[Nyororin]

Eliminating kanji would be much like eliminating punctuation and "proper" spelling in English.

I have yet to meet anyone Japanese over the age of, say, 10 - or rather the maturity of a ten year old - who has honestly expressed a belief that kanji should be eliminated. And even most lower grade schoolers only feel that way because their kanji homework is a pain.

Seriously, I think that either your "Japanese partner" is trying to humor you by telling you she thinks kanji are hard and a pain because you have trouble with them, is obsessed with English-language-culture to the point of bashing anything Japanese to win culture points... Or really has the mentality of a child.

Or maybe they are "Japanese" but grew up outside Japan where kanji have been a chore and of no use in real day to day life?

It is just so hard for me to understand why someone could think Japanese would be better off without kanji. It really just stuns me that anyone familiar with the language could feel that way.
Reading Japanese without kanji is even worse than English written phonetically and with no punctuation. There is so much that makes it incredibly slow and laborious to read and comprehend. I will second what Sumippi said about reading children's books. It is *hard* to read something aloud and fluidly to a child without going over it ahead of time when it is written all in hiragana. Even when it is something incredibly simple, it takes longer than reading kanji heavy newspaper.