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Article about dating a black man:
I was a man in my 50s looking for love online - but women just wanted me for sex. She was a divorced white woman in her mid 40s with two young children. When she messaged me on a popular dating app, she wrote that she wanted to “try something different”.



She told me, without any embarrassment, that sex with a black man was an item on her bucket list, alongside other post-divorce “experiences”, like trekking in Nepal or zip-lining in Costa Rica. She saw me not as a personality, but as a pastime, an object, and did not see her actions as racially insulting in the slightest. “Why did you swipe right on me?” I inquired as we sat in a bar on our first date. “Because I thought you’d be a playa,” she said. She admitted she had not read the text accompanying my profile pictures. In other words, she had seen a black face and unthinkingly equated it with promiscuity. When I gently pointed out the racism implicit in her words, I realised it had never occurred to her they could ever be interpreted that way. Although she lived in London, all the people in her life were white, and so her assumptions about race had never been challenged. It was after this experience and other similar ones that it started to seem to me as if the new world of dating now meant that for many, connecting with black men had become like a branch of online shopping: as easy as buying a fridge on Amazon. At the same time I realised that the culture of online dating presents particular challenges if you’re black, whether you’re male or female. Last week, Candice Carty-Williams, author of the acclaimed novel Queenie , told a newspaper how dating was “harder for sure” for black women. “Black women are the least responded to on dating apps,” she said. “From my own experience and the experience of my black female friends, the ways that we are spoken to is horrible.” I was 51 when I tried online dating for the first time, three years ago. I had just come out of a six-year relationship with a white woman, which had followed a four-year relationship with a black woman. I have a grown-up son from a much earlier relationship. But marriage has somehow never happened for me, as much as I would like it to some day. I work as a writer and live in West London, and what I wanted when I unexpectedly emerged on to the singles market at the start of my sixth decade was companionship. I longed to be in love once again. I spent 18 months, on and off, seeking this on various dating apps, and was shocked at the racism that proliferated. The vast majority of users are white, and most opt for partners of their own ethnicity. This is certainly the case with most of my white friends, who admit that when it comes to selecting a partner they tend to default to what they know, and what seems familiar aesthetically. The statistics on online dating back this up. Research conducted by professor Gerald Mendelsohn at the University of California revealed that over 80 per cent of the contacts initiated by white members were to other whites, with only three per cent to black members. Black females are considered the least attractive group within digital dating. Christian Rudder, co-founder of OKCupid, discovered within his app’s analytics that black women (and also East Asian men) were the least popular groups, with the lowest number of matches. Black women received 25 per cent fewer connects than white women. With a narrower field of options, blacks are forced to be more proactive when online dating, and to cast a wider net than their white counterparts. Mendelsohn’s research found that black daters “were 10 times more likely to contact whites than whites were to contact blacks.” This was certainly true for me, but approaching white women and those of other ethnicities did not present a problem, as I find women of all races attractive. I’ve never had a type as such: all the women I’ve been out with have been very different from each other. But it’s equally true that you have to be pragmatic, not emotional. The low volume of ethnic diversity within online dating means there is a high probability black singles in the UK will end up dating whites, simply as a result of availability. Of all the single, London-based females I scrolled through across four different dating apps - easily over a thousand faces - I estimate that only five per cent were black. And this number dwindled further when I assessed whether or not I liked their personalities or found them attractive. During my time internet dating, I met up with five black women and 20 white, which is merely a reflection of who’s out there. It didn’t work out with the black women either because they didn’t live close enough, or I didn’t feel a spark, or in one case because she wanted children and I had already had mine. When I did find black women to date, I was happy, as they’re harder to come by and we often had a shared racial experience and outlook. But other than that, my approach was colour blind, if not age blind. I set my parameters between 40 and 55, which meant almost every match was divorced and with children. The majority of those I encountered had only ever dated white men, and a number of them expressed racist views, sometimes without even realising. On seeing my online pictures, several assumed the following: “promiscuous”, “large penis”, “voracious sex”, not “family man” or “loving partner”. Some of them told me this outright. One especially telling moment came when a white woman I was dating said jokingly that her white friends wanted to know what a black man would be like in bed. I had stated in my bio that I was looking for a relationship. But in my experience there remains a perception within the online dating arena that black men are candidates only for sex and a good time. Black women are subject to even greater levels of abuse, particularly around post-colonial stereotypes about possessing a more vigorous sexual appetite or outlandish sexual preferences. Style blogger Stephanie Yeboah encountered this during her time online dating. “Some blatantly exclaim that they would want to be in a relationship [with me] to ‘get a taste of jungle fever’ and to see whether black women are ‘as aggressive in bed as they’ve heard,’” she said. In so many areas of society, blacks are required to be “more than” in order to be accepted, and for many this is also true in the bedroom. This is not sex as we know it, as an act of pleasure, but sex as performance, defined by race. Once you’ve had one or two women make remarks to you about “what black men are like in bed”, the performance aspect becomes clear - and the knowledge that the woman you’re dating thinks “I’m sleeping with a black man” and not just “I’m sleeping with a man”. With the next white woman I met online and slept with, I deliberately tried to make the sex mediocre. I wanted to smash the stereotype. I wanted sex to be normalised, finally, like it is for white men. Admittedly my moral perspective is specific to my age, as a more mature online dater. I’m well aware there are many young black men on Tinder who are having fun sleeping with white women without any concerns about racial stereotypes. In fact, many even welcome it. I play football with a bunch of black guys in their 20s and they tell me I’m overthinking it all.