I want to introduce my BB&W crew to a VERY good friend of mine ,Kevin Purcell, whom I first met trolling for blogs when blogs weren’t EVEN COOL. BUT KEVIN, in his inherent ability to sniff coolness, had a kickarse blog that had me LOLing, LMFAO, ROTFLMAO, OMGing and STFUing. He was so funny I just had to reach out to him and make him a regular humorist for the magazine I was associate editing at the time. But since then poo baby…Kevvy is recently divorced and is tipping his tippy toe in the dating pool, and while he has never “swirled” it’s not for lack of trying. Girls, he is a swirl virgin.

Well, I’ll just let him tell it. Kev…take it away.

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Being honest right up front, I am not an expert on interracial relationships. Being more honest, far from being an expert, I’ve never actually experienced an interracial relationship. As a newly single white guy, I can at least make two salient points: 1) I have recently experienced the messy end of a marriage to a white lady. Not suggesting that it failed because either of our skin tones, but given the circumstances, it’s difficult to recommend further relationships strictly by type. And 2) I have not been ethnicity-exclusive for lack of trying. I’m out there now, busy, working the angles, and I’m happy to say I’ve been turned down already by women from every hue and tincture.

So while my actual relationship experience is limited, I can proudly say I am a well-qualified, equal opportunity rejectee. When it comes to the prospect of awkward first-date conversation with me over, say, coffee or frozen yogurt, women of all creeds and nationalities speak with one voice when they politely say “No thank you, sir.” With these powers to inspire unity of purpose, I am not unlike Moses, except without that untamed religious-guy beard and instead of Jews as a whole, my powers extend only to single women roughly my age living within practical driving distance. Plus I’m not 100% on the whole God thing, so if you’re following me and we come to a largish body of water, we’re probably just going to have to go around.

It’s not that I’ve made it a mission to find a non-white woman to date; I’m just playing the odds. In my particular case, in the swirling ethnic sandstorm that is Southern California, all of the white-only women I know I’m related to by blood. We can go out, we can have a good time, but at the end of the evening, the good night kiss is either going to be strictly platonic or really, really awkward.

Now that I think about it though, family lore says somewhere in the family shrubbery, there’s a few twigs of Cherokee intermingled with the Irish and the Germans and some probably very sunburned English. So even in that case, we’re not dealing with entirely white people. However, it does explain the tendency in my family for us to oppress ourselves, usually somehow involving alcohol.

Maybe that’s the reason I don’t feel like I’d get any push-back from my family if I were to bring home someone who expands our narrow cultural spectrum. Maybe our own history makes us “post-racial,” whatever that means exactly. I’m certainly not aware of any constraints or potential disfavor. Or maybe it’s just the time we live in where the some of the political sharpness of race has been blunted by generational attitude shifts. Or maybe as a non-minority, we’re simply not attuned to view cross-ethnic pairings as a subtle (or even un-subtle) cultural threat. Maybe they just want me to be happy and are disinterested in the packaging. Or maybe they just want me coupled up as soon as possible so I’ll stop calling at three in the morning to tell them about the miracle that is OxiClean.

Probably not the last one; because why would anyone choose grape juice stains? That makes no sense.