Dating Indian Girl In Usa
Another big difference between Indian dating in comparison to the Western one is the level of romance. American women strive for equality and generally are not expecting their significant other to go above and beyond to impress them. But your Indian girlfriend will expect you to create that fairy tale that every girl dreams of. Internet dating is becoming an increasingly popular way for women in India to find suitable partners for dating and marriage. Even many of the most isolated Indian villages have internet these days, so beautiful Indian girls know that they are not completely bound by the restrictions of caste and geography. A beautiful Indian woman wanting to escape the boundaries of a traditional Indian arranged marriage will turn to a dating agency for help. Literally thousands of those are available in India, some of which are specialized for finding suitable husbands for Indian girls living in Western countries. May 12, 2011 There are some definite pros and cons to dating an Indian girl and one of the pros is certainly not in the fact that the family needs to grant permission for you to date the daughter. However, on the plus side, if you are looking for a girl that isn’t demanding and willing to bend toward your preferences, this would be an ideal situation.
I've never seriously dated an Indian guy before. I don't willingly avoid them; it's just kind of happened that way.
I'm Indian-American. My parents came to America in their 20s and had me in Long Island, New York, where I grew up. My hometown was a predominantly white, upper-middle class town, where I was one of the few brown people in my high school.
I remember my very first high school crush, whom I'd met in the drama club. Bernard* was tall and had cream-colored skin, with sea-green eyes and dirty blond hair (he was WAY out of frizzy-haired Sheena's league). Bernard and I never got together, but he ended up setting a precedent for many of the guys I found myself attracted to as I got older. 'I wanna join NASA,' he once told me while we jammed to music in his garage.
Like Bernard, the guys I've dated have all had wild aspirations. And they were all white.
There was the music producer, the impassioned civil rights activist and so on and so forth. The white guys I dated were often encouraged to be themselves growing up. They usually had familial support to pursue their dreams.
They didn't have to deal with an added layer of pressure to go through years of schooling, against their will, with the end goal of earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, because their parents didn't come to America from a developing country with certain expectations of their children.
In the Indian-American households I've both grown up in and dropped in on, those expectations often were, 'You better make a shit-ton of money because we traveled WAY too far and gave up WAY too much for you to screw up your life.'
My one cousin just graduated from Columbia Law School. I have another who's doing a Ph.D at Columbia in International Affairs and another who's finishing up his residency in Internal Medicine. None of these instances are accidents or coincidences; they are the result of long, drawn-out conversations about what's worth pursuing and what isn't.
'What about dentistry?' my mom once asked me in our kitchen. I was 16 and we were throwing around potential career ideas for me. 'Just like your sister. You could try it out and see if it's for you.'
I briefly considered her suggestion, but knew it wasn't my style.
From what I've witnessed in the lives of friends and family friends, it isn't atypical in Indian-American culture for parents to suggest high-paying professions as viable options. In fact, we're usually encouraged to continue education after college. According to the Pew Research Center, 40.6 percent of Indian-Americans over the age of 25 have graduate or professional degrees, which makes us one of the most highly educated ethnic groups in America.
I am not a 'highly educated' person (well, not according to conventional standards, anyway. I still consider myself to be quite intelligent). And I never wanted to be; I was always the artist, the social outcast, the brown girl different from most brown guys who were on their way to pursuing a steady job and a steady income in law or medicine or business. I liked marijuana; they liked beer pong. I liked to talk about indie-pop artists; they liked to talk about which Mercedes they were saving up to buy. We had different interests and values.
Simply put, brown guys and I had little-to-nothing in common besides our brown skin color. What would an aspiring writer and an aspiring cardiologist talk about over coffee, anyway? I tried it a few times. Most conversations fell flat.
Indian Dating Website
There was this brown guy named Rohit*, the first of three Indian guys I've ever dated, whom I met in college. He was in the business school. One day, I had a beer with him while he talked my ear off about capital management and private equity. It was my fault; I asked him what he wanted to do with his life.
