Rooted and Restless: Do I date outside my culture to hide from it?

This year, love is occupying my mind in a novel way. Turning 20 has nudged me to reflect on my teenage love life. I was brave enough to stray from the norms, and with that came a diverse array of exes. They were diverse in many ways, but what interests me at this moment is their cultural differences.

I’ve dated people from four different countries — each of them was from a different place from both me and each other. This wasn’t intentional in any conscious sense, but I couldn’t help but form some hypotheses about how this pattern formed.

To begin my investigation, I thought about a relationship that should have felt the most familiar. My least cross-cultural relationship was, paradoxically, the most uncomfortable. I met my second ex in high school; while I was born elsewhere, we both grew up in the same city.

Similarity, it turns out, didn’t guarantee comfort. The relationship faltered for many reasons, but the most glaring one was definitely his homophobia and misogyny — reinforced by Shanghai’s Confucian-style patriarchy. We also diverged politically in ways that were difficult to negotiate. He would press me on where I was really from. “You agree that Taiwan is just considered a Special Administrative Region of China, right?” he asked once, glancing at me. I shrugged, suddenly unable to meet his eyes.

Many people I knew were supportive of this relationship; we were a very conventional couple. Yet, I felt exasperated and oppressed. It was upsetting to try to fit my sociocultural identity into a palatable box to appease him. Ultimately, I came out of it feeling more affirmed than ever as a feminist, an advocate for queer rights and someone who stands their ground.

In the aftermath of this relationship, I wondered: Would it take someone further from my upbringing to understand my autonomy?

Let’s take my relationship with my German ex as an example, where the gap between us was obvious from the start. I initially understood his cultural world through stereotypes (and vice versa), but we quickly dismantled those and made a point of learning more about each other’s cultures. He told me about German Christmas festivities while I introduced him to Qixi, the Chinese “Valentine’s Day.”

Although I’m in another cross-cultural relationship now, this one doesn’t fit into any of the above categories.

My current partner is American, a SoCal native, even. Thinking about that is bizarre — it feels unmistakably college, though before meeting him, I hadn’t spent much time imagining who I might date during my undergraduate years. What I did know, however, was that the idea of dating an American intimidated me.

I grew up attending school with an American curriculum, so I absorbed a certain amount of cultural shorthand. However, I’ve always felt slightly unmoored in conversations about American touchstones like childhood TV shows or 2000s pop culture. No matter how fluent I was in English or knowledgeable about contemporary U.S. events, this was territory that would always remain uncharted.

In some ways, this ambiguous overlap makes this relationship more complicated than the others. I worried that being with someone I genuinely liked would magnify that gap — that I would feel clueless or culturally out of place next to the person I cared about most.

This anxiety didn’t disappear once we started dating, so eventually I asked him how he felt about dating someone outside his culture. He acknowledged how different our upbringings were. Sometimes, he said, he hesitates to send me something steeped in his own experiences, unsure whether I’ll understand it or feel excluded by it. At the same time, he’s often excited to learn about the parts of my life that feel unfamiliar to him: niche traditions, favorite cultural foods, things he knows he would rarely have encountered otherwise. It felt comforting to realize that this cultural gap wasn’t something I was navigating alone, but something we were both noticing and crossing together.

Still, even if I had all this figured out, the real pressure doesn’t come from cultural gaps. The more uncomfortable question stemmed from closer to home: do I fear dating within my culture because that’s exactly what my mother wants for me?

Since I started first grade at an international elementary school, my parents used to joke that if I ended up with a foreign boyfriend, they wouldn’t know how to communicate with him. At the time, it felt lighthearted. But over the years, it’s become clear that my mother wasn’t entirely joking. She has voiced her hopes for me: she wants me to be with a Chinese or Taiwanese man, and doesn’t want me to get with someone abroad and complicate her life with a language (and by extension, social) barrier. 

To some extent I understand, but thinking about this still makes my stomach drop. It makes me wonder whether I subconsciously date outside my culture to escape these expectations. Maybe I wanted to prove that I can build a fulfilling life for myself when I’m out in the world alone. Maybe I’ve let certain prejudiced values I’ve encountered shape how I view people within my own culture, even though I know better than to generalize. 

I’m still not entirely sure what that says about my choices. I suppose what I’ve been searching for isn’t a way to hide from my culture, but to distance myself from the expectations that try to define it for me.

Cross-cultural love has taught me a great deal and given me opportunities to explore who I am when placed beside someone different from me. At the same time, it’s a place where I can negotiate identity and expectation.

Somewhere within all that tension, I’ve found a version of happiness that feels distinctly my own this Valentine’s Day.

Rochelle Lu SC ‘28 is from Shanghai, China and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She is amazed that Hinge actually worked its magic and spends her free time consulting the astrology app Co-Star for insights about love.