privilege

They walk beside us, exoticize and fetishize us for our accomplishments, compliment us for our bodies, booties, thinking they're the first and only white guy to do so.

„Maybe you should only date people of color”, an acquaintance recently suggested over two glasses of red wine. “The men you’ve been seeing are so privileged and self-absorbed that they can’t even see the real you.”

He had a point. Later that day, I wrote the following poem in my diary:

I’m gonna be another curly haired migra for another blonde, white man.

And you

you know that.

* * *

Is it really true? And if so, how big is the problem exactly? As migrant women, should we avoid dating more privileged men, even when society, our parents, and the internet urge us to do exactly that?

While I’m thinking about the dynamics of inter-class dating, I recall a conversation with a close friend, a working-class girl who is now a journalist.

She confessed that she didn't want to date within her own class because it felt too familiar, too ordinary, and not intriguing enough.

On the other hand, research and my personal observations found that most people tend to choose partners who are similar to them, a pattern called “assortative mating”. 45 per cent of upper-class participants in a 2017 UK survey said they would not even consider entering into a long-term relationship with someone from a different social class.

But after graduating uni, what class did we belong to now?

Did we really spend years at university, gaining cultural capital, reading important books, and building our reputations, only to settle for men who haven't finished their bachelor’s degrees by the age of 27 simply because they … didn't need to? Did we really endure harsh working environments to succeed as journalists, authors and artists, only to end up with men who remind us of our fathers in blue-collar jobs?

I feel guilty admitting that, to some extent, I felt entitled to "date up” while attending and even more, after finishing university. I wanted to date posh guys because I thought I was one of them now. Then I realized: I wasn't, and I never truly would be.

What they see in me, they see in any other woman who wasn’t born into super-wealth, fame, or a mansion near some picturesque Austrian lake. They think they can boost their own reputation by dating us, because we provide them with something they don’t have: charisma, humor and street credibility. You know, the little “extra” they’re missing as Almans (the phenomenon also exists gender-reverse, btw.). I could be wrong, but it seems to me that they date migrant women from “poorer” families so they can subconsciously still feel superior.

The truth is, that I personally never really felt 100% comfortable being with the pretty posh boys. Sure, I was able to decode their cultural assets now, and yet their often-unacknowledged privilege felt like a wedge between us, their lack of empathy towards my family’s history like an ick I couldn’t get over.

“But it’s family!” they said, not understanding that some issues go deeper than bloodlines. Dating someone without major obstacles in their lives that they had to overcome feels shallow, like the betrayal of my own overcomings.

It feels like telling my biggest vulnerabilities to someone who has read about war in history books, yet pretends to know how it feels to stand on the battlefield. It’s disgusting, and discouraging.

Sometimes, I could breathe the distance between us, that no number of university-spent years would balance out. The way they said “pasta” instead of “noodles,” and the fact they didn’t have to care about getting a job because they were already old, white men by the age of 30.

How they didn’t know how to hold a drill but could take you to the museum and talk about old paintings for hours, giving you the feeling of being the main character in a Jane Austen movie (or at least, Charlotte in Sex and the City who’s about to marry a lawyer). It bothered me, and I liked it. It made me feel posher than I actually am, and at the same time, I started hating them for it. And by it, I mean the privilege.

The little things we don't speak about.

I’m a Marxist at heart, so is my acquaintance right? Should I stop dating white upper-class boys? Probably. Let’s assume class does matter more than gender, wouldn’t it be logical not to fuck the enemy? Almost as an (politically surely problematic) analogy to the fact that many black people don’t want to date white people because there’s this thing called racism, and no white person will ever understand what it means being subjected to it daily.

Obviously, I’m white (passing), so my structural problem isn’t racism, it’s classism. And even though I’m not affected by it any longer, I still remember how I felt excluded from certain groups at uni. I remember how they looked at my bad haircut, my bad taste, my unawareness of terms such as “behaviorism“, „cohort” or “empiricism”.  

Even today, I feel like betraying my Austrian grandmother, who worked as a housekeeper, when I spend too much time with the white kiddo who never had to think twice about whether he’s qualified enough for the high-paid bullshit job position he’s holding. I can literally hear him screaming at her, not paying her minimum wage, yet still feeling entitled to her services.

I feel like I’m betraying myself when I’m with a guy who didn’t have to work as hard for his accomplishments as I did. It’s just a feeling, and I can’t help it. It feels wrong, no matter how I want to twist and turn it. “Much as we don’t like to admit it, class is often a deeply ingrained part of our identity, loyalties and aspirations”, London-based therapist Olivia James writes and I have to nod while reading.

Being too privileged turned out to be a major ick for me because the privileged often can’t see their own position in a fractured political society. They gentrify the streets, shittalk their neighbors and feel like all land, every café, institution or political space naturally belongs to them. Sometimes, they think I only got here through some fucking quota.  

What bothers me even more is that they often have a thing for women like me—social climbers, white-passing, or not white at all women who somehow made it. They walk beside us, exoticize and fetishize us for our accomplishments, compliment us for our bodies, booties, thinking they're the first and only white guy to do so.

Lately, I've had a realization, and it's sticking. I don’t want to be that woman, that pick-me, who gets an “educated” artsy boyfriend with “educated” academic parents at any price.

I should feel grateful for what I have: my own parents, my own family, my own class, my own value, my own place in the world. And it's not in some bed next to them.

It's actually staying pretty far away from all of what comes with it.