by Glory Lennon

Created on: December 12, 2008

You see it everywhere. A tall, skinny, young man with a short, fat, slightly older woman or a thoroughly ugly guy holding hands with a very pretty girl and people stare in mild wonderment. Eventually, these curious folks shrug and say to themselves, "Must be true about opposites attracting."

On the other hand, when it is a white male dating a black girl, an oriental girl with a white guy, a Hispanic male with a black female or any combination you can think of, those stares turn to utter incredulity, scorn and perhaps, in some of them, something evil.

"What are they thinking?" these people ask in hushed, and at times not so hushed, whispers hardly concealing their disgust and disapproval.

The obvious answer, at least obvious to those within these so-called interracial relationships, is perhaps that they are not thinking but instead feeling. Love is like that. Love doesn't pause to think about incriminations. Love doesn't stop to check on propriety. It doesn't step back to ponder the future ramifications. Some say love is blind but that is not quite right. Where true love exists it is merely seeing the beauty others easily miss and seeing the sameness when all that others see are the differences. Most importantly, however, love doesn't even care when those rudely staring, narrow-minded people sneer at it.

Yes, it must be difficult to be considered something close to an abomination without succumbing to bitterness. It can be a challenge to blithely go about head held high and pretend not to see the frowns and malice on some faces. It can be down-right infuriating hearing the snide remarks. It can be near impossible to keep cool when subtle, insulting insinuations are thrown out.

But it can be done with dignity and haughty disregard. Many interracial couples do just that out of necessity and for survival. They manage to live quite happily to the utter amazement of these same disdainful people. We can always turn it around on them, you see. We can laugh at them, belittle them and sorrowfully say, "Oh, how dreadfully boring! You are so white bread and you married another slice of white. What are you thinking?"

This is the attitude my husband Tommy and I share. He is as white an American as they come, of English-Irish-German decent and I was born in the Dominican Republic but raised since babyhood in the States. Our cultures clashed horribly from day one but did that stop us? Would I be here writing this if it had?

Tommy and I heard it all, mostly from our well-meaning,

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