Best qualities of a black man dating

She was a divorced white woman in her mid 40s with two young children. When she messaged me on a popular dating app, she wrote that she wanted to “try something different”. She told me, without any embarrassment, that sex with a black man was an item on her bucket list, alongside other post-divorce “experiences”, like trekking in Nepal or zip-lining in Costa Rica. She saw me not as a personality, but as a pastime, an object, and did not see her actions as racially insulting in the slightest. 

“Why did you swipe right on me?” I inquired as we sat in a bar on our first date. 

“Because I thought you’d be a playa,” she said. 

She admitted she had not read the text accompanying my profile pictures. In other words, she had seen a black face and unthinkingly equated it with promiscuity. When I gently pointed out the racism implicit in her words, I realised it had never occurred to her they could ever be interpreted that way. Although she lived in London, all the people in her life were white, and so her assumptions about race had never been challenged.

It was after this experience and other similar ones that it started to seem to me as if the new world of dating now meant that for many, connecting with black men had become like a branch of online shopping: as easy as buying a fridge on Amazon. At the same time I realised that the culture of online dating presents particular challenges if you’re black, whether you’re male or female.