I don't recall that we set many, if any, boundaries on romance--ethnic or religious, in any case.  Our parents did.  Parents often got uneasy or outright upset when romance crossed the major religious lines: Catholic, Protestant, and Jew.  Or "the wrong kind." 

 

My brother Art, president of the Student Council in his senior year ('55-6) first crossed the line when he began to date a girl my parents and many teachers considered "loose" and licentious.  She was Mary Etta Belch whose father tended to the C.W. Post family's properties in the Carolinas and where Post College would soon arise.  I recall only that Mary Etta could drink and swear comfortably and that she and my brother spent a lot of time in his car and ont he Post Estate.  In the summer of '55 when I was in South Dakota working as a digger on an archeological project, my mother's letter contained the following typical parental worry:

 

"We are trying our best to break up that Marietta combination. [My brother Art was dating a girl named Mary Etta Belch, a Southern girl whose father was caretaker on the Post Estate.] After talking with the teachers, we feel it quite necessary. All the boys refuse to take him to Brookville and Ellie, Clancy and Paul were quite mad at her Sunday. SO why don't your brother get wise to himself. Maybe he would like the job as cook next summer. (Really don't think he would although he might like the chance to get out there.) Don't mention this to him as both Dad and I have been talking to him very seriously, more Dad than I as you know I get very upset."

I suspect some parents were not happy about my brother dating their daughters after he attended a PTA meeting about parent-student conflict and announced that if a parent would not allow a girl to stay out at least an hour after a night movie so he and she could park at the beach and neck, then he would not take her out.

 

A couple of years later when my brother was romancing Barbara Wade and she had gone off to Georgetown Visitation in Washington, DC my brother upset our parents and hers when he drove his nosed and decked and glasspacked '50 Ford down to DC, sprung Barbara, and went to South Carolina intending to get married because that state had no waiting period.  The four parents called out the police to stop this Episcopal-Catholic transgression.  Barbara and Art decided not to tie the knot.  They returned home.