Interracial Dating: Holding Hands

This is the third part of the series on Interracial Dating. Read the first two parts here and here.

Holding Hands

After you navigate the maze of the rules of attraction, there is the actual dating. This is when the fun begins, as the carnival of culture clash comes to your town.

Dimsum or Samosa?

Race, or ethnicity, is almost synonymous with culture. What race you are, usually pinpoints to the environment one grew up in, the customs observed, the festivals celebrated. It can impact the thousand different ways we carry ourselves, conduct our daily lives.

Hence, when two people of two different ethnicities come together, there are bound to be cultural differences. Maybe she is appalled that you can eat food with your fingers. Maybe he is rolling his eyes when you use water, not tissue paper. Differences can be a source of conflict, or it can be the starting point of mutual discovery.¹

To add another layer of confusion, even within certain 'races', such Indians, there are several small ethnic groups with drastically different cultures. Malays are not a uniformly descended group from one Malay ancestor, but a socially and legally enforced grouping of several small indigenous tribes. And of course, there are the myriad dialect groups in the Chinese community. There is more diversity than we think there is.

From my previous articles about Rules of Attraction, the readers would remember the Totem pole, a ladder of sexual superiority and inferiority, and the phenomenon of internal racism. The 'inferior' race may sometimes try to suppress her racial characteristics when with her partner, believing them to be unappealing. Or perhaps they think that the lack of cultural traits make them more like their partner, hence more relatable. Suddenly she stops wearing her favourite salvar kameezes, or maybe he doesn't listen to his Javanese folk music collection anymore.²