I first met my boyfriend, Diego Valadez, in high school in a town that has no shortage of diversity. We reconnected and started dating after he served in the military from 2020 to 2025. He’s Latino, and I’m biracial, with a white mom and Black dad.

I grew up with an example set by my parents: race or culture doesn’t matter when choosing a partner. But simply choosing love wasn’t always easy for them.

When she was pregnant with me, my mom would get odd stares out in public with my dad. One time, after I was born, she visited a sandwich shop, and the cashier looked at me and said, “Thank goodness her skin is white.”  

Fortunately, today, more people don’t view intercultural couples as negatively as they did in the past. 

A Pew Research Center report found that, in 2000, which was around the time I was born, about 31% of Americans opposed intercultural marriage. In 2017, opposition dropped to 10%.

A 2021 report from Gallup also found that approval of interracial marriage has remained above 90% into the 2020s.

Despite these statistics, conflicts still exist, especially when strong religious differences are at play or when parents insist their children marry someone of the same race or ethnicity. Some of my cousins experienced this but successfully overcame it. 

One of them wasn’t liked much by her now-husband’s family because she was white and Catholic, while they were Hindu and Indian. His parents wanted to move forward with an arranged marriage, but eventually respected their relationship after getting to know my cousin and seeing how she engaged with their culture.

That hasn’t been the case for Leilany Fuentes-Garcia, a Mexican-American student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. She has been in a relationship with her boyfriend, who is Pakistani-American, for two years. Both of them feel deeply connected to their respective communities and have found ways to avoid cultural misunderstandings within their relationship.

Neither of them are very traditional or strict in their religious practices, and Fuentes-Garcia said they are both eager to learn about, share and understand each other’s cultures. 

“Being able to share that really brings you closer to that other person, and I think that’s really beautiful,” Fuentes-Garcia said.

She and her boyfriend, who are Catholic and Muslim, have celebrated each other’s religious holidays, like Christmas and Eid, practiced traditions, like fasting for Ramadan together, and began learning each other’s languages, Urdu and Spanish. 

In my own relationship with Valadez, we don’t have to navigate many cultural complexities. I enjoy learning about and engaging in my friends’ cultures, especially when it comes to trying their traditional dishes.

I never realized how meaningful that was until Valadez’s dad made a comment about me being officially adopted into Mexican culture. His family appreciates my willingness to experiment with different Mexican foods — and how much extra salsa verde I add.

There are instances in which Valadez strays from traditional cultural norms. He doesn’t agree with some of the gender norms that exist in Hispanic culture, in which men are responsible for finances while women take care of the family and household. Valadez believes in equal partnerships and the importance of individualism, which he doesn’t think is always prioritized in his culture. 

Valadez thinks of himself as “Americanized” in this regard. With all the diversity he encountered in the Northwest suburbs, Chicago’s West side and in the military, he never felt like he had to choose a partner based on their race or culture in the past and instead looked for people who shared similar values as him, such as independence and maintaining education.

“It shows a lot of character when it comes to how you are as a person,” Valadez said.

Fuentes-Garcia said she thought it would be easier to date someone with a similar culture. She values quality time with her family and was concerned about how her partner would get along with them, but it has worked out well so far.

 “Being in the relationship I am in right now, it’s just been a wonderful experience,” Fuentes-Garcia said. Despite their families coming from different parts of the world, they can relate to their cultures being considered marginalized in the United States.

I thought it was sweet how Fuentes-Garcia and her boyfriend learned each other’s languages, even if only just a few words at a time, so they can have small conversations. It made me realize that I should put more time and effort into doing so myself. 

It would be meaningful if I could learn Spanish so I could communicate with Valadez’s grandma. It’s also important to both of us that our future children can speak Spanish. I feel that taking that extra step goes a long way in a relationship, and it would create an even stronger bond between us.

More often than not, I’ve seen relationships fail due to incompatible personalities rather than incompatible cultures. But when the reason is culture, I believe it stems from ignoring cultural values or not being willing to learn more about a person’s background. 

Some people want their significant other to assimilate rather than learn. Others may fetishize a person’s race or culture instead of genuinely loving their partner for who they actually are.

I’m grateful that Valadez and I don’t have to face the same challenges as older generations did. It’s worth being open to concepts our families weren’t once open to. Laura Molony, my aunt, married a Black man in 1979, and my grandfather never spoke to or met him. He was still wary of my dad when the two were introduced in the early 2000s.

But I think society is now shifting in a more positive direction. Further down the road, our mixed family made my grandfather shift in that direction too. 

“I was the one who made him see that color doesn’t change who we love,” Molony said. We are lucky that our families are more concerned with our happiness and don’t mind our differences.