We've all had that moment where we've started dating someone and everything seemed perfect. You get along fantastically, you understand each other well, you have tons of things in common, and the conversation never seems dull. However, we all reach a point where we find something our significant other is super passionate about that we are super...not passionate about. Most of the time, we are able to work through the fact that we don't care about what they intensely love, but sometimes, it causes problems.

My boyfriend is highly interested in politics and history. I could probably not name more than 10 presidents, which I'm sure disappoints him. I am very interested in pop culture and fashion. He could probably not name more than one song by any given pop artist, if he could even come up with one by some artists. I don't really have any interest in knowing more about history or politics, but he regularly tells me about the constitutional convention of 1787 anyway. He does not want to know anymore about fashion or pop culture, but I regularly tell him what Justin Bieber is up to anyway.

Dating someone with different interests than you is hard, but it can make things interesting. I've learned more about the constitutional convention than I ever would have learned without my boyfriend, which, yeah, isn't really that useful to me, but it's something I didn't know. Knowledge I never would have discovered without him. By dating someone with such different passions than me, I can be certain our relationship is not based on trivial commonalities or looks (if you make it through the first three rants about things you don't care about, you must really love them).

Being with someone who is deeply passionate about something you don't care about can be tough, too. I get weird looks that make me feel dumb when I tell him I don't know what something is that he's talking about (not his fault, though, I'm sure I give him the same looks involuntarily). When he tells me something and I stop him to ask him what that means, he might look at me like he's flabbergasted that I would be so uninformed, because that's just a simple fact for him. He'll say things that, to him, are as simple and universally known as George Washington being the first president, but they aren't that simple to people who aren't History majors. I'll do the same thing on other topics, of course. It's important to remember that other people don't delve into the same interests as us, as deeply as us.

It makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong, sometimes, like the things he's talking about are things I should definitely know, but I don't. He talks about things like they're the most important things in our lives, but I can rarely find it necessary to know all of them, which just makes me feel...bad. It's like I'm completely uninformed on things that I should definitely know. He'll (and I do the same thing) treat facts like they're common knowledge, making me wonder how I've been left so far out of the loop.

Most troublesome, though, is that I often feel like I can't relate to my boyfriend. He's insanely passionate about these things that he talks nonstop about, often to me, and I just don't get them. I feel lost and confused through most of the conversation when they come up, but I know they're a huge part of his life, especially since his interests are part of his immediate, desired line of work. I feel like in order to really connect with him and relate to him, I have to understand what he's passionate about, but I usually don't. I know he often feels the same way.

All in all, we put up with each other talking about what the other cares most about. We try to understand each other's passions, but we also both understand we can't make one another passionate about them. We're teaching each other a lot about what we find exciting or important and we're both learning how to communicate about things we don't fully understand. There's always something new we can teach each other that will benefit the other and the conversation can go on for hours trying to learn about the other's sentiment.