I have a crush on a friend from Central Asia. He’s tall, kind, and is a first-class gentleman.
He cooks and cleans! And he lives fifteen minutes from my flat in London, which is quite handy because I hate kitchen duty.
My best friend here is a stunning woman whose mother is Ethiopian and father is Italian. She, in turn, had a shattering crush on a Nigerian. And for the last three years, I have been sharing a flat with two brothers from southeast rural China, one of whom boils and eats seven eggs every morning. He has a crush on a Polish girl.
Besides dodging dirty dishes, befriending a woman who men always drool over, and managing to avoid the perpetual stench of boiled chicken ovum, all this adds up to what some might call single life in a multi-cultural melting pot.
When I first relocated to London, I was constantly surprised by the amount of interracial (better known as mixed-ethnicity) couples. It is one of the first things you notice as an American visiting London. The sheer variety of people walking hand-in-hand and smooching is mind boggling—Indian women with English men, Kenyan women with Italian men, Brazilian women with French men, and English women with, well, everyone. As a newcomer, it seemed a virtual love fest.
According the United Kingdom’s 2001 census report, Britain has one of the fastest growing multi-ethnic populations in the world. On the tiny island of England, particularly in the crammed capital city, people can only distance themselves so far from each other before they’re living in Oxfordshire. (Kind of like living in Queens when you’re dying to reside in Manhattan.) Residents of varying wealth, religion, custom, and country of origin all live cheek-to-jowl (inevitably meeting people they would never connect with if they didn’t live in London) because they want to live in London.
All this proximity is enough to wonder how the diversity is reflected in the dating scene. What is the sea like when there are so many different fish swimming in it?
As far as radio presenter Colleen George is concerned, there’s no exclusion of anyone anymore, at least for her. Colleen is a native New Yorker of St. Lucian descent who relocated to England in 2006.
In contrast, in the US, even cosmopolitan cities like New York are still finding interracial dating “a bit taboo,” particularly for black women, Colleen says. But in London, it is less unusual for black women to date men of another ethnicity. They are no different than any other eligible women. “In London, guys can just approach you and it’s fine. You’re just like Susie on the street… you’ll get [odd] looks from new people like me, but here it’s just such a norm,” she tells me.
Colleen appreciates the openness of dating the scene. She’s comfortable with the free-spirit qualities of social life here and that is mostly due to her upbringing. “No one judged anyone in my family. I think that was the basis of me being the free thinking person I am. Like who am I to judge?” She asked. “I’m not perfect… You’re responsible for your happiness and I do thank my mom for that.”
For Karolina, a Polish psychology student who migrated to England four years ago, the dating scene may be open, but finding Mr. Right is still difficult. And crossing a cultural divide isn’t always desirable—especially when the person reaching across the gap for you is hitting you up for a one-night stand or has a religious background you don’t agree with. “London is such a melting pot. You have people from so many different countries and sometimes you want to meet people from your own country. And that’s another difficult thing because it’s such a big city and it’s really difficult to meet the proper guy,” Karolina says.
