Cless Alvein’s blog, Alvanista, is here.
I approach the podium. My hands tremble slightly. Even though the atmosphere is one of support, I’m not used to speaking in front of crowds.
“My name is Cless Alvein,” I begin. (Actually, that’s my pseudonym, but let’s go with it this way for now.)
“Hi Cless!” the crowd calls back in unison. The first step to self-understanding and growth is the ability to articulate one’s predicament.
“My name is Cless Alvein, and I’m looking for love. I’m looking for a beautiful, intelligent, sweet woman to caress and cherish. I guess you could say that I’m a love-a-holic.”
The crowd applauds. Or maybe not, since what I’ve articulated is not an unusual sentiment. To be “love-a-holic” is an essential aspect of the human condition, not a pathology. I am seeking love and intimacy intensely at this stage of life (age 26). Don’t get me wrong: I’m attractive enough that I have no problem meeting women, and I’m sufficiently functional on my own. I have a good job, great friends, and a lot of hobbies. I don’t need a woman, and if it were God’s will for me to be single and dedicate myself solely to other aspects of life, I’d stoically accept that. However, I really want one. I’d like to be married before my 32nd birthday. Of course, I’d rather have no relationship at all than anything but a passionate, loving one– this explains my extreme selectivity and long single spells– but it’s this faith in love that keeps me searching.
We’re afraid of love, as humans, and we shouldn’t be. Love, and not only of the romantic kind but of all varieties, is what we live and die for. It’s why God created us. Four billion years of evolution through progressively sophisticated mechanisms have brought us to this human form, and while we lack the comprehension and brilliance of our Creator, we’re fully capable of love– and that’s a great start. We invent flying machines because we love the idea of flight, write novels and design computers because we love language and symbols, and we perpetuate the species by loving each other and forming families.
With love as a motivator, one can see why I’m averse to combat dating and the casual-sex market: there’s no love in it. There isn’t even luke-warm “like” in it. It’s more like a real-life flame war than a process of growth and discovery, combining the nonchalant mean-spiritedness of 4chan and the confining status obsessions of Autoadmit. When two people are trying to assert and to assess each other’s status, there’s no chance for genuine friendship, compassion, and love to flourish. Pouring battery acid in a garden, proving one’s “status” to the earth, doesn’t bring flowers to blossom. It kills them.
Escaping combat dating is hard, and most American men have become fed up with it and the “mainstream” dating scene run by middle-class, mostly white, American women. Many of us will look elsewhere to find love, dating internationally and interracially. Our most fervent opponents in this are, perhaps not surprisingly, the entitled and selfish Sex and the City girls we’re moving away from. Why? Because despite living in a “post-feminist” world, they still need us more than we need them. Why? Because the marital hypergamy of the typical, entitled American yuppie woman, even still, tends to follow specific racial and class patterns, which romantic men and women readily ignore. Carrie Bradshaw’s “Mr. Big” had to be a blue-blooded white man. By contrast, a person who is seeking love above all, like myself, can marry a woman of any nationality and racial background.
This terrifies the casual-sexing divorce monkeys and suburban-bred office cows that mainstream American women have become, and it’s the reason they pipe out such outlandish stereotypes about white men who are open to interracial dating and marriage. They claim, for example, that we “can’t get white women”. Wrong. We can, and some of us will marry the few decent white girls who are still single. We just don’t find racial similarity important in choosing a mating partner– at all. These women do, and losing “their men” frightens them.
Of white men who date Asian women, the scared white girls argue that we seek submissive housewives, or that Asian women just have low standards. Also wrong. Second- and third-generation Asian immigrants are as free, under the law, as any other American women, and they strongly prefer egalitarian relationships. Moreover, Asian womens’ standards aren’t “lower”, but just different. They care more about culture, intelligence, and refinement than they do about the American concept of social status, and that’s a good thing. I mean, isn’t it a little bit pathetic when a 30-year-old woman is still chasing the types of men who were popular in high school?
Of white men who date black women, they make an even more offensive assertion: that we’re attracted to them because they’re supposedly “easy”. Doubleplusunright– or in old speak, wrong again. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite, because the specific type of black women that we seek (and, yes, for serious relationships and marriage) is far from promiscuous.
One of the best-kept secrets in the modern dating scene is the beauty– physical, intellectual, romantic and spiritual– of the educated, middle-class black woman. Among them are some of the most cultured, strong and loyal women I’ve ever met. They’re fully American– in fact, I’d argue that, without the contributions of black Americans, the U.S. would be a cultural backwater– but with strong values and spirituality, a combination that makes them one of the most desirable ethnitcities for an American man to date. Also, they’re not at all easy. Immensely strong and spiritual women, they tend to have sex only in the context of a loving relationship predicated on mutual respect and loyalty, preserving the ability to pair bond while their mainstream, Sex and the City-raised counterparts have lost it.
At the risk of sounding like a racial fetishist, which I’m not, let me give the disclaimer that I’m speaking strictly in aggregate terms. I know there are great white women out there, but a white man unwilling to date outside of his ethnicity is putting himself at a severe disadvantage– there aren’t enough good white women “to go around”, so to speak. Obviously, it also goes without saying that not every non-white or foreign woman is an angel. There are great and awful women in all ethnicities, of course. Yet as a white American man, it seems very clear that the odds are substantially better for those of us who are enthusiastic about looking elsewhere.
It’s also important, in my mind, to clear the air about white American men who “out-marry”. The vast majority of us are not racial fetishists at all, and our motivations have nothing to do with the perverse and offensive stereotypes propagated by scared white women. We date and marry these women– Asian, black, European, Latina– because we love them. Why wouldn’t we?
