I started dating Mark two years ago during my sophomore year in high school. We were both taking a poetry class and he was really into a poem that I wrote about visiting my family in India. We talked and I liked him instantly. He was kind and sweet but ... white. I never had romantic feelings for someone who wasn't Indian, nor would I ever be allowed to do anything about those feelings. But I liked him too much. There was no way I could stop my feelings for Mark.
Identity
Dating someone who wasn't the same race or part of the same culture as me made me think about things that I wasn't so aware of before. More than ever, I found myself thinking about my identity as a young Indian woman with dark brown skin. For the first time, I saw how brown my hand was when being held by a white hand. I was kissing a boy who never spoke Hindi and didn't know anything about Hinduism. People noticed us on the street. Our differences became more apparent to me. I wasn't sure if it could work.
Community
My friends, all of them Indian, wanted to be open to Mark, but I knew that they felt a little strange about our relationship. In our high school, people of the same ethnic group stick together. Mark stuck out like a sore thumb at our "Indian" lunch table. We were all used to being around people of other ethnic groups and races, but we didn't intermix. I felt like I also stuck out when I was with Mark's friends and family. Sometimes I felt that my different ethnicity was a blaring neon sign, and this made me feel totally out of place.
Family
My family was entirely another issue that affected me on a much larger scale. When I went to ask permission to date Mark, my parents wouldn't hear of it. We spoke from different worlds and experiences. To them, although we were just dating, the potential for it to become serious was always present. I was to marry an Indian man and raise Indian children. I tried to tell them that we are all of some sort of mixed blood and that Mark was special.
My relationship with Mark put a rift in my relationship with my parents. They took it as an insult that I wanted to date outside of my own culture. They could not and still cannot accept Mark for who he is. To them he is an outsider.
Together
After dating Mark for two years I feel much more comfortable about our differences. We have expanded our community of friends to more of a mixed group. Getting to know Mark as the unique individual that he is has shown me that love doesn't have to be about racial and cultural identity labels. It is about who the other person is, how he acts, and how he treats me. When I look at Mark, I don't see our differences; I just see Mark.
