“My parents absolutely love her,” Kenny says. “My mom actually threatened me if I do anything to hurt her. My parents are almost as much in love with her as I am.”

The feeling is mutual.

“I’m really grateful to have met such an incredible family,” Kanga says. “Not just his parents, but his entire family: his aunt, his grandparents. His grandmother is so sweet. She let me practice my injections on her. She takes insulin, so she let me give her insulin shot to her.”

Though both couples feel inter-cultural dating can’t help but become more accepted as time goes on and more immigrants make this land theirs, the professors are not so hopeful.

“I don’t think it’s going to happen naturally by just the fact of having different kinds of people here in the United States,” Lee says. “African Americans and white Americans have co-existed in this country for how many decades and centuries now? But they’re not necessarily intermarrying as much as they should if it was just up to natural forces and what not.”


“In our culture, marriage is something girls have to do,” she says. “They go to school and get married. But we’re in America, and I think things have to change.”

Couples such as these rarely keep both culture’s practices for any long period of time, Hobfoll says.

“He keeps his Christmas tree, and she keeps her Hanukkah candles for a generation,” he says. “Then they keep one, or they keep neither.” The professor says this issue will forever be in contradiction with itself. “We all don’t like racism, but we all agree tradition is a beautiful thing.”

facing the future
Whether a case of naiveté or blind love, Kenny doesn’t see what all the fuss is about.

“Her culture is important to me,” he says. “I haven’t got to experience it. When I do, I’m sure our relationship will remain the same.”
The marriage of true love and family values is not as simple from Kanga’s view.

“It scares me to think about what might happen in terms of my family when they do find out,” she says. “But I have too much invested in this relationship, and I do care about Kenny a lot. I’m not ready. I’m not willing to let go of that anymore.”

According to professor Lee’s studies of second generation immigrants, student’s in Kanga’s situation may not have to worry forever if they hold out long enough.

“What they tell me is that their parents are very much opposed to their intermarrying,” Lee says. “They really emphasize that. But what a lot of these people are telling me is that if you delay your marriage for so long that your parents get so desperate that they just want you to get married, period, and they don’t even care about who you marry anymore. They just say, ‘Go get married. Just find a nice person and get married.’”

This would be ideal for Kenny and Kanga because marriage for the sake of marriage or for the sake of tradition doesn’t fit into Kanga’s plans.
Kanga does little things to help Kenny experience her culture, such as cooking him Indian foods, but there is still a separation that has existed between her family and personal life since the couple started dating 2 years ago.
“Sometimes I feel like if anyone’s going to be discriminatory, it’s going to be people from my culture,” Kanga says. “Because [in their minds] you don’t do it. I think my culture is very discriminatory in terms of our kind of relationship.”

The Western side of these couples have been anything but disapproving.

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