What I’ve Learned About Dating a Latino

In the early stages of dating, you tend to stay up late texting or talking to the desired person on the phone and maybe even scrolling through his photos on social media, wondering what your children would look like. When on dates, the two of you generally go out to eat, fill the time together with engaging activities, and put on the best version of yourselves. Expectedly, when you begin to take the relationship more seriously, the real you comes out — what you really eat, how much you can really afford to spend on movies, how you fill your down time, and all those personal subjects that a person tends to shy away from in the beginning.

Luckily, in my relationship, we got the hard conversations out of the way. Our pasts, our values, our careers, our families… We laid it all out on the table. This isn’t to say that our lives are perfectly aligned, because they most definitely are not. We have our fair share of differences, though none are enough to make either of us run. However, one difference stood out more than the rest and likely tempted both of us to run at some point:

He’s a Guatemalan, Spanish-speaking, soccer-playing, Messi-loving Latino, and I’m… a white girl.

Growing up in Marin County and attending college in Santa Barbara, my cultural color wheel consisted of about three shades of ivory until I landed a job…