Dating/Marrying People from a foreign culture Your thoughts?

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I've been in several different countries (including some in Asia and in Central/South America). Believe me, the hopes that so many American men have that there is some attractive but naive and non-picky girl waiting for them out there in some foreign country is waaaay off base. Many of the former countries in which these type of scenarios used to occur are becoming much more developed than they were 20 or 30 years ago, which means people there can afford to be selective. With the advent of the internet, cell phones, social networking sites, and just globalization in general, the women from every country (including those in Asia and Latin America) are not uncomplicated, simple girls who are sitting and waiting around for some American guy to come sweep them off their feet and whisk them away to America. I have yet to meet any who are non-picky and who have a desperate hope that some American guy will sweep down out of the sky and take them away to comfortable suburban glory back in the US. Unless you mean a mail-order bride, who usually divorces the guy as soon as she gets her greencard.

I'm a product of cross-cultural relationships myself (white, asian, middle eastern), and my girlfriend of 7 years is half Pacific Islander / half Asian. The one and only time I actually travelled across the American Midwest- the states like Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, etc. - I found that there were an overwhelming amount of people who had only dated and married people from the exact same background, belief system, and ethnic culture as them. In some places, if your name isn't something like Becky Johnson or Billy Ray Smith, people look at anyone who'se of an unidentified ethnicity like they're some kind of exotic species of animal imported from the Amazon rain forest. It definitely seems to be something which other people find interesting though, especially those people who have lived most of their life in a suburban, homogenous type of environment.

What you said is true though, most people still marry within their own ethnic background. It's too bad that many people are still afraid to do this, or feel uncomfortable with it. I think this may be more for reasons of simply not knowing how to approach members of a different culture than for reasons such as family pressure or being truly uncomfortable (although those can definitely play a part). Many white guys I know are very fond of asian girls, but very often have trouble finding a common ground on which to converse with them at first - which is a requirement of any beginning relationship.

My attitude is this- you only live once. Why date someone who looks just the same as you, comes from the same type of background, and likes all the same things? Be adventurous and try exploring the unknown, instead of just staying within the set boundries of your own culture and upbringing.

Besides, from what I've seen in a large amount of cases, your children will probably come out beautiful and you can name them more interesting names without them sounding cheesy or fake.



lol, wanting to date someone of a different culture or ethnicity, but who you still want to look Caucasian regardless, seems ironic somewhat. Why is the lighter skin tone equated with a higher standard of attractiveness? If you wanted to date someone with lighter skin tone, wouldn't it be easier to just date someone who was white, and was of the same background and culture as you are?

Skin tone is meaningless when it comes to beauty. Believe me, I could show you some Polynesian girls in California and Hawaii that any normal man would fall head over heels for, regardless of what "skin tone" you prefer. There are attractive people of all cultural backgrounds, ethnicities, and skin tones.

Exactly, you only live once, why stick with what is familiar and mundane?

I'm an Australian btw.

My first boyfriend was Chinese (I'm caucasian) and it worked fantastically between us. I loved that he was from a different culture, spoke cantonese at home, and ate delicious food all the time I'm a pretty multicultural person myself though, my family (although being 3rd generation white aussies, with one english grandparent bah boring) likes to eat food from different cultures and stuff. I grew up using chopsticks for some meals

I learnt heaps of stuff from him, like how to play mahjong (sp?)

Yeah, Tailfins was REALLY conservative, and his whole thing seemed to be that Latinas were better because they "knew their place" and American women didn't. But I don't agree with that kind of thinking.

Actually, I have been thinking about it myself. I come from Norway, but I am particularly attracted to Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese, other Latin, Greek and Middle East women. I have been considering some of this foreign bride dating sites. Of course there is the danger that one ends up with someone that takes you just to get a passport to your country. In my own case, this possibility is ruled out anyway, as I have to low income to be allowed to bring her to my country.Plus as I am only 36, I am to young to take my disability pension abroad, at least this is how I have understood the rules. In other words, I am not allowed to marry whom I want .

interesting obseration, and while i have no stats available on the subject i do have an observation.

