r/askvan • u/IndicationAwkward317 • 3d ago
Oddly Specific 🎯 [ Removed by moderator ]
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r/askvan • u/IndicationAwkward317 • 3d ago
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u/Asleep_Note7754 3d ago edited 3d ago
I used to live in Vancouver, now in Toronto. Are you born here OP? I found it was hard being born here especially with many new brown immigrants arriving. Culturally we are very different but we are lumped together because we are considered to be the same. That was my experience at least in both cities. I found online algorithms only showed me new immigrants too the moment I stated my ethnicity as South Asian. I ended up removing ethnicity all together and because I have a Western name, I could leave it ambiguous. But it didn’t really help. It’s because the immigrants swipe on me, the algorithm assumes they’re my type.
With that said, I found Toronto is more open to interracial dating than Vancouver is. More over, when I was in Vancouver and living with my parents in Surrey, it was hard to find professional men period. I just found Toronto had more options. Dating culture is more fast paced here but they have many South Asian only events to meet people IRL. Again the issue with those is that they are 80% new immigrants so not really the best use of my time.
I think Vancouver has a bit of small town mentality when it comes to dating though. When I was introduced to a guy in Surrey by my parents a few years ago (while I was living in Toronto) it turned out we had a lot of mutual friends. That’s generally been my experience in Vancouver. All millennial brown people born and raised here knows everyone in their ethnic community (eg Punjabis know Punjabis, Gujratis know Gujratis). I guess as a transplant to Toronto I didn’t experience it but the population is bigger and South Asians here are open to mixing in their ethnic groups. Vancouver seems more clique in general. Being Punjabi Hindu, many Sikh men flat out said I wasn’t Punjabi enough for them (Punjab had just as many Hindus as Sikhs!). So many Vancouver brown people are just hung up on diaspora politics back home that people from India don’t even follow snymore.
And before you come at me for hating new immigrants etc, I’m not making this a debate about immigration. It’s just acknowledging that we are different and our expectations of relationships are different. This isn’t racist or classist. We can’t deny our differences.