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?
