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Dealing with a forced break up

Anon for obvious reasons.

For the past few months I've been trying to deal with a forced break up post-uni.

It's a difficult but cliched story- I'm a secular humanist (agnostic) from a Muslim background. My family isn't too religiously strict, but are far more 'cultural' in the sense that they are concious about their 'standing' in their community. Personally I think its crap (considering such communities are built on gossip and rumours) but I always felt for some reason that I could transcend the pettiness and live my own life.

Anyway, I fell in love at university, with a girl who wasn't south asian or Muslim (she was a Chinese Buddhist)- my parents had met her before and liked her so I was under the impression our relationship could work out, even if some frowned upon it.

However, after my graduation in July, my parents pretty much coerced me into breaking up with her. They said that they'd refuse to assist funding for my masters degree (at LSE where the MsC I had applied for cost 24k) and then when I decided to take out a private loan for it, then threatened to kick me out of my family home, knowing full well that I couldn't afford to live in London even with my current job. My ex, who lives up in the north, was also in her own financial predicaments, coming from quite a low-income single parent family.

My parents didn't say directly why they wanted me to break up with her, other than 'what will people say about us, or your father?' which pretty much meant that they were more concerned about how it would affect their reputation. I felt I had little choice but to break up with her- after all if I couldn't see her due to my parent's threats, and she obviously couldn't come to see me, then there was little chance it could work in the long term, and even if it did, I wouldn't want to subject her to so much prejudice due to her race or religion.

I've been finding it hard to come to terms with it all. In my head, she's the only person I'll ever 'love' and that our relationship came to a premature end for reasons that could have easily been avoided. I'm now in a position where I fear I'm losing her even as a friend due to the amount of emotional pain we're both in, and meanwhile my parents are talking about beginning the process of attempting to arrange me. On the latter, they are trying to present the idea there is a 'choice' in who to be partnered with, but as anyone who has gone through this process knows, this is really a folly designed to 'dilute' the realities of arranged marriage for cultural continuation.

I'm not sure really what to do- I could potentially get a properly paid job once my Msc is done, but even then I would have lost someone I care about very deeply, but on the other I don't want my parents to get the satisfaction of successfully coercing me into a partnership which just brings misery and pain (esp.to the poor girl I'd end up arranged to).