The first time you walk into a room where nobody shares your pigment, your accent, or your grandmother’s spice rack, you are not just a stranger—you are a question mark. People do not hate you; they simply have no file folder labeled “you.” Their past boyfriends, girlfriends, crushes, and sitcom references all wore a different shade, spoke in cadences they can mimic without thinking. You, meanwhile, are still loading: customs officers in their heads are flipping through pages, trying to decide whether your passport requires a special stamp. Until that bureaucratic moment resolves, you are background music with an unfamiliar rhythm, easily tuned out.Attraction is lazy. It reaches for the lowest cognitive bill: the face that reminds someone of the first person who made their stomach flutter, the voice that echoes a childhood best friend. You are not that echo, so you must become a solo they cannot ignore. Being “pretty enough” or “nice enough” will not cross the threshold; nice is the wallpaper people forget while they are deciding what couch to buy. You have to be the mural that stops them mid-sentence, the bass line that makes them turn the car around. Excellence is the visa that bypasses the usual immigration queue.
This is unfair in the way that gravity is unfair: pointless to debate, mandatory to navigate. You wanted dating to be a quiet conversation between two souls, but the room is louder than your intentions. You are carrying every stereotype that ever floated across a movie screen in their subconscious: hypersexual, hyposexual, domineering, submissive, rich, poor, dangerous, docile. None of them fit, yet all of them buzz like fluorescent lights above your head, distorting color, making every smile look like a flinch. The only reliable way to switch off that hum is to broadcast a signal so crisp that static cannot compete.
So you learn to cook the dish no one at the potluck can pronounce but everyone finishes first. You deadlift in the corner of the gym where the chalk hangs like fog, quietly doubling the weight that made them glance over. You read the novel their favorite novelist keeps quoting, then quote it back at the launch party with a perspective that silences the room. You do not do this to audition for humanity; you do it to collapse the distance between “exotic” and “specific.” Specific is lovable; exotic is collectible. Collectibles gather dust.
Standing out is exhausting, and some nights you resent the invoice. You want the luxury of mediocrity, the right to be forgettable without your entire tribe being downgraded in the ledger. But mediocrity is a private club whose membership cards are issued at birth; you lost that particular lottery the moment your genes rolled the dice across continents. What you own instead is contrast value: the sharper the difference, the brighter the spotlight must burn. Refuse the spotlight and you remain a silhouette, guessed at and dismissed. Claim it, and you become three-dimensional enough to touch.
Eventually someone will reach out, not because they have finished processing every sociological footnote, but because your particular frequency has cut through the noise. They will still carry baggage—everyone does—but it will be small enough to fit under the seat in front of them instead of blocking the aisle. You will not have solved racism; you will simply have created a private exception, two passports stamped at the border of one shared life. That is as reliable as dating across the color line ever gets: not the erasure of unfamiliarity, but the moment it becomes less important than the story you are writing together.
