Catrin, from the west German city of Mainz, had to come to terms with the fact her girlfriend's uncle had worked for the Stasi, the East German secret police.

She weaned Yvi off cheap sweet wine and other Communist-era habits and taught her to savor elegant dry wines. On foreign holidays, when English was required, she had to do the talking because Yvi's only foreign language was Russian.

But today, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Catrin, 39, and Yvi, 37, say they've grown so similar in their outlooks and habits that they are rarely even aware anymore that they grew up in a divided Germany _ one amid the plenty of the democratic west, the other in the Soviet-controlled east.

It's a transition that has become a common narrative in Germany as the number of mixed east-west relationships grows and the old labels "Ossi" and "Wessi" become irrelevant.

"The East and West thing," said Yvi, a hairdresser who owns her own studio, "it's just not an issue for us anymore."

Experts agree. Simone Schmollack, a journalist who has written a book on the topic, "German-German Relationships," said the number of such couples hasn't been measured since 1995, when they made up 4 percent of marriages. She believes there are many more today, and the numbers keep going up.

"It's becoming always more normal, especially in Berlin, which is a melting pot," said Schmollack, who published her book in 2005 and still follows the trend. In "love and relationships, even more has changed than on the larger political stage."

In a sign of how Yvi and Catrin have made it, they entered a legal partnership three years ago. Yvi _ born Potucek _ took her girlfriend's last name.

Today they are raising two children, 3-year-old Ben Bela and 5-month-old Annie, born to Catrin and fathered by a friend of hers. They live in an airy and modern Berlin apartment where children's alphabet magnets on the refrigerator this week spelled out that "Catrin Loves Yvi."

Mixed couples say there is much more that unites them than separates them, otherwise they wouldn't be together. It might be shared ethics, political views, a love of family or a similar educational background based on such German classics as the works of Goethe and Schiller, which were read on both sides of the border.

"Loving each other doesn't have anything to do with politics anyway," said Klaus-Hubert Fugger, a west German, 43, married to a woman from the east.

Kathrin Roller, 47, from the western city of Ulm, said that when she met her east German husband 12 years ago, she felt as if they were from different countries despite their common language and professions as historians.

"It was still exotic to bring an eastern German into my circle of friends. I felt like a real pioneer," she said. "But today it isn't exotic anymore."

She admits that some cultural differences persist. For instance, she says her husband, also 47, "can't throw anything away" _ a trait she attributes to the deprivations of communism.

A case in point is their toilet paper holder, which hangs from rope in their bathroom. It is the inner rod of an old wooden rolling pin that, in a previous incarnation, was used to roll out dough in the kitchen.

"He thinks you can always use something for something else," Roller said, saying it contrasts with her own tendency to throw out old, rusty household items and buy new ones.

Religion is another sticking point. Her father was a Lutheran pastor and, although she isn't a believer herself, she values the church. That often puts her at odds with his strict atheism, an outlook promoted in the Soviet bloc.

"He rejects the church so strongly that I start defending it, even though I never thought I would have to defend it," Roller said.

Florian Klampfer, a Berlin therapist, said that when he began counseling couples 12 years ago, east-west identity was an issue that often came up immediately. Not so today.

"People at that time were still very much involved in the former worlds that they grew up in. It was still very fresh," Klampfer said. "It has really changed a lot."

When the issue does still present problems, it's generally not a deal-breaker. Sometimes easterners are more careful with money and don't like the free-spending ways of their western partners. But eastern Germans, who grew up with greater hardship, tend also to be creative at finding solutions to their relationship problems and persistent in working them through.

Schmollack said it has been more typical to find eastern women with western men. West German women in the early years after the changes were put off by eastern men, deeming them poorly dressed or boring.

But this too is changing, and many western women have come to appreciate the fact that eastern men grew up in a system that promoted gender equality and made it easy for them to combine motherhood with work, thanks to child care centers that took infants older than 11 weeks.

"What is great for me about being married to an eastern German is that he was used to his mother working," said Valeska Foltin, 35, a business consultant from Marburg. She and her husband, Torsten Kurth, 36, live in Berlin with their three sons, all toddlers.

"I've been together with boyfriends who told me 'OK, yes, of course you can do a little something, but if we want to have a family, you are a mother and I don't want my children to be with someone else when they are small,'" she said.

But for her husband, also a business consultant, "it's kind of normal that even after having children I will go back to work, and that even the young children will have a nanny or go to nursery school," she said.

She also values the developed nursery school system that has been preserved in eastern Germany from Communist times, and which still doesn't exist in western Germany.

Though they were teenagers when the wall fell, Foltin and Kurth sometimes bicker over small things. She, for example, loves the chocolate spread Nutella, while he insists the east German version, Nudossi, is far superior because of its higher hazelnut count.

"It's actually much better," he said, as he held one of their sons on his lap in their toy-strewn apartment.

"No, it actually isn't," she countered, laughing.

Despite the small differences, which they make fun of, they say they live with the acute awareness that the historical and political is also very personal to them. They live only 500 meters (yards) from a spot where the Berlin Wall once snaked through the city, and Foltin said she is still moved each time she passes by.

"I get goose bumps, especially when I am with the children," she said. "They wouldn't be here if the wall was still up."