I am Chinese and my girlfriend is Indian. Both our parents were immigrants, and both of us are citizens and were raised in Singapore. We have been dating for 4 years, and I want to marry her. I have already met her family, and although it was difficult for them to accept it at first, they have already come to accept our relationship.

The problem is my father is extremely racist especially towards Indians, and I am not sure how to break the news to him. I would really like it if my father could accept our relationship and attend our wedding. However, I am almost certainly expecting him to get extremely angry and spiteful towards me and my girlfriend’s family.

I love my girlfriend a lot, and I don’t want my father to say anything that could hurt her or her family. But at the same time, I love my father a lot too. He has sacrificed a lot to raise me and my sibling himself, and cares a lot about our education and future. I care a lot about him too.

I’m prepared to hear all sorts of racist remarks from him to try and persuade me to change my mind. I’m planning to tell him that I am not going to change my mind regardless of what he thinks. Nonetheless, I would still like to continue being a part of his life and care for him as he enters his retirement.

I really want him to see that racism is wrong. Even though my girlfriend already knows about his behaviour, I don’t want him to leave a bad impression on her family. First impressions matter a lot, and his attitude might create tension between our families in the future. I just want everyone to be happy. Harmony is really important to me.

I don’t know how to convince him that his racist beliefs are wrong. Being direct about it is definitely not going to work. He is a very stubborn and unreasonable person. It is practically impossible for someone like him to change the way he thinks. Does anyone have any experience with this? I would really appreciate if anyone could share how they were able to talk some sense into someone like that.

EDIT: I didn’t expect this post to get as much attention as it has been getting. I want to say thank you to all who have given me their advice and well-wishes. Since there have been a lot of questions, I’ll provide more details about our backstory.

As I mentioned, my girlfriend and I have been dating for 4 years. We always knew that it would be a tremendous obstacle to broach the topic of our relationship to our parents, since both her parents and my father were immigrants and have very traditional mindsets. However, we have never wanted to keep them in the dark and elope. Although that would be the easiest way out for us, it would betray their trust and bring them a lot of shame and despair. As much as we love each other, we don’t want our marriage to be at the expense of our parents’ happiness.

With that said, the reason why we waited so long was because we wanted to sort out things like our career and where we stand on topics such as religion, language, kids, and so on. This is so that we can be fully prepared to convince both our parents that we are ready to be committed to this relationship.

However, at the start of March this year, her parents started to make preparations to find a suitable groom for her in India. We were forced to tell her parents about the truth as the situation would become extremely messy if we had allowed that to happen.

At first, they found it very difficult to accept the truth. I visited them on a few occasions and we talked a lot about their wishes and concerns. Throughout the entire process, they were very respectful and thoughtful towards me even though they were going through a lot of emotional turmoil.

Now, after much difficulty, they have come to accept our relationship. However, they are concerned whether my father will be supportive of our relationship. Naturally, they are worried about how he will treat their daughter in future.

Unlike her parents, my father is a very difficult person to talk to. Every person has their own ego, but some don’t see any reason to or just don’t know how to adjust to the people around them. My father is just like that. He talks and swears loudly and has even gotten into arguments in public. He has many racist things to say about many different races, especially Indians nowadays.

This is not something that I am proud of. However, like many of you have said, you can’t really change the way people think, especially people like him. Yet, I still love him a lot, because he has worked very hard all his life for his children to have a better life than him. I don’t want him to feel abandoned by his children, but at the same time, I absolutely do not want my girlfriend or her family to be hurt by any racist thing that he says.

He has met my girlfriend once before – by accident. A few years ago, we bumped into him as we were heading in opposite directions from my home. His reaction was to stare coldly at her, almost in a state of disbelief. Ever since that incident, she has been scared of him, and my father and I have never talked about it. I don’t dare to bring it up, and he doesn’t believe that I am serious about this girl. But now, the pressure is mounting for me to break the truth to him.

However, since last year, his anger and racism towards Indians has become very extreme because of an incident that happened with my brother. My brother happens to be in a relationship with an Indian girl as well. He was invited to go to India by her family to celebrate some family event. At the request of her family, he informed my father of his decision to go for the trip one week before the flight. Now, in any normal family, that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. However, my father, who was previously unaware about this relationship, was absolutely livid. Not only was my brother dating an Indian girl, he was going to India with her family without his consent, and he did not give him a chance to voice his disapproval about anything. Ever since this incident, they have not been on talking terms, and my father’s hatred for Indians has become very pronounced.

Because of that, the situation has become even more dire for me. I definitely don’t want to make the same mistake as my brother. But with how badly he reacted to my brother’s relationship, I fear for the worst even though my relationship with my father is relatively cordial right now. I don’t want my father to lose contact with both his sons. We are his only family in Singapore, and he has worked all his life through a failed marriage to raise us up.

That is why I came here to ask for help. I never expected that so many people would respond and show their support. I really do appreciate the words of advice that some of you have given me. I also thank some of you for sharing your first-hand experiences, especially those who have been in interracial relationships themselves. Your stories give me some reassurance that things might turn out okay somehow.