I Don't Date White Girls

& my recent foray into dating (men)

Dating is a funny thing. A thespian at heart, there is a theatrical element to it that I love. Every date is a mini performance and every bar or restaurant table, my stage. I play myself, of course, but the idealized version. My shiniest, silliest, most interesting self is, quite literally, brought to the table. Queer and straight dating is kind of like performing in musicals versus plays. The musicals are light-hearted with quick banter and touchy subjects that come up in almost whimsical ways. Straight plays on the other hand, are dialogue based. And in the case of dating cis men, the dialogue tends to be led almost entirely by the feminine lead, in this case, me.

Relationships, for better and for worse, teach us about ourselves. Our traits are reflected back at us through the mirror of the person we love. Whereas relationships require honesty, dating almost encourages deception, or at the very least, omission. We play a role, cast ourselves as the attractive, interesting and ideal candidate for our date. It is exhausting and fascinating.

Cis men are especially interesting to me, because they so often operate in ways I don’t quite understand. In my recent foray into dating this genre of person, I have found a few common themes:

1. They are bad at asking questions other than repeating back the ones I have already asked

2. They are genuinely surprised when I am able to hold an interesting conversation with them

3. They like to tell me when something I’ve said is funny instead of just laughing

4. They love to slip in that they don’t date white girls

The fourth point is a phenomenon I have experienced throughout my entire dating career. Men, and only men, love to tell me how much they like ethnic women, how they are uninterested in dating white women, and how many of their exes are non-white. They do this, only and always, after they have found a way to ask me about my ethnicity. As soon as they find out I am any percent Persian, it is as if I have granted them permission to let me know how much they love brown women.

The irony, of course, is that in many many many ways…I am white. I literally have light/white skin, I am biologically half white, I was raised in a white community and I receive all of the benefits of being white because I can code-switch in and out of my Persian-ness whenever it benefits me. I won’t even get into the concept of Whiteness, or how it was created as a tool of oppression that is at the root of America’s many MANY evils, that is a topic for another day.

All to say that when a random man starts telling you about his dislike of dating blonde white girls while sipping on a draft pilsner, you realize that in a way, he is asking you to code switch for him. He doesn't care that you are half white or that you use self tanner to get the tan you want without the sun damage. In fact, he won’t believe you when you tell him that you do this! Because dating, especially early on, is really just an exercise in projecting, isn’t it? You want your date to fit your script. Men want me to be brown, so to them I am brown. I want them to be romantic and deeply curious about me, so I assume every thoughtful question and compliment is a sign that they are extremely taken with me.

We all project on the people around us all of the time. Luckily (?) for me, the men I date are not subtle about their projection, so it is easy to discern. And perhaps because it is so easy to identify, it has prompted me to think about my version of that comment. What is my “I don’t date white girls”? What type of person do I tell myself that I don’t date? And is that actually the case, or am I just casting a role in the play I have written in my mind?