What is it like when an Asian male and a white female date? Just like any other combo. But Asian guys and White girls are uniquely special in an incredible way. If you want an exciting, sexy, and loveable partner, this is the relationship you need to fulfill your life. Perhaps AMWF is the perfect combination for you.

Is this romantic pairing different from any other combination? It all depends on who you ask. Also, this is a very broad question because there are many types of Asian males just as there are different white females. One thing we can be sure of, though, a lot of the stereotypical perceived difficulties of AMWF dating is actually not there. Let’s break these down and then let’s get to the real issues involved in AMWF relationships.

Language Issues

One of the most common objections, if you will, about AMWF dating involves a perceived language barrier. Let’s get one thing out of the way. This is not usually an issue. An Asian American male who was born and raised in the United States usually has no language issues to speak of. White girls might be turned on by the Asian guy’s language difference at first however.

Even if his parents spoke the language of their country of origin exclusively at home, second-generation Asian Americans usually have no language issues. They usually are able to transition seamlessly between an exclusively English-speaking outside world and a monolingual home culture. They are bicultural at a fairly deep level.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that they know how to fluently speak in the language of the original country of their parents. Their parents’ place of birth language may be a problematic language for them. By problematic, I’m not saying that second-generation Asian American males have a problem with their parents speaking another language. The problem involves absorption.

It’s not unusual for second-generation Chinese American, Korean American, or Filipino American kids to understand their parents’ language but are completely unable to speak it. This happens quite a bit. It takes a focused effort and a structured language environment normally to foster full bilingual capabilities.

It happens often, but it definitely doesn’t apply across the board. Just as you can find an Asian guy who is able to speak fluent Korea and English, there’s also an equal number of guys who can’t. The same applies to Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, Japanese, you name it.

This has more to do with their dynamics at home. Still, the key takeaway here is, for the most part, even first-generation immigrant Asian males can and do quite well with the English language so communication is not an issue.

This language barrier is really just one of perception. Whether we like it or not and whether we accept it or not, there are still quite a number of people in America who perceive Asians as perennial strangers. Just by looking at their facial features, their skin color, and their overall physical characteristics, they are portrayed as the other.

This perception is not going to go away anytime soon because it has been held for so long. This is the real issue behind any perceived language barrier in the typical AMWF relationship.

America’s experience with Asians actually goes back a long way. Indeed, in Louisiana, there are records of Filipino castaways from the Spanish colonial territory of the Philippines establishing small communities in French Catholic Louisiana. That’s how far back the Asian influence goes in America. Chinese have been documented as traveling to Hawaii long before Captain James Cook “discovered” the Hawaiian islands.

Regardless of the long American experience with Asians, there’s still this lingering perception that they are relatively new and that they are comparatively “strangers” compared to, let’s say, African Americans or definitely Native Americans.

Where does this perception come from? It’s not a simple matter of saying that it’s just straight racism or prejudice that informs this misconception. A lot of it has to do with statistics. Generally speaking, Asians have always been in the minority within the larger minority community.

For the longest time, national conversation about interracial relationships and intercultural politics and economic issues centered on the black and white American division. For the longest time, if you wanted to talk about minority rights and minority cultural issues, it was almost assumed that you’re talking about African Americans. Asians were basically not even on the radar.

Things changed quite a bit in the 1940s with the Japanese internment experience. These were first-, second-, and third-generation Japanese Americans held in internal concentration camps in the United States. You would think that kind of thing doesn’t happen in the land of the free but it did. In fact, it was so shocking and so embarrassing that Japanese American survivors of those concentration camps received reparations from the US government. This was damaging for White girls married to Asian guys, and many amazing relationships suffered because of it.

Before that, statistically speaking, Asians were a very tiny slice of the larger immigrant pie. Of course, there was a lot of racial animus as to why this was the case.

One can easily point at the Asian exclusion laws that were passed in the late 1800s in the United States. In particular, Chinese were perceived as so hard-working and so diligent as workers that they blew everybody away. They worked twice the hours for less money and produced much more than other workers.

This was a serious issue because one of the biggest political voices at the time were Irish Americans. A lot of them were working class and the Chinese were viewed as their competitors. This is why there were lots of Asian exclusion laws, whether against the Chinese or de facto limitation on the Japanese. This explains partly why Asian immigration numbers were very low prior to the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

Starting in 1965, the United States opened up immigration to mostly non-European countries. This has the dramatic result of diversifying America’s population. This also is the reason there is a perception that Asians, by and large, are recent arrivals.

It all depends on how you define “recent.” To some people, forty years is recent. Others interpret the term more strictly and restrict it to five years.

Whatever the case may be, Asians are viewed as relatively recent arrivals and that’s why the matching assumption that they can’t speak English. When you look at English SAT scores and overall academic achievement, it turns out that Asian American kids do quite well. So, this is not an issue. When it comes to Asian males dating white females, language barriers are almost non-existent.

