Cross Culture Marriages

Question

Have you ever considered marrying across cultures? Are you already married to someone from a different culture?

This link lists the top ten considerations before marrying cross culturally.

Do you agree?

Can you think of more?

Nona the brit · Accepted Answer

Those are important points to consider. It's not easy to be in a cross-cultural relationship. Mind, I've never found the relationships with men from my own culture that easy either! <img class='emoticon' style='Width:19px;Height:19px;' data-delaysrc='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/1.gif' src='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/1.gif' alt='Emotion: smile'/>

Englishuser · Answer

Hi nona the brit,

You wrote:

Mind, I've never found the relationships with men from my own culture that easy either!

What about relationships with women from your own culture? Don't get me wrong: I'm just wondering whether cross-gender relationships are also cross-cultural ones.

Englishuser

Nona the brit · Answer

I would have said the opposite. A relationship with someone the same gender is the same-culture.

Anyway, if you wish to discuss this please start a new thread and let's not take this one off the OP's point, thanks.

BarbaraPA · Answer

I