I dated outside my ethnicity and it’s the best thing I ever did

This is going to be my last Reddit post, because I want to reduce my screen time. But I want to share this with a female community that will hopefully understand what I went through.

I’m Indian-American and I grew up with one brother. He was 6 years older than me and he never lifted a finger around the house. I set and cleared the table starting from a young age, washed the dishes, and did the laundry. Even when my brother was in high school, he was always on the couch playing video games. My dad was just as bad. He said that “men who like to cook aren’t real men.” He never once helped my mom out with anything in the kitchen and yet he would complain to her that her food “wasn’t as good as his mom’s.” My mom irons his work clothes, replaces the towels in his bathroom with new ones, and she never even gets thank you or an acknowledgment for any of the work that she did in all their years of marriage.

I grew up in a heavily Indian area and I also went to an Indian Sunday school where I saw the same thing happen in so many families. My friends (all female) had to do so much around the house while their brothers or male cousins got to sit back and relax for doing absolutely nothing. I remember when my mom didn’t answer my dad fast enough when he was calling her, he literally took her phone away and said that she didn’t deserve it. My dad threatened physical violence against her multiple times. She has a job and bought that phone herself, but he still treated her like a child. In our community, these things are laughed off (they say a man unloading the dishwasher is whipped and it’s looked down upon because that’s “a woman’s job.” They even look down at the woman for “letting” the guy do that, as if it’s such a shame that the guy does something around the house.) I never saw one single happy relationship or marriage among all my friends’ parents.

When I met my boyfriend, I was scared that he’d be like every guy I’d met up until that point: selfish and abusive, but he was completely different. He helps out with the cooking. He helps out with the cleaning. He doesn’t police my clothing (all men in my community want to see women completely covered up while they themselves lounge around in shorts and undershirts; it’s a whole separate issue). He genuinely wants to see me happy and succeeding in life. It’s such a change and I’m so glad to have met him.

Tl;dr - I meet a guy in college that isn’t Indian and treats me like an actual human being for the first time in my life