A clearly very smart guy, he looked at me with blank stares after he asked me about my interests. I'm a different kind of smart. I'm emotionally intelligent. I wanted to talk about my favorite piece of prose from 'Pride and Prejudice' and about why I feel sad sometimes and don't know why. But whenever I started on any of my favorite things, he would tune out.
I know my experience isn't reflective of every other Indian-American girl's experience. This isn't the year 1890 -- there are a bunch of Indian guys who are beginning to break the mold and expand into other areas like tech, editorial and even comedy (hey, Aziz Ansari!), but they are still far and few between.
So why am I writing about any of this? Because recently, I've been accused of hating on my own culture. People call me out on social media for, uh, choosing vanilla over chocolate. They essentially accuse me of being racist against my own kind.
While I can always appreciate a passionate person with an opinion, I absolutely do not appreciate being accused of being racist against my own kind. Sometimes referred to as 'internalized racism,' it's the allegation that you believe the stereotypes that the world has created of your own kind, so you resist your own kind.
Well, I suppose I resist my own kind because of two things: all the bad dates I've been on with brown men and the fact that I'm not into my culture's idea of what a pristine Indian man 'should' be like (ie. the hedgefund guy; see above anecdote).
But I am not racist against my own kind. It's true that we all absorb stereotypes about all different races, but if I really bought into what Hollywood, some of middle America and actual racists believe all Indians to be -- nerdy doctors or otherwise 7/11 and Dunkin Donut owners with incredibly unattractive accents -- then I wouldn't have ever given any Indian guys a real chance to begin with.
Am I writing off dating Indian men forever? Absolutely not. If I met an Indian guy I could talk to, I would give him a chance. But as it stands, I've yet to meet an Indian guy who both appreciates and shares my affinity for Fiona Apple and likes to play guitar on the weekends with me while I sing. Until that happens, I'm going to keep doing what I've always done.
We live in a world where interracial dating is more widely accepted than ever before. It saddens me to see there are still people out there who can be so narrow-minded, so judgmental about the highly personal romantic decisions of others. You have no idea who I am. You have no idea where I came from.
I love my culture. But I also love Western culture. Can you give me a break? I'm just trying to find a balance between the two. And I'll tell you this: I'm certainly not the only girl who struggles with cultural identity and self-acceptance. This struggle I have is also an immigrant struggle. It's a struggle for anyone who doesn't know how much of their parents' culture they should fuse with the culture in which they were brought up. At the end of the day, each and every one of us is conditioned to think, act and feel a certain way because of the respective ways in which we were raised.
It's only human to do what you've always done. And we are all human.
*Name has been changed.
From the beginning, the American way of life has been a very fast paced one, and in today’s generation especially it can be hard for an Indian-American girl to establish her own identity. For Indian-American girls, America isn’t a place foreign to us but rather to our culture. Being raised by parents who have followed a more or less traditional route isn’t easy. It can be hard for parents to give their kids the freedom that comes from living in a liberal country like the US, and it can be hard for us girls to understand and accept where our parents are coming from. Whatever our background, we’ve all had similar experiences. We constantly struggle to keep a balance between our roots while trying to keep pace with the American way of life – landing us in sticky situations that we may look back on and laugh, maybe feel sad, and sometimes even mad.
One of the most annoying issues us Indian-American girls face at home concerns education. Our parents are always on our tails about our grades. Did you make all A’s this semester? Why did you only make a 96 on your physics exam? Did you eat your almonds today? No? Why?! How are you going to remember all those proteins for your biochemistry class? Woah. Talk about needing a chill pill. The first thing I’m going to do when I become a doctor is prescribe you some Valium. But ladies, I know that’s exactly what goes on inside your heads too. Don’t even deny it. We are constantly competing to be the best because of the pressure put on us by our parents. There’s no doubt they want the best for us. But the thing is, in school we are surrounded by other kids who think a B+ is a milestone. And while a B+ may be stellar in our books, our parents expect nothing but perfection. As a result, we start to question whether our parents’ expectations are valid. Are they asking too much of us? Or are the other kids just not on par with our capabilities?
