What Nobody Tells You About Dating When You’re First-Gen

A conversation with Dr. Rosette Elghossian on love, loyalty, and learning to disappoint your parents.

There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes with being first-generation. It’s not the loneliness of being new somewhere, it’s the loneliness of being in-between. Between the world your parents sacrificed everything to give you and the world they left behind. Between their dreams for your life and your own.

Recently I sat down with Dr. Rosette Elghossain, licensed clinical psychologist and first-generation Lebanese American, to talk about what really happens when you try to date, love, and build a life while carrying all of that.

It was, as they say, a lot.

The Weight of the Sacrifice

My dad was pulled out of school at twelve to work the farm. He became a mechanic. When it was time for my sister and me to go to college, he asked one question: “What are you studying?” And the answer had better translate directly into a career.

Dr. Rosette laughed when I said that. She knew exactly what I meant. “Being Lebanese, I had four options,” she told me. “Doctor, lawyer, engineer or disowned.”

This pressure is not cruelty. It’s fear transmuted into expectation. Our parents arrived here, often alone, without their own parents or siblings, without a safety net and built their village from scratch. They missed out on everything familiar so that we wouldn’t have to. And somewhere in that sacrifice lives a quiet demand: make it count.

What Dr. Rosette sees in her practice isn’t the parents themselves, it’s their children. The ones carrying the story. “My clients feel pressured to live their lives a certain way because they feel indebted,” she explained. “In cultures like ours, we value loyalty. We value sacrifice. And we take that on as: I need to do these things to repay what my parents gave up.”

That’s heavy. And it shows up everywhere, including in who we let ourselves love.

Are You Even Allowed to Date?

Before we even get into who you’re allowed to date, there’s a prior question: are you allowed to date at all?

Dr. Rosette described clients who couldn’t say a boy’s name in their house without their parents “flipping out” and those same parents asking why they weren’t married yet. At 25. Calling them spinsters.

The cruel irony: no guidance on the most important decision you’ll ever make, followed by relentless pressure to have already made it correctly.

And the cultural rules aren’t always what they look like from outside. When I get letters from women asking, “My boyfriend of two years hasn’t introduced me to his family, is that a red flag?” I always ask: what culture is he from? For South Asian men, for Lebanese men, for Greek men, not introducing someone to the family isn’t abandonment. It’s protection of the relationship until commitment is certain. These aren’t red flags. They’re a different love language entirely.

Your Parents Are Allowed to Be Disappointed

This is the thing Dr. Rosette said that I want to embroider on a pillow:

Your parents are allowed to be disappointed in you.

Not as a punishment. Not as permission for cruelty. But as a fact: they’re having a normative emotional reaction to their own vision of your life being punctured. That’s real. That’s human. And it doesn’t mean you have to undo your choices to fix it.

“A lot of first-generation people, especially daughters, are so conditioned to put our parents’ needs and opinions first,” Dr. Rosette said. “As soon as we get a whiff of disappointment, we feel like we have to backtrack. But your parents are allowed to be disappointed just as much as you are allowed to make your own choices.”

You can hold empathy for them and stand in your own truth. These are not mutually exclusive.

What I Cannot Teach Someone

We talked about deal-breakers. About the person who says “I can only date someone from my culture”   and what’s really underneath that.

Often, when I dig into it with clients, what they’re really protecting is something like: family dinners. Loyalty. A sense of home. And I have to gently point out you can have family dinners with someone who isn’t Greek. You can build a home with someone who wasn’t born into your traditions.

This is what I believe: I can teach someone a language. I can teach them flavors, dances, a different worldview. What I cannot teach them is how to be a good person.

Dr. Rosette put it beautifully. Think about My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which, for the record, was basically a documentary for both of us. Ian only had to be told about Greek Easter once. He learned it, he experienced it, he embraced it. That’s the trait to look for: someone who is genuinely curious, open-minded, and takes it upon themselves to understand who you are not because they’re required to, but because they’re proud of you.

A Script for the Hard Conversation

We answered a letter from a 33-year-old first-generation Indian-American woman whose parents were fighting her relationship with a white American man, even trying to set her up with someone else while she was still with him. She was exhausted. Depressed. Feeling like she was lying to her partner by not telling him what was happening.

Dr. Rosette’s advice was concrete and compassionate: temper your expectations of your parents. Don’t go into the conversation hoping they’ll welcome him with open arms. And when you do talk to them, don’t lead with “I love him.” Lead with shared values.

“You always taught me to value loyalty, family, respect, and hard work,” you might say. “And that’s exactly what we connect on.”

When parents fear someone from outside the culture, what they’re really fearing is: will our traditions survive? Will our grandchildren know the language? Will the things we kept alive still exist? If you can address those fears directly   show them the bedrock, not just the love   you give them something to hold onto.

The buffet analogy Dr. Rosette uses has stayed with me. We’re all picking and choosing from the culture we were born into, the country we grew up in, the communities we’ve built for ourselves. That’s not betrayal. That’s survival. That’s what every immigrant family has always done.

You can love your parents deeply and still choose differently than they’d choose for you. You can honor where you come from and still build something new. These things are not opposites.

They’re just the life of someone navigating two worlds at once.

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Author

Maria Avgitidis

Maria Avgitidis is a bestselling author, podcaster, and fourth-generation matchmaker. As the founder and CEO of Agape Match, she blends a century-old family legacy with contemporary relationship psychology, matching high-achieving singles through a refined, community-driven process that has produced thousands of meaningful matches.