Dear Prudence,
I’ve been dating a lovely man for about five months, and in most ways, I feel like we’re a great fit. He’s fun, kind, affectionate, and communication is easy. He volunteers in the community and has a job that makes a difference. For context, we’re both white, middle-aged, straight, and upper-middle class.
Here’s the hang-up: I am embedded in a lovely community and extended family full of diversity of many types—race, ethnicity, language, national origin, class, and sexual orientation.
Additionally, my child from my previous marriage is bi-racial. And due to my family and my work, I’ve done a lot to understand my many forms of privilege, recognize and see the ways the world offers unequal opportunity, and grapple with how I personally show up and my own implicit biases. I’m on a journey, and I have a lot left to learn, but that journey matters to me.
He’s not on that journey. He’s not opposed to it, and he has said he’s willing to learn. But, we keep stumbling into conversations where I realize just how much he lives in an unexamined white male privilege bubble. It shows up at times like when we’re talking about being a parent during the pandemic (he pushed back on the idea that women might have had it harder than men overall because he knows some good dads who are really involved); immigration (before he’s okay with someone being undocumented, he wants to know their story—in essence be a judge of their right to be here); or race (he’s aware racism exists, but doesn’t see much difference between raising a white child and a child of color in our country).
Even as I type these comments, I realize how much these things clash with what I believe and have personally experienced. And they make me nervous about how he might show up for my child. And yet, I can’t decide: Is this a good guy who is at the very beginning of a journey, and I’m the first one to nudge him onto the road, OR is this a guy who is stuck in his current mindset and it’s just too far from what matters to me for me to be okay with it. How do I know?
— On Different Roads?