Chantel Everett and Pedro Jimeno are fan favorites from TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé franchise. First appearing on Season 4 of the series, Chantel quickly fell head over heels for Pedro after meeting him while vacationing in the Dominican Republic.
Chantel and Pedro come from two very different worlds.
Chantel lived with her middle-class family in Atlanta, Georgia, while Pedro’s family in Santo Domingo had far less financially. Deception, along with the cultural and financial differences between Chantel and Pedro’s families, caused non-stop drama that formed a rift in the new couple’s relationship.
The couple’s struggles were chronicled on the show, landing them a spin-off titled, The Family Chantel. Now, Chantel is sharing tips she’s learned along the way when it comes to dating someone from a different culture.
Chantel Everett Shares 5 Tips for Dating Outside of Your Culture
Learn the language, the food, the values, how they were raised, how they grew up, where they lived and what it was like. That’s good advice for any relationship, but especially important if you come from different backgrounds
The best way to get to learn and get to know someone from a different culture is to be immersed in it. If you can, experiencing it all first-hand is way more impactful than hearing about it or reading about it.
Learning about your partner and their culture is a process. It might take a while and there might be some misunderstandings along the way, so keeping an open mind will hopefully manage those bumps.
It’s important to be patient for your own good and sanity, as well as in any relationship, but especially when you have to take the extra steps to learn so much about someone’s background. It will make you and your relationship that much stronger!
Forget all preconceived ideas you had about their world or what you thought a culture was about, or how the people are or what they do. Even if you thought something was common in a certain culture, people are inherently different and varied. Not everyone behaves the way you’d expect. So it’s important to get to know someone’s culture but know that it’s just one piece of a larger puzzle of who someone is as an individual – when it comes to your partner, their family or their friends.
Tune in to The Family Chantel Mondays at 9/8C on TLC.