Is it normal strangers are “extra” friendly to us – an interracial couple?
My girlfriend is black; I’m a white guy. I’ve noticed that, no matter where we are, many strangers seem to go out of their way to be super-friendly to us. We’ve been traveling, acting like tourists and taking pictures of each other and can’t count how many times people have come up and offered to take a picture of us together with our camera. Or another couple will say something like “You look like a nice couple, would you take a picture of us?” Someone will come up to us and say we’re a cute couple or that we look so happy together. An older black woman walked past our table in a restaurant once, looked at my gf and said, “You go girl.” Lots of other stuff, but you should have the picture. I’m not complaining about people being nice; we need more of that these days. But, sometimes it almost seems like we’re being patronized for some reason. We’re a 30-something couple in the Northeast US, but these things have happened throughout the Western Hemisphere.