Member-only story
When You Marry Your Sri Lankan Girlfriend
Title: When You Marry Your Sri Lankan Girlfriend
Before my wife, I only dated white women. Why? Because I’d grown up going to schools filled with predominantly white people. I found myself seen as that “token black girl” and I accepted it. There wasn’t much diversity. I went to a small high school in a small town on Eastern Long Island located two hours south of New York City. In my graduating class, there were four people of color: me, my cousin Natasha, and two other people. There were seventy-three people in our graduating class in 2001.
Later that year, I found myself in my first college relationship with a woman who had the most beautiful red hair, a killer smile and eyes that made you believe you were the most important person in her world. She was also white. It was indeed a pattern, this desire to date white women. It was my comfort zone. It gave me a false sense of safety. Being with white women was the opposite of my own life, a life I felt so disconnected from as the daughter of a formerly incarcerated woman. In my relationships, I found a kind of social acceptance I didn’t often find elsewhere. Also, brown and black women had never appealed to me. Call it preference. Call it ignorance. Call it shallow — it was what it was. That is until, I met my wife.
I found myself in love with someone unfamiliar, whose world was vastly different than my own, and who fell outside of the cultural safety zone I knew so well. I fell in love with a Sri Lankan woman named Dinushka.
Born in Sri Lanka during the height of the country’s civil war which began in 1983 and ended in 2009; her family fled their home country. Eventually, they immigrated to the United States when she was 5 years old. She grew up on the East Coast and soon began to call America home.
I, on the other hand, didn’t know much about Sri Lanka or anything about South Asia until I met her. We met when online dating was a little less transactional and more experiential (at least for lesbians). We talked for a month before we met. We shared very intimate parts of our souls with an honesty I found to be so lacking in others. During those conversations over email, she offered me pieces of herself, pieces she had not given to others.