On a different note, hospitality is a big part of our culture and sometimes our friends think we’re being obnoxiously welcoming when they come to our houses. Indian moms tend to interpret a “no” as I’m saying no, but in actuality please feel free to shove some more curry down my throat. What runs through your head: This isn’t India Mom! It’s America. A no really means no. But you know better than to speak up because anything you say will probably be shot down by your delightful mother. So you silently sink down into your chair feeling sorry for your friends’ stomachs and start thinking of the nearest pharmacy where you can run to and grab some Pepto-Bismol. We obviously can’t disrespect our moms, but we also have a reputation to uphold. We don’t want our friends to think we’re trying too hard, but we can’t just tell our moms to back off. That is the way our moms were raised. Why should they change their customary ways of addressing guests just because our friends won’t understand? Of course this is what we should think, but instead we’re more concerned about being accepted by our friends. It’s not that we’re ashamed of our upbringing – we just don’t want to be compelled to justify it. It’s like we’re in a perpetual catch-22.
Regardless of how annoyed we get with our own culture sometimes, our blood begins to boil when others disrespect it. Take those hate parade tweets after Nina Davuluri won the Miss America pageant for example, “The Arab wins?! This is Miss AMERICA, not Miss Arabia!” Um. So, tell me again how you passed middle school geography? Or when you tell your friends you’re going to India the summer after graduation and they stare at you like a deer in the headlights, genuinely asking if you’re going to “come back married or something.” Yeah… Now would be a good time to walk away. And possibly question your choice of company. How about when the Lowe’s guy comes to replace the screen door and tries to brush off the swastika drawn on the steps with his foot: “Holy mother of god. Who the hell put that there?!” You (politely) give him the stink eye because your parents are standing behind you. But really, tell me you don’t just want to punch him.
We watch people insult our culture on a daily basis. It’s amazing how culturally insensitive people can be. For one we live in the melting pot of nations. Part of us wants to tell them off. The other half realizes that we’re not in our homeland. Maybe we should keep quiet. Yet another part of us feels like we don’t know enough about our culture. We don’t want to come off as ABCDs (American Born Confused Desis). We try to live both lives, protecting the culture we were taught and living in the culture we grew up in.
The quirky nature of our culture is full of ironies. One of the most obvious is dating. Living in America, they expect us not to date, but as soon as we hit the age of 25 they ask “So… where’s the boy??” You didn’t want me to date for the past 25 years of my life and now you expect me to conjure up a husband out of thin air? Great. Or maybe your parents go a step further and ask your relatives in India to start looking for potentials. That’s when the middle-of-the-night calls start rolling in. How tall are you? How tall do you want him? What’s your major? He’s a little dark but he’s an engineer! Can I give him your number so he can call you? Um no? I’ll shop for my own husband, thank you very much. And they tell you “dating” is unconventional.
Dating Indian Men In Usa
Despite getting calls in the middle of the night from curious worried grandmas who want to know if you’ve learned to cook yet and if they should start searching for your suitors, you know you have the biggest and best families out there. Your parents are everyone’s uncle and aunty – including your eclectic group of Spanish, Asian, African, Irish, Black, White, Red, Green (you get the point), friends. They treat them like their own kids and spoil them rotten. Sometimes you can’t help but wonder why you’ve never gotten that kind of treatment from your parents. Accordingly, when we do eventually find the one, all of our friends insist on coming to our weddings. So, sure why not… We’ve never even met half of the family that shows up at our own weddings. What’s a few, maybe fifty, more?
Fun and games aside, crossing national borders doesn’t mean losing cultural ones. Yes, people may think we’re loud and crazy but they also know we’re quite lovable. We make the best students because our adorable dads worry too much about our futures. We make the best friends because our houses have the best food. And following in our female ancestors’ footsteps, it’s a given that we also make the best wives and mothers. We may be fair. We may be dark. Even if we were purple, most people will still think we’re “like totally exotic.” So to say the least, you’re Indian, you’re a female, and you live in America. Hello superwoman.