Not the case at all. I arrived in Minneapolis in 1977, age nineteen.
I'd already dipped my wick a fair bit in my home town of Bethesda MD but upon arriving in the Twin Cities, suddenly I was an EXOTIC because Mpls/St. Paul was the valhalla of Swedish and Norwegian blue eyed blond haired white people if ever there was one in the 1970's, and I was a rare swarthy "Jew-talian" with dark coloring and black hair and brown eyes and a lot of body hair, something the fair skinned farm boys didn't have, and the girls noticed...girls of every race, creed and color, because while Minneapolis is predominantly white, there are plenty of black, hispanic, asian and native American women there, too.
And suddenly I was Captain Kirk.
And I wanted to "taste it all".
And as a member of a moderately successful rock band, I did.
My dance card reads like a United Nations meeting.
Maybe interracial couples are constantly discriminated against and told they're destined to fail by people like you and that negative environment is the cause of the difference?
Leon Russell was an Okie from Lawton Oklahoma, a hotbed of Bible Belt white Christian America if ever there was one.
His mother played piano in the local evangelical church and taught piano lessons in the home, teaching exclusively from books of Christian hymns at first, then moving into classical.
He married a black lady, Mary McCreary, who grew up singing gospel in HER local evangelical church choir, but he met her when she was a member of Little Sister.
Thus, other than skin color, they had several things in common, a Christian evangelical upbringing, rock and roll/soul/gospel music and life on the road as performing artists.
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Leon purchased a 12 acre spread with eight buildings and a sprawling home on Grand Lake of the Cherokees outside of Disney, Oklahoma and he built his recording studio there, and they lived there and toured for several years.
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But during the entire time they lived at the compound at Grand Lake, the locals castigated the couple because of "their race mixing". One of the main reasons the marriage didn't survive was because of the racial tension they had to endure.
Leon eventually gave the middle finger to his home state, sold the lake compound, moved to the Nashville area and never lived in Oklahoma again.
Does that data entirely exclude the possibility of discrimination and social pressures as factors? Does that data apply to skin colour difference alone or does it cover national and cultural lines? Does that data say that every single mixed-race relationship is destined to fail and so it's pointless to even consider them?
This study was about the behaviour of people on dating sites, not the outcome of relationships.
Indirectly yes. If you’re in an environment where your relationship is constantly dismissed or derided and where you’re discriminated against because of the relationship you’re in, that will put additional pressures on that relationship which could play a part in the relationship ending. It’s unlikely to be the only factor (there usually isn’t only one factor) but it’s the kind of thing that could be at least a factor in the statistical difference you’re quoting.
Yes, and as I’ve said, not all inter-racial relationships will be inter-cultural (and vice-versa) and it’s clearly going to be cultural differences and disagreements that will cause difficulties. You can only make an honest assessment if you distinguish between the two. Again, as a white Brit, I’m more likely to have cultural differences with a white American than I would with a black Brit.
I’m not saying it isn’t noteworthy, I’m saying it isn’t a reasonable justification to dismiss the possibility of any kind of successful relationship with anyone of a different skin colour and it is that attitude this study is about.
On what basis are you entirely dismissing discrimination as even a possible factor? I totally agree there will be multiple influences but nothing anyone has presented here (myself included) justifies dismissing any possibilities.
I don’t think it’s a requirement for the point they’re making since unless there is zero chance of a successful relationship, dismissing entire groups makes no sense on that basis. You could include considerations of likely outcomes bass on statistics but you’d need to start with the chance of successful relationships (which will mean different things to different people of course) from these sites in general. Does the 10% you quote actually apply to this subset of “relationship” and how statistically significant is 10% of whatever general proportion of successful connections?
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