Dating Anxieties

 

Before we were about to part ways, Marlon, visibly anxious, asked me at the last minute to join him for a beer at a bar next to the coffee shop where we had just finished our interview. After ordering our drinks from the bartender, we posted up in the bar’s front patio so that Marlon could smoke a cigarette and quell some of his nerves. Once we sat down, Marlon took a few quick swigs of his beer, lit up a cigarette, and then asked if he could solicit some friendly dating advice. At first, I found his demeanor somewhat surprising because of how confident I came to see him through the course of our conversation earlier.

From hearing his life stories, it was pretty clear that Marlon was a social butterfly. Marlon was working at a local mortgage brokering company in Carson. The company’s staff closely mirrored the demographic of the surrounding neighborhood—a mix of mostly Filipinos and Mexicans, both American-born and immigrant. Marlon was quick to make friends beyond his immediate set of friends and within a few months found himself in a mixed group of both Filipino and Latino guys that he would regularly grab drinks with after work.

“Working there was cool. There were a lot of girls, man,” Marlon had said earlier in our interview. I asked him if he had dated any of them.

“Yeah, a couple actually. And even sometimes within the same group of friends. It was kind of dramatic,” he shared, in a more matter-of-fact, rather than bragging fashion. While in the coffee shop, Marlon mentioned three women he had dated. The first, Hazel, was Filipina, and they dated for a few weeks. The two women he dated later, Jennifer and Graciela, were both Mexican American. Interestingly, during our formal interview, Marlon had not mentioned that he was currently dating a woman he had met at his new job, and for whatever reason, first brought her up once we were at the bar. Her name was Sara, and she was a Vietnamese American girl from Westminster in Orange County.

“I’m kinda nervous about the girl I’m dating,” Marlon confessed, appearing slightly relieved to get the nerves off his chest, “This is the first time I’m dating someone of a different race.”

At this point, I was slightly confused, but more so intrigued. Marlon had spent more than half an hour in the latter part of our interview talking about Jennifer and Graciela, who again were both Mexican American. He recounted his dating experiences with them in the same way anyone would talk about an old boyfriend or girlfriend—how they first met, what sorts of activities they did, the things they would fight about, how they broke up—but at no point did Marlon belabor the fact that he was Filipino and they were Latina. Why did the idea of “race” come up now?

“Wait a second. Didn’t you just say the last two girlfriends you had were Mexican? What about them?” I called him out, hoping to tap more deeply into Marlon’s own conceptions of racial difference.

Marlon laughed. He laughed in the way you laugh when someone asks a question with an obvious answer they expect you to already know. Nerves about his new girlfriend aside, Marlon’s confidence resurfaced in his rebuttal to me: 

“That doesn’t count. Mexicans are the same as Filipinos.”