One of the most prominent features of the text is not just the narrator’s relationship to prospective romantic partners, but some of the different aspects of setting them up from within a clear cross-cultural divide. The idea of the “double consciousness” is a term first used when W. E. B. Dubois coined it in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). It refers to the different barriers that minorities or people of color deal with when interacting with people outside of their race. It also refers the idea that people must think of themselves in terms of a duality existing as themselves but also as a being within a subordinate role in a dominant culture that does not belong to them. Double consciousness also relates to adjusting social niceties, speech, and behavior when dealing with other races in situations where it is beneficial to appear to conform to the dominant culture or to appear as non-threatening.

The narrator’s double consciousness is apparent in relation to the narrator’s attempt at romantic or physical relationships with different women of various nationalities throughout the text. The different approaches to courtship that are described for different ethnicities point to a need to understand how the same action can have different outcomes among people from different cultural backgrounds.