Warning: unsubstantiated generalization follows UPDATED

The comment Amber quotes, about a Jewish man who dates "shiksas" but will only marry a Jew, reminded me of the converse side to that phenomenon: the neurosis that can accompany in-group dating. It's often suggested (by parents, say) that staying with one's own kind is simpler. I'm not entirely sure that's the case.

But let's back-track a moment. Speaking of fairly secular, Western heterosexuals generally, there's a certain assumption that women want to marry and men don't. While I have not found this to be the case with actual humans, there are certainly men who think it necessary to preface a relationship with a 'Hey, hey, nothing serious going on here,' even if they end up pleading for marriage and more.

So take that as a given. Now, whatever tendencies men have of thinking Woman wants a ring, and a big shiny one at that, regardless of what a particular woman desires, Jewish* men are far more likely to assume this of Jewish women. Both because of preconceived ideas about their female counterparts being JAPs, and for another, less offensive but also presumptuous reason: they assume Jewish women not only, as women, want marriage, but, as Jewish women, seek a Jewish husband. These men assume that a Jewish woman would only get involved with a Jewish man with intent to marry. These same men may or may not only date Jewish women, but either way, it doesn't matter. They know that for every reasonable-seeming Jewish man, there are 10,000,000,000 Jewish women in the Tri-State Area alone desperate to marry him. How do they know this? Pop culture, things their mothers told them to flatter them, who knows.

So where does all this lead? What it does is bring to the foreground of the relationship a question in the background of most: is this person the one for me? There's almost an implied engagement from the first date on. The stakes this high, things must either head towards marriage or collapse into a heap of neurosis. Or both.

* Maybe all this is true of other minorities in the West. Maybe not. Readers, decide for yourselves, but my anecdotal evidence lies where it does.

UPDATE

David Schraub points me to the interracial-dating discussion that continues at the Atlantic, between Coates and Jeffrey Goldberg. Reading it makes me all the more glad that this discussion is also taking place among female bloggers, and that I posted what I did above. Goldberg and Coates's take on the matter is very... male. In particular Goldberg's remark that he "felt sorry for the Jewish women who intermarried, because I sensed that they tried, and failed, to convince Jewish men that they weren't, in fact, their mothers, that they were intelligent and sexy and all the rest."

Goldberg should rest assured that plenty of Jewish women a) had their first relationships with non-Jewish guys, because that's who happened to be cute and around, yes, even in places like New York, and b) have been able to 'get' Jewish men (and even -- imagine -- reject them. Jewish women dumping perfectly good Jewish men, for the same reasons anyone ends a relationship with anyone else! Yes, it happens.), but for whatever reason the man they end up with turns out not to be Jewish.

Once we're on the subject of how black women and Jewish women are totally the same, how about black and Jewish men, both groups (or at least their representatives at the Atlantic) convinced that the women of their cohort fantasize about being their wives, while they, adventurous and worldly, dream of the exotic? Where oh where might such cultural beliefs come from, we shall never know.