connect with him on “different levels” (whatever that means!). Terry loved Bollywood movies like I did. For example, we went to see a movie called Om Shanti Om together. However, while I remember enjoying seeing the movie with him, he was busy speed-reading the subtitles. I doubt if he got much out the movie itself. Later he complained about the massive headache he’d gotten from all the speed-reading he’d done.

Talia, a good female friend of mine, had her own views about young love between people of different cultural backgrounds. She told me one day that she did not believe that a cultural difference was ever the real problem. She said, “I firmly believe the biggest problem by far is where and how we grew up, rather than our cultural background.” To me, that means that the environment must play a much bigger role in young love than previously thought.

This is the way she put it: “A boy and girl living in the same town in Canada, for example, regardless of their cultural backgrounds, would have a much better chance of having a successful relationship than a boy and girl who have the same cultural backgrounds but live in two different settings.” Maybe, there is something to this theory.

According to Talia (who, by the way, is a sociology major at York University), “environmental conditioning differs from person to person, and regardless of race and cultural background, if two people have the same environmental conditioning, their relationship has a much better chance of succeeding.”

Talia, born in Bangladesh and raised in Canada, had been dating for the past two years her Canadian-born boyfriend, Jim, who was of Polish descent. She thought the biggest problem she would face with Jim was that of political differences. They each had their own definite familial political views. As Talia would say to me, “It’s not the difference between curried and KFC chicken; the problem really has to do with key environmental differences—things we encounter in our day-to-day lives. Jim comes from a very conservative political white family and I come from a very liberal brown family. Neither of these two families will ever be able to see eye to eye.”

For another good female friend of mine, Rachel, it came down to a difference between the belief systems of their parents that created the initial hesitation on both sides of her relationship with her current boyfriend, Tony.

Rachel, a former PhD student at York University and the current chairwoman of the collective board at the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre, had been dating her boyfriend, Tony, who is of North Korean descent, for the past two and a half years. She smiled as she reminisced how they’d met. “We actually met on Lava Life!” Prior to that, she’d been thinking, No way! Does that website even work as a serious dating website? I don’t believe it. But despite her cynicism, she decided it was worth a try. I had had some exposure to such websites but had decided they weren’t for me.

Rachel laughed at me as she saw my surprised expression. “I only joined Lava Life because I was trying to get over someone else in a hurry … Tony was the very first Lava Life date I went on, so I guess I lucked out! We’ve been very happy together ever since.”

Maybe when you’re still young, you don’t mind taking some chances with meeting people who are different from you in some key respect: skin colour, race or cultural background, but after finding out that not all relationships are happy anyway (in fact, most of them aren’t in my opinion), I really don’t object to interracial relationships. People have the same difficulties in romantic relationships regardless of considerations like race.

I continue to subscribe to my own personal theory that if you have something substantial in common with your special friend and this brings you closer together, that’s a very good thing. If it worked for me in the past whenever I met a new person, it should also work for other people in their lives, young or old. All I know is, it’s been difficult to find the “right” person so far, but I know that if I ever do think I have found the “right” person, I’ll do my damndest to make it work between us, regardless of our individual skin colour, race or cultural background.

        On the other hand, if worse comes to worse and I decide I will never meet the man of my dreams using conventional methods, I may decide to use a dating service instead and see what happens. If I do manage to meet someone special using that method, I’m sure his skin colour and race will be the least of my worries in trying to make our relationship work the way I think it should. The main point is, I just want to meet that special guy who can make me happy and for whom I can do the same.

copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA