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.
