Sorry that happened to you. I had a similar experience not being approved for being different with my first high school crush. We both liked each other as much as young kids can like each other. What surprised me was when it came time to ask her to date formally, she didn't seem interested. This was surprising to me based on all of our interactions and I found out a couple of months later from her friend that it was because of me being "different" and fear of how her family would react if she dated someone "different". She didn't want to upset me so she never told me, but damn it hurt just as bad to hear it from someone else.

So what's my regret? Well there's a couple but the biggest one is that instead of embracing being different and who I was and where I came from, I instead tried to hide it as best I could. I avoided anything to do with my native culture or language because I think I was so hurt internally that someone who appeared to have feelings for me would put them aside for fear of their family's reaction. I even gave up my interests that I feared were too nerdy and contributed to my being "different", after all I am on hacker news so there's some nerd in me, right?

Ended up going off to college in a big city school where different was normal and got back to my roots and interests and this put me on a wonderful path that lead to great success early in my career, stronger relationships with my family and culture, and a much happier life. It feels good to embrace "you", even if some small-town folk may think it's "different".

My secondary regret is that I never reached back out to her to see if she still had similar feelings or maybe tried to get a relationship going on as more mature adults. I've thought about her a good bit but I think what I've realized is that it's not so much her that I'm interested in, it's that all I wanted was to be accepted by her and that maybe if I were to be accepted, I could prove to myself that I'm really not "different".