Musings on multiculturalism

A lot of people including but not limited to a few friends and random people I meet at parties, ask me, "What's wrong with Indian boys? Why are you dating a foreigner?" They seem even more alarmed when they realise that more and more Indian women are choosing to do this--step outside our dating "comfort" zones and be with men from other countries. Even my mother asked me more in a sociological sense--why are Indian girls picking foreign men? And are Indian men just being left far behind by the wayside in this new, 21st century world?

So, I figured I'd answer these questions. A small disclaimer that these are my thoughts and mine alone, perhaps with a few chimings in of other Indian women who find themselves in love with men who are not Indian.

To begin with, yes, perhaps the easiest descriptor of JC to people who haven't met him is the fact that he is English. Nationality, like it or not, conjures up a lot for other people. But, at the end of the day, he is my boyfriend and my best friend, and it doesn't matter if he's white or brown or green or purple. (Although, purple might be kind of cool!) I know that's very Michael-Jackson-y of me, but at the end of the day, your partner is your partner, you know? You stop thinking about the things that might define them to other people. Just like a beautiful face when you get to know it becomes just eyes or just a nose or just a mouth, I am often startled when people refer to me as in a multi-cultural relationship. It takes me a while, and then I'm like oh right, it's true, I am.

Surfing the internet, I've come across a lot of blogs that feature the other way round relationship--foreign girl marries Indian/sub-continent guy. But very few define what I have--where the boy is Not From Here. Perhaps it's because those other ladies don't think about it as much as the Other Way Rounds do, perhaps it's because as an Indian girl dating a foreign guy you're already assumed to be SO far out of your "traditional" structure that there's little or no point writing about it. My parents and my family know about JC, my parents have met him, I've met his, all is well. But I also get that we're not what you would call "typical".

Why am I with JC? He personifies all the things I want in a man--he is kind and smart and cute and he lets me be and have my own space. What more could a girl ask for? Must we bring our countries and their looooooooooong history into this? The Indian men I have dated--and I have dated quite a few--have been pretty much the same--commitment phobic, allergic to your Modern Liberated Sometimes-Writes-About-Sex-On-Her-Blog girl, attached to their mamas. They are in no way representative of all the Indian men and if you're with one who is all the things that JC is, then more kudos to you. My male friends are almost all Indian, but they're my friends. Not my lovers. And that makes all the difference.

And what of the Bombay girlfriend? That phenomenon that happens when expats move in large droves into a thriving Asian city (can also be substituted with the Singapore Girlfriend etc) and date an Indian girl to get a "feel" for the culture but then go home to wherever it is they're from and marry your girl next door keeping you just as a happy memory of more exotic times? They exist. I've seen them. Your Indian girl in that situation would be either a) using her expat man as an accessory or b) completely heartbroken. Yes, evil things exist. Yes, sometimes having someone on your arm is more important than waiting for the right person. But all the same, I advocate my multi-cultural relationship. I advocate having tarragon nestle up to garam masala in the kitchen, I advocate learning new things, I advocate not having a peg, a way to compare your partner to other people you know. JC and I began brand new, neither having an idea of what relationships in the other's country were supposed to look like. We taught ourselves. In some ways, he is an Indian boy--families are high priority for him. In some ways, I am an English girl--I feel that my partner and I should be completely equal with no one person running the house or paying the bills.

But in all ways, we are an awesome couple (touch wood and all that). Though not very much alike on the outside, on the inside we're, if not peas in a pod, then a pretty close second. We talk about things, we fool around, we care deeply about the other person. And that is what is wrong with Indian boys--they're not my boy.

And another woman with a foreign boyfriend writes a note for us. Here's what scout had to say:

I have not been lucky in love. I do not possess the ability to distinguish between what I want and what is actually good for me. My romantic escapades have almost always been a build up to the moment when I’m sitting alone in a corner of my room, staring at my knees, wondering what went wrong, replaying conversations and looks and James Blunt songs.

But for the last two years, I have had a constant in my life. Someone who I wouldn’t hesitate to identify as ‘family’ if I ever needed to. Someone who has proved to me, despite my neuroses, my stubborn attempts at proving my worst fears true, my self-destructive patterns of thinking, despite everything, that he will stay by my side. Someone who is convinced (more than I ever will be) that I’m the best person he knows, the only girl he loves.

I didn’t believe him. It took a very long, painful time before I began to let go of my doubts, of my loathing for myself, of my inability to trust anyone. A lesser man would have quit a long time ago. A lesser man wouldn’t have had the patience, nor the understanding required to sit through the breakdowns and infuriatingly regressive discussions that I have thrown his way. More than his often unconditional love, more than his understanding, more than the overwhelming gestures of affection, the most important thing he has given me is my faith in myself. And for that, I will never know how to repay him. No amount of video game consoles and Reiss jumpers will make up for the effort it took for him to pull me out of my well of self-contained gloom and show me what I was missing. I’m a miserable bastard, I am.

This is my first adult relationship and I would die a happy woman if it were my last. It changed me; it challenged me to stray away from the spiral I had created for myself. What I have with him is not trivial, not fleeting, not something I can replace easily if I were to ever lose it. It isn’t the kind of love you read about in paperback novels, it is the kind of love you can only build once in your life, the kind that probably won’t ever fade away, even if we were to never meet again.

And now, the things that set us apart to a casual observer – how our passports carry different seals on them, how his skin is paler than mine, how our accents don’t match up – they seem meaningless and insignificant. There will be people who believe that relationships borne out of drastically different backgrounds do not work, that there will always be a divide too large to bridge. But I cannot let him go just because my mother didn’t expect me to have a gora boyfriend. I can understand her reservations, they make sense to a certain extent, but what he must seem to my family and friends back home is not what he is to me. It would be unnatural for me to think of him as anything except in context to what he means to me, and to me, he means the world. It’s really that simple.