What is at stake in naming an intimate couple "mixed," and more specifically, "Christian-Muslim"? What kind of lives, relations, and differences are conjured, or erased, by such a designation? This paper takes these questions as its point of departure to closely look at the methodological implications of categorization within academic knowledge production, focusing on terms such as "Muslim," "Christian," "religious," and "minority." Drawing on ethnographically attuned qualitative research on (secular) Christian-Muslim couples in the Netherlands, it asks what these designations denote, who defines them, under what conditions they acquire force, and how they are inhabited, contested, or undone in everyday life. While ethnographic research frequently takes self-identification as a given, contradictions and ambiguities in lived experiences challenge static classifications, a tension further intensified when the colonial genealogies of these categories are foregrounded, along with their entanglements with other axes of power such as race, class, nationality, gender, and secular normativity, thus calling for closer attention to how their meanings take shape and are recursively transformed. This paper therefore looks at how researchers might then engage with such processes of categorization, particularly when definitions diverge, remain unstable, or fail to resonate altogether, asking whether to affirm self-identifications, push against them, attend to non-verbal cues and other modes of expression, or read classificatory impasses as symptomatic of deeper structural impossibilities. Resisting the impulse to render minoritized Muslim subjects merely as objects of analysis through the binary of sameness/difference, or to treat Christian subjects merely as the unmarked norm, this paper questions the ethical and methodological implications of naming—by whom, for whom, and to what end—and examines how such practices inscribe and delimit particular forms of life.