Cultural Barriers in AMWF Dating

Just as misleading is the idea of a cultural barrier between partners in AMWF dating. In fact, studies show that people tend to be more attracted to other people who share their values. It’s very easy to read this in terms of general abstractions about the values regarding integrity, honesty, ambition, entrepreneurship, so on and so forth.

However, in practical terms, this can be accurately translated as people of the same class tend to be attracted to people from the same class. In the United States, this transcends color. If you’re middle class or upper middle class, you tend to be attracted to people of the same class as you regardless of their color, whether they speak with an accent or not, and where in the world they originally came from.

Regardless of whether you’re talking about black and white dating, Latino-white dating, Asian-Latino or Asian-black dating, this general trend pretty much holds. The issue is not so much cultural barriers but class barriers.

Again, this is not much of an issue because when you compare household incomes segmented along racial lines, Asians guys do quite well compared to whites – better economically than white guys actually. In fact, in many years, Asian households earn more than white American households. White American households, in turn, tend to earn more than black American and Latin American households. As a result, white girls may see asian guys as a rich trophy husband.

The issue of any perceived cultural miscommunication or cultural issues really doesn’t hold when you account for class similarity in dating.

AMWF Dating: The Real Topics

Now that we have debunked some of the most commonly held misconceptions animating or surrounding international AMWF dating, are there any real issues left to discuss? Yes, there are.

First of all, there’s the phenomenon of fetishization. Let me be clear. When you are dating somebody because that woman has blond hair and blue eyes, you are fetishizing her. You’re treating her as a fetish.

The same analysis applies to dating somebody because of their skin color. White girls can be attractive to Asian guys because of their skin color. Just as a white girl might like a Chinese guy for how cool and rich he is. You’re not really dating the person; you’re dating what you think that person is or you’re dating your attraction to that person.

Please understand that there’s a big difference between focusing on your attraction and actually being attracted to that person as a person. Two totally different things. You’re basically stereotyping or reading into the person things that you desire and, ultimately, the relationship really is all about you and what you want to get out of that person.

On the other hand, you can choose to fall in love not with Asian eyes, the brown skin color, the straight, black hair, or any other Asian features but with Jim, Ken, or Tim. In other words, you fall in love with the person.

Again, these are two totally different things because when you fall in love with the person, it doesn’t matter what skin color that person has. It doesn’t matter whether he speaks with an accent or not. It doesn’t matter where he spent his childhood. All that matters is that you like his sense of humor and other things about him. In other words, you’ve fallen in love with the person himself.

Fetishization is a big deal. It robs the individuality of that person you’re supposed to be in love with.

There’s also stereotypes regarding wealth. It’s not unusual for gold diggers to go after Asian men precisely because they’re thinking that either the guy is already loaded or he has the capacity to get loaded.

Again, this is just as messed up has fetishization because you’re not really in love with the person. You’re in love with their proximity to power or their ability to get power and wealth.

This also applies the other way around. Some Asians marry white females because they think that they’ve arrived. They look at their white partner as some sort of social status ticket to high society or they view their partner as some external symbol of their ability to reach the very top of American society.

This mindset, as weird as it may seem (since it uses people as ‘trophies’), is actually rooted in America’s de facto racially segregated past. Back in the day, white women were deemed to be the highest symbols of beauty and purity. This was especially true in the antebellum South. There was a whole complex of mystique built around the ‘unobtainable’ beauty of white women for men of color. Considering the antimiscegenation laws in effect then as well as the reality of lynchings or any other kind of mob action, there’s a sense that the white woman was the ‘forbidden fruit.

You might be easily forgiven for thinking that this is a purely Jim Crow Southern phenomenon. Nope. In the West, where anti-Chinese sentiment was at its highest, Chinese men and white women were viewed as not only ethnically separate but sexually separate from each other. Chinese men, as despised as they were due to their ability to put white working class men to shame in terms of wage costs and productivity, were viewed as menacing sexual villains. Proper white women were supposed to not have anything to do with them-much less desire them sexually.

Indeed, a lot of the racial venom the majority culture spouted against blacks in both the antebellum and Jim Crow South had Chinese analogs. Chinese were deemed to be perpetual strangers-so uncultured and so unfamiliar with all things Western that they were supposed to not want to have anything to do with with women. Of course, Asian men who did not fit the stereotype or bucked it were viewed with suspicion or were treated harshly until they towed the line. The trends and cultural fault lines above form the historical context of Asian male and White female relationships. While we have gone a long way, you’d be surprised at how durable some misconceptions can be.

These issues linger and they are pernicious. They are harmful precisely because AMWF dating based on these misconceptions don’t really involve falling in love with the other person for who they are.