Racial preferences in the dating world

One of the more delicate areas I dealt with while running a dating service for more than two decades was the issue of race, and more specifically racial stereotyping by prospective members.

Stereotyping in itself is a volatile issue, and at some point during intake interviews, I often repeated the phrase “While there is some truth to all stereotypes, there are certainly many exceptions to every single one.”

However, when one is dealing with a sample of more than 20,000 single, divorced, and widowed men and women, I feel confident and comfortable making certain statements in a column titled The Truth about Dating.

Yet I was still hesitant to write this column, until a reader sent me an article from The New York Times, in which the author, John Tierney, published a story about racial preferences in the dating world.

Moreover, the article cited a study titled Racial Preferences in Dating that documented the preferences of more than 400 participants in speed dating sessions at Columbia University. A quick reading of both the Times article and the Columbia study seemed to support my own anecdotal findings.

(Unfortunately while reading the Columbia study I was overcome by the academic verbiage that authors of such studies feel compelled to use. Do they teach “Boring Writing 101” at Ivy League institutions of higher learning? I found it impossible to read more than a few pages without getting a headache. Here is a sample sentence: “Rates of inter-racial marriages thus capture both preferences and socio-geographic segregation.” Huh?)

Anyway, here is what I found in 23 years of interviewing singles, and I will attempt to communicate in my best “non-academic” language. When we interviewed prospective members, we always asked what their preferences were in terms of meeting people of different races.

Overall, women of most races preferred to meet men of their own race. Most Caucasian women wanted only to meet Caucasian men, the exceptions being women who were more educated and well-traveled, who considered themselves somewhat “worldly.”

Of all the races, African-American women were the most insistent about wanting to meet only African-American men. But most of those women excluded black men who had recently moved to New England from Africa or the Caribbean.

The one major exception to the finding that women wanted to meet men of their own race was Asian women, a vast majority of whom stated that they strongly preferred meeting non-Asian men.

The primary explanation offered by most Asian women was that they wanted to be matched with tall men, and they insisted that practically all of the Asian men they knew were short. But when I would ask if they would be willing to meet an Asian man if he were tall, most would simply shake their head and say they would rather not.

And what about Indian women? To be honest the sample of Indian women who joined my dating service more than 23 years was too small to determine any general statements about them.

As for men, overall they were far more open to meeting women of other races. In fact, and I find this especially interesting, the race of women most in demand were, you guessed it, Asian women. Therefore, almost all of the Asian women in my dating service had a very high Dating Quotient.

When I asked men to explain their preferences for Asian women, many shrugged and admitted they were just extremely attracted to them. But I also believe that many of these men, consciously or subconsciously, wanted to meet women who fit the stereotype of the submissive “Geisha girl,” whose primary purpose is to entertain and please men.

Interestingly enough, though, most of the Asian women we interviewed could not have had personalities more opposite than that passive stereotype. Many had Ph.Ds., M.D.s, or law degrees, and were extremely assertive. (Especially when I tried in vain to persuade them to consider meeting Asian men!)

Unfortunately for African-American women, most of the African-American men who joined stated a strong preference for meeting either white or Asian women. Many expressed the identical view, “I don’t have to join a dating service to meet women of my own race.”

The two groups of men who were the most difficult to match (and therefore had the lowest DQ) were Asian men and Indian men. Like African men, this was especially true of Asian and Indian men who had grown up overseas and relocated to New England, usually to pursue careers either in computer science or medicine. In a few cases I could persuade women to meet men of different races, IF the men were totally “Americanized.”

Of course Asian men were difficult to match because, as I previously stated, the one group of women who did not want to meet men of their own race was Asian women.

As for Indian men, they were the hardest people to match of any group of men or women of any race. And, with so many Indian men moving into the Boston area for jobs in high tech, rarely a week passed without several inquiries from men from India or Pakistan.

One reason they were difficult to match is that only a handful of Indian women joined over the decades, compared to hundreds of Indian or Pakistani men. But another is that many women, even the self-described “worldly” ones, expressed the stereotypical belief that Indian men had antiquated views of women.

To some extent, these women were correct. For example, of all the men I spoke with who wanted to meet women much younger than themselves, the largest group was, in fact, Indian men. Many told me that it was quite common back “home” for men to date and marry women at least a decade younger than themselves. And they wondered why they could not do the same here … which further lowered their DQ.

So that is the story from my own anecdotal experiences. Again, I am sure there are exceptions to every statement I made in this column. On the other hand, if you want “scientific” proof of what I am stating, just Google and download a copy of Columbia University’s Racial Preferences in Dating study.

I second that. I could never manage a stable relationship with an American women regardless of their race. My wife was raised in a homely Russian culture and is far more accomodating than most American women I been with.

“Speak for yourself. I find a lot of black women very attractive, but I never have found a black woman who didn’t insist she wanted only to date and marry a black man. The odds of finding a black woman and white man together are far slimmer than the odds of finding a white woman and a black man, and that’s not entirely because of the biases of black and white men.”

I found the exact opposite, I dated a black woman (conservative, yes, they exist) for 3 years, and all of her black female freinds had already dated white/latino men, or were extremely curious.

I met a woman recently, from Lithuania who was smart, funny, personality for days, seemed slighty conservative, and as a bonus attractive as hell, and was’nt aware of it (not high maintenance, in other words.) She was a lady without being a prude, and was open and sweet and no sign of the American bad attitude I see everywhere.

Heck of a sexy accent, too.

They just don’t grow them like that here anymore, the “chip” is a perfect way to explain why.

I don’t date anymore, I’m not even interested, but that Lithuanian has made me ponder vacationing in Eastern Europe...

Btw, the least common mix is asian male/white female.

I wonder why?

“Most Caucasian women wanted only to meet Caucasian men, the exceptions being women who were more educated and well-traveled, who considered themselves somewhat “worldly.”

Young Kofi...

Kofi and his wife.

Most Eastern European women strongly reject moral relativism and feminism, even if they are religious or not. At the same time, they are more “mentally” independent than American women judging by the way they talk and how they dont hesitate to show genuine emotion w/o thinking it as a symbol of “weakness”.

A very interesting thing is - they seem to prefer “emotionally strong” and “honest” men than physically attractive ones. On the other hand, those American women who are not yet Lesbians, tend to go for the buff studs in the guise of “sexual independence”, which probably explains the recent trend of obsession with black men who are renowned for their sexual prowess.

Indian women are gorgeous and prove excellent wives, but most of them interpret dating as a ritual that necessarily leads to marriage. The concept of “casual dating” is thought as something “immoral”. Also, most Indian women, necessarily marry along religious lines, if not caste lines. And hence, Hindus have a better shot at getting an Indian girlfriend/wife than guys like me.

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