Hey viewers, I’ve been in the dating coaching scene for over a decade now and there’s one thing I can tell you for sure – Certain nationalities definitely struggle more with dating than others. In fact you don’t need to take my word for it, OkCupid founder Christian Rudder lays the statics from his online dating webiste out in his new book Dataclysm – The truth is that certain nationalities are simply voted as less desirable than others. So that settles it then right? Evidently both men and women are racist when it comes to dating, and the data backs it up! Well, actually while the data is correct, it’s quite misleading.
While there are definitely a few racist people out there in the world, they are fortunately a very small minority. The real problem at play is one of culture clash impacting our dating preferences. To illustrate this effect at play, I’ll tell you about 2 students I took in 2012 in the same class together.
They were both of African Descent, but one was from an upper middle-class UK background while the other grew up as a poor kid in a poor predominantly black neighborhood in the USA. Now both these men were just as ‘black’ as each other, but the man from the UK had a much easier time meeting women than the man from the USA. I see examples like this every week of my life, and they clearly show why race itself is not the real problem in dating – Low Socio-economic predominantly black communities tend to have a very strong cultural identity which is vastly different to most other cultures. – This means that the way people joke, the way people romantically engage with others, people’s expectations for how men and women should behave when dating, people’s way of resolving conflict etc. is completely different.
The African man from the UK on the other hand has a cultural behaviour style indistinguishable from the rest of most western cultures, so he has far less difficulty meeting women because it’s just easier for him to connect with them on the level they want to be connected with. Now as we go through life, we quickly learn what cultural behaviors we feel compatible with romantically, and which we feel incompatible with. So we learn to automatically discount people romantically from certain cultures as a way to simply ‘save time’ by not dating people we’re unlikely really click with.
Hey viewers, I’ve been in the dating coaching scene for over a decade now and there’s one thing I can tell you for sure – Certain nationalities definitely struggle more with dating than others. In fact you don’t need to take my word for it, OkCupid founder Christian Rudder lays the statics from his online dating webiste out in his new book Dataclysm – The truth is that certain nationalities are simply voted as less desirable than others. So that settles it then right? Evidently both men and women are racist when it comes to dating, and the data backs it up! Well, actually while the data is correct, it’s quite misleading.
While there are definitely a few racist people out there in the world, they are fortunately a very small minority. The real problem at play is one of culture clash impacting our dating preferences. To illustrate this effect at play, I’ll tell you about 2 students I took in 2012 in the same class together.
They were both of African Descent, but one was from an upper middle-class UK background while the other grew up as a poor kid in a poor predominantly black neighborhood in the USA. Now both these men were just as ‘black’ as each other, but the man from the UK had a much easier time meeting women than the man from the USA. I see examples like this every week of my life, and they clearly show why race itself is not the real problem in dating – Low Socio-economic predominantly black communities tend to have a very strong cultural identity which is vastly different to most other cultures. – This means that the way people joke, the way people romantically engage with others, people’s expectations for how men and women should behave when dating, people’s way of resolving conflict etc. is completely different.
The African man from the UK on the other hand has a cultural behaviour style indistinguishable from the rest of most western cultures, so he has far less difficulty meeting women because it’s just easier for him to connect with them on the level they want to be connected with. Now as we go through life, we quickly learn what cultural behaviors we feel compatible with romantically, and which we feel incompatible with. So we learn to automatically discount people romantically from certain cultures as a way to simply ‘save time’ by not dating people we’re unlikely really click with.
For example, I’m a pretty confident and outspoken guy, I’m not at all conservative or traditional or religious. As a result, I know that I’m unlikely to be compatible with girls from conservative or religious cultures because I’ll be too brash for them, and they’ll be too shy and not outspoken enough for me. So any girl I meet who for example appears traditionally Korean, Chinese, Indian, or from any number of conservative African countries are instantly discounted in my mind because I know the odds are that we just won’t click – BUT in spite of that fact, for the last 8 years I’ve been dating an Indian girl – There was no clash for us because she grew up in Australia and grew up in more or less the same cultural background I did.
So you’re watching and you are from a cultural background that the men or women you want don’t seem to be so interested in you, what do you do about this? Well there are 2 ways to go here… One, If you strongly identify with your cultural background, and believe that it is an intrinsic part of who you are, then you need to realise that you don’t actually WANT a romantic relationship with anyone from a culture which clashes with yours because you’ll never really understand each other. You shouldn’t want someone with vastly different relationship expectations from your own. However, if you feel like you want to break free from your cultural background and be your own person, but feel instantly unfairly judged because of how you look or sound, then there is an easy way to destroy this pattern and be judged solely on your own merits as a unique human being.
The key? Break people’s cultural stereotypes within minutes of meeting you. Imagine you are sitting on a park bench, and a man rides up on a Harley Davidson, he is wearing all black leather, his head is shaved, and he is covered in tattoos. What assumptions do you make about him? Imagine 1 minute later he walks over to a woman holding a baby who appears to know him – He gives her a big hug, and the women hands the baby to him, and he immediately tarts nurturing the young child, talking to it in a baby voice and giving it a lot of affection – Do you notice that you now instantly drop all previously held notions of what this man would be like as a person?
The trick here was that he did something which completely flew in the face of your previously held notions for ‘men like him’. So you suddenly drop the stereotype and begin assessing him completely anew. You can do the exact same thing yourself – You simply need to ask yourself, what do people assume about me and my culture when they first meet me? What can I do or say, or how could I dress that would completely shatter those stereotypes? If you achieve that, your race and cultural background will stop getting in your way, and instead people will see you for who you really are as a person.
So while most men and women arent’ really racist, it is quite natural to avoid certain cultures because you feel you won’t get along romantically. The good news is that it’s really easy to break a person’s stereotype and give yourself a chance to shine as an individual. I know this is a controversial topic for many, so please go ahead and put your comments below.
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