love at first site or why you can't resist

you know you want him (or her).

i didn’t plan it this way. i put my picture up on the internet dating site, i specified ONLY muslim men of indian origin, 35-45, with a graduate degree and an yearly income over $250,000.

and i got a 27 year-old chinese-american biker. a vietnamese art director. a whole bunch of jewish-american lawyers. and a broke african-american bartender. (2 ex-husbands & 3 kids, why should i have been surprised that the people attracted to me were less traditional?)

but two of my friends with less-checkered backgrounds ended up with a 50 year-old italian filmmaker and a 60 year-old british rockstar with a bunch of kids...

in my case, the totally wrong one is always the one who sticks in my head. an italian accent dripping across the phone lines makes me melt. i love husky voice and brown skin. the darker the better.

so i go on the date just for a laugh, and he makes me laugh all the way through. or i can barely sit still for wanting to leap across the table...

let's say you (like my french ex-fiance henri) decided that he wanted a nice, french (protestant) girl and got waylaid by a gorgeous lebanese woman. and then a west indian goddess stopped him in his tracks.

(i maybe justifying here but even for an israeli-raised, new-york-resident guy of eastern european origin whose ideal woman is an israeli girl who grew up in new york city – can't guaratee he's met his match - the slightest differences can cause parallex error in their perspectives on the world.)

for me, in this benetton-mtv-cnn endlessly shrinking world, the bigger the difference the more the appeal.

i'm not going to lie to you.
well, i would but you'd see right through it.

even joseph conrad, back in the day, knew about the sexiness of the other side. reading cultural differences in body language. smelling it in the scent of their skin. and those long eyelashes...

an indian friend who is a superfamous writer and has been married about a million times to english and american women once said to me, (when i asked him why), “you fall in love with who you fall in love with, it’s not about the color of their skin.”

please. his last wife was indian, by the way.

everyone i know has fallen for the whole person. their culture, their religion, the color of their eyes and skin. how different they are from you as well as how much they are the same. at first glance, you have to be attracted to the outer package – because that is what you see.

and don’t say that looks aren’t important. (yes, there are people who are so deep that they can see past the first impression to the true beauty inside. i don't know that many, but i've heard.)

the majority of humanity is pleasantly superficial and unevolved. that's why advertising works so well. we are shallow.

in my mind, what’s wrong with decorative value? you’ve always liked japanese furniture and if you can find a piece that is both aesthetically pleasing and doesn’t break when you sit on it, does that make you shallow?

a quick digression - looks alone, however breathtaking, will not cut it in the long term.

no matter how irresistible your new love is, pretty is as pretty does (as they used to say in the victorian days).
the hottie gets tepid.
beauty gets boring fast if it doesn’t go much deeper.
as my british friend george used to say about her ex-boyfriend, “in the end, he was neither use nor ornament to me.”

STOP RIGHT HERE.

THERE ARE A LOT OF REASONS TO STAY IN YOUR CLAN.
OR TRIBE. OR STRATUM OF SOCIETY.

the other side of the story is a person who knows exactly what he or she wants, or wants exactly what is expected of him or her, and never looks past that. (this is not me, obviously - but i know lots of people who do it really well)

years ago, i did a story on arranged marriage for a now-defunct magazine called Mademoiselle. leah is a pretty lubavitch woman who grew up on the upper east side of new york city and married the young man chosen for her by her family.

as far as i can tell, they were living in bliss in brooklyn.

she is smart and really funny so i had to ask her – wasn’t there a moment, even one, when she was out in the park with her girlfriends and she lusted after a latino guy on a bicycle? or the cute stockboy in the supermarket. when the hot rush of adolescent hormones washed over her - did she ever have a split second of transgression?

she said, no. (possibly lying, but it didn’t seem like it).

also, her daughter was bubbly and adorable and had never watched tv and was reading by the time she was two.

so much for sesame street. my kids did not read til kindergarten.

here are the points my parents like to work into conversations:

scientific studies prove that the more similar your social and economic background, the more likely a couple is to stay together.

that stupid statistic that if you're a woman and you haven’t gotten married by the time you’re 35, you will get hit by a bus or live out your life in tragic isolation - though with less stress and depression, greater expendable income and more day-to-day happiness.

as leah and most of my friends in india prove, the classic arranged marriage, which matches a man or woman with his/her socio-economic counterpart, tends to last.

so if you end up with your best friend from school and both sets of your parents were professionals and protestants and old family friends - congratulations!

you are more likely to stay married or coupled. gender and sexual orientation aside.

many people – myself amongst them, to the great embarrassment of my parents – find that uninspiring. (but a lot easier, i am told.)

