Lana Condor and Anthony De La Torre Share How They Knew They Were in Love: “I Just Felt Safe”

Lana Condor and Anthony De La Torre aren’t officially married yet, but they already seem to know the secret to a successful marriage: compromise. In an interview with POPSUGAR promoting Amazon’s wedding registry platform, the pair revealed that they’re already compromising on everything, starting with their wedding gifts. “I love cheese, and Anthony is dairy-free. My life revolves around cheese,” the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” the actor says. “One of the things that we got from our wedding registry is this charcuterie board, but it’s something really only I can indulge in.” The musician, on the other hand, loves espresso. Lana adds, “I’m not the biggest espresso fan, so he can get his own little espresso machine.”

Lana learned the value of compromise from her parents, Mary and Bob Condor. “My parents tell me that what marriage is all about is compromise and being able to share,” the 25-year-old says. The actual wedding-planning process has also been evenly distributed between Lana and De La Torre. “I feel like it’s been pretty equal, if not leaning a little bit more towards Anthony planning a decent amount of it,” she continues. De La Torre adds, “We see eye to eye on so much of it that it’s been fairly easy up until this point.”

Related: Lana Condor and Anthony De La Torre’s Romance Has Our Hearts

Another thing they can agree on? Record players. Lana loves Amazon’s wedding registry for its “massive portfolio,” but out of everything on it, she and her husband-to-be are most excited about the turntable. “Whenever we go to someone’s home and they have a turntable, it just immediately brings their home together,” Lana explains. “You’re like, ‘Oh, these are cool people.’ Ultimately, I’m just hoping that people will think when we host that we too are cool.” De La Torre adds, “It’ll make us appear classy and like we have it all together.”

The record Lana is most excited to play on her new turntable is De La Torre’s forthcoming EP, which he says will be out “February or March.” “I personally would love to listen to it as a record,” she says, dropping hints that De La Torre should opt for a vinyl release. “I think that would be amazing.” Lana continues, “He’s so talented, and I’ve been witness to just how hard he’s working and the countless nights that he’s stayed awake all night. I have peeked my head into his various writing sessions. To be honest, I personally like to think that I inspired some of his music, so that’s really nice, too.”

Lana says De La Torre’s work ethic is “one of the reasons why I fell in love with him in the first place.” She notes, “When he gets his mind set to something, he executes it in the best way that he can.” But it isn’t all work and no play for the couple. They love to dance things out at the end of a long day, which is another reason why the turntable is the perfect gift. “Sometimes at night, Anthony and I will have just a two-person dance party, and so we usually will turn on some sort of Marc Anthony or something like that to dance to,” Lana reveals.

Lana and De La Torre first met at an Emmys party in 2015, and they’ve been together ever since. “Being with Lana the first month that we were dating, I felt like it was the first time that I sort of let my guard down and my walls down,” De La Torre says. “I felt safe. Not to be overdramatic, but I just felt really safe around her.” For him, there was no question that she was his future. “You don’t really have a doubt about it,” he says. “It’s just like, ‘Yeah, this just makes sense.'”

Lana expressed similar sentiments, saying they “got along immediately.” She notes, “It was very obvious that we kind of just vibrated on the same frequency within the first . . . well, I want to say the first month, but I’d say less than that.” After their first meeting, De La Torre decided to just dive right in. He recalls, “I was just like, ‘Hey, I know I’m supposed to like . . . play it cool and wait . . . but do you want to hang out again tomorrow?'”

De La Torre’s emotional availability was “a huge point of attraction for me,” Lana says. “Anthony always says, ‘If someone likes you, they will go out of their way to be around you.’ He was very much a testament to that. There were no games being played. Everything was very transparent. I think that his transparency was something that I was very surprised with and hadn’t really experienced before.”

“A couple of weeks after, I basically was like, ‘You are my boyfriend.’ I didn’t really give him a choice,” Lana continues, laughing. “He was like, ‘OK.’ [It was] very, very clear from very early on that this was my person.”

De La Torre and Lana announced their engagement back in January. Their wedding is set to take place in the spring of 2023, and it’ll include dogs and In-N-Out Burger. “We’re definitely going to have a major food game at our wedding,” Lana says. “It’s definitely coming together.”