The first problem for me has always been parents. Through a strange collision of old-school Latino parenting and extremely conservative Christianity, I was—am—expected to follow a very strict set of rules for finding a partner. The specifics are best left for another time and place, but I can tell you what I wasn’t supposed to do. I wasn’t supposed to date a white woman who didn’t go to a church like ours, let alone date a white woman who was raised in a manner entirely differently than I was.

Whoops.

Parents are usually the first point of tension in interracial relationships among open-minded, socially liberal couples, and it goes beyond the totally normal handwringing over whether you’re serious enough about the relationship to take that step. It’s where, if you’re a brown person dating a white person, you might start to feel the cultural strain most. And it’s more complicated than the Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? dilemma, where you put on your best face and hope no one says anything a little bit racist that you have to be good-natured about. You have to worry about culture, and expectations. And sometimes, it all comes back to parents.

For Kumail and Emily, the leads in The Big Sick—a romantic comedy based on the real-life relationship between comedian and star Kumail Nanjiani and writer Emily V. Gordon—things start to crumble when it comes to parents. Emily’s are going to be in town, and Kumail (the film’s leads share names with their real-life counterparts) not only comes up with an excuse for not meeting them, he dodges telling her whether or not his parents even know about her.

His reasons for doing so stem from being a member of an immigrant family of Pakistani Muslims. Because of his parent’s faith and culture, he’s expected to acquiesce to an arranged marriage. To that end, he regularly goes to dinner with his family, while his mother invites over a parade of eligible women for him to consider. He goes along with it, even though he knows it something he doesn’t want. It’s a complicated dilemma, one that’s rarely depicted in American movies, but it’s a recognizable and familiar one, even if you, like me, aren’t a Pakistani Muslim. You still might recognize the fear.

Sometimes there’s a cost to interracial relationships. Sometimes there’s no way of knowing whether culture will win out over parental support.

The Big Sick’s Nanjiani isn’t forthright with Emily because of this fear—a fear that stems from the suspicion that a relationship might be more costly for you than it is your partner, that you have a cultural price to pay that the other does not. The film doesn’t offer this as a reason to justify dishonesty, but it illustrates a very real gulf that’s rarely explored in American movies, and even more rarely plumbed by American critics, who, in their overwhelming whiteness, distill its complexities with pat phrases like culture clash.

Sometimes, cultures don’t clash. They bubble and froth behind large, porous walls that you try to keep together with dirt and mud and your bare hands until you can’t anymore and it all spills over and there’s no telling whether or not the understanding, compassionate white woman you love and admire will understand what it’s like to contend with this burden you’ve just learned to exist with. You wonder how they might feel to discover your parents might not be as chill about everything as theirs are. If it’s better to give complicated answers to questions that are easily asked and answered on their end, or just keep your mouth shut. If they know that just being with them means potentially walling off two of the biggest and most important parts of your life from one another, and the deep and abiding pain that results from that.

In The Big Sick, this dilemma is handled disastrously by Kumail (the character), who not only string his parents along, but also doesn’t tell Emily anything about the expectation of arranged marriage placed on him. This leads to their breakup, right before the titular illness places Emily in a medically-induced coma.