STILL HERE?

congratulations! subversives are good for the genetic evolution of humanity. keep it going long enough and we may be able to end religious wars and racial strife all together.

finally, there is new evidence to suggest that the second most compelling factor in lasting marriages is shared personality traits. so if you’re both laid-back and chilled out, or you’re both type-A high achievers, you might be able to drag it out for decades. (assuming the type-As don’t spontaneously combust.)

my friend jane, a german-american woman, who’s been married for forty years to a greek-american man agrees. we were hanging out in the locker room to the pool and she explained that the secret to a long relationship is being the same kind of people. “we’re both artists and we’re both very calm people, we like a degree of comfort and stability, i think that was what brought us together even more than culture. i mean, he came from a culture that was very emotional and family-driven and i came from a very germanic, rational culture – but we’d both become independent.”

they got engaged on valentine’s day.

a good omen as you embark on this journey.

Sleeping with the Enemy or dating across cultures

this is a personal exploration of crossing over

half self-help. and half help-me-out.

10 years ago, i’d just gotten out of my second marriage but was still not ready to throw in the towel on romance.

the proactive solution was to expand my horizons. so i started on a dating trip across cultures, religions, generations and continents.

and of course, i was whining that nothing could possibly be harder than being a single south asian mother (with three kids) rejoining the meat market in new york city.

wrong. very few people have it easy.

imagine a pakistani gay man trying to find his soulmate without giving his grandfather a heart attack. a sweet vietnamese buddhist with a thing for israeli girls. or nice british lesbian hoping to settle down and have a family.

even dating as single mother puts you in a different place. all this time, you’ve been in mom-world. you start hanging out with a single man who has never been married or was married but never had kids and he takes awhile to realize why you’re wrecked by 9 o’clock. or why you can’t run out and meet him and his friends in the restaurant down the road on the spur of the moment. (hello? the home-alone-kids...)

or even weirder, explaining why facing the disapproval of your kids is even harder than facing the disapproval of your parents when you’re a teenager.

all that later. this is a map from someone who’s been there (at least heterosexually). though, in my mind, it’s all the same.

the idea is a connect-the-dots trip through the key relationship destroying points for you and your significant other. or your s-o to be. the final result should be, at the very least, a happy ending.

here's the premise (or the first one): there is no such thing as a failed relationship.

human beings learn and grow from their deeper connections with others. the farther away another person is from where you grew up, the more you stand to learn from him. or her.

statistically, unions between people of similar backgrounds last longer. however, i’m not convinced that the length of a marriage is a measurement of its success. on the other hand, a relationship in all its permutations, that continues on with two people respecting each other, is probably the best happy ending.

you know that sixties command, “make love, not war”? that’s where the personal gets political.

want to understand the inner workings of a communist, a southern baptist, a muslim, a jew, a midwesterner, a pentacostal? marry one. (oh no, wait – maybe that’s where the “war” part comes in...)

better still, date one. have someone you think you couldn’t possibly relate to as your best friend. suddenly, the gaping cracks in empathy come together.

if all that seems too ambitious, here’s another thought: if you are even thinking of hooking up with anyone else – you are crossing cultures - whether they are from another ethnicity, religion, country, or even gender.

the fact is, even growing up in a different family makes your cultural references alien. forget about the color of your skin or what you call god. or GOD.

the only way to guarantee you’re on the same page culturally is to marry your own sibling. maybe even the same sex sibling.

repulsive as that thought is, it could be the only way to never have arguments about the correct way to react, celebrate, spend your money, spend time with your family or worship.

oh, there’s one other way – stay alone.

scratch that. if we could really be happy, autonomous and single that would mean we were amoebas. and what is the happiness capacity for amoebas?

i’ve been deconstructing the idea of the crosscultural relationship since attending a literary event in with my youngest daughter and my then british husband. an elderly indian woman came up to me and said, “you know, i also have a mixed marriage.”

and i said, “really? is your husband european?”

the poor woman looked totally aghast and said, “oh, no. i mean, i am from north india and he is from south.”