Many men with As tend to marry or date women from a culture that is different from their own.

the difficulties expereinced in ones own culture is magnified through both AS and cultural expectations within that culture that everyone has who has grown up in and is familiar in that culture.

with an individual from another culture, the eccentricities and odd behaviour displayed by many As and rejected within their own culture is either hidden or accepted by a foreign culture as being from a different country rather than just being seen as odd.

there are, in my opinion many children of mix race marriages where their As father has mnarried another culture or travelled to another country.

Agreed, their are very attractive women from any culture, the question is, mon ami, whether they would give consideration to guys like you and me

I read somewhere in a cultural book that girls from Australia are the ones who ask out guys

Trust, but verify. There are also a LOT of people (men and women) who 'marry under false pretenses', and will go along for the minimum amount of time to get citizenship, then kick you to the curb. I saw it happen to one of my friends, and several of his friends (simultaneously. I smelled a rat...well, also I couldn't afford the thousands to get one over). He has a wonderful little girl, but mama took him for whatever she could get, and then moved her (native) boyfriend to the States, and married him.

Culturally, if I am not entirely mistakened, the hispanic culture is a male dominated culture, which would tend to work in guys' favor I suppose.

It does seem to be that lots of white Brits get themselves a bride from the Indian subcontinent. I think a lot of the men that do this do it not necessarily because they can't get a British girl, but in the hopes of getting a girl that is more submissive, or less likely to be promiscuous, or a better homemaker, etc.

Maybe they just like the exotic look? There are many beautiful women from India.

Dating/Marrying People from a foreign culture Your thoughts?

I'm sure you can find what you're looking for, my friend. One positive thing about the rise of the internet and cell phone technology is that foreign cultures are much much less insular than they were 20 years ago. Just the fact that the last Olympics was in China- something that was inconceivable 20 years ago- shows the degree to which the barriers are coming down.

In addition, the advent of the Vietnam War changed things quite a bit. For the first time in American history, there were a large number of white American soldiers who were born in the standard 1950s/early 1960s era homogenous white background who were mixing, marrying, and having children with Asian women over in Vietnam. From what I've been told, that did anger a lot of white American women quite a bit (when a soldier would wind up marrying his pretty Vietnamese fiancee over in Saigon, instead of marrying Sally Johnson or whoever the girl next door was back in America that his parents wanted him to marry). However, things smoothed out over the years, and now everyone's pretty cool with intercultural dating- except some places in the midwest and south, like I said.

Fortunately, things are no longer the way they were back then. When the famous movie "South Pacific" came out in the late 1950s, it caused quite a bit of controversy and indignation over the portrayal of a white American soldier falling in love and having sex with a beautiful Asian girl while he was stationed overseas near Japan during World War II. Believe it or not, the American legislature actually considered outlawing the movie, because they felt that a movie promoting interracial marriage between whites and Asians was a threat to the American way of life and promoted communism. Things like that aren't even an issue today at all.

But I agree with what you said about not having to leave the US anymore- it's really just a matter of everyone become Americanized. Walk around any college campus in northern California, and you will see a great number of white guys with Asian girlfriends, both of whom are normal American college students who are fully Americanized. In many cases, you have many Asian and Latin individuals who are already 2nd or 3rd generation Americans, and as such identify much more with standard American culture and preferences than they do with the culture their grandparents came from 50 or 60 years ago.

The United States currently has around 305 million people living here. All of South America has a population of around 370 million. India has well over 1 billion people living there, and China also has a population of over 1 billion- both of which are more than the population of the US and all of South America combined. In 500 years, if things continue the way they are, probably everyone on earth will be at least 1/4 or 1/2 Asian or Indian, which is really a pretty cool prospect. So why fight the inevitable?

So really, this is the best time in history for intercultural dating. Things are no longer how they were in the 1950s. Now is the time to go for it. Good luck bro

WTF?????? I don't think so! In fact, they still have fairly rigid gender-role expectations of the guys (whilst they themselves can vary from the norm as much as they please). Overall they're the most hidebound, materialistic bigots on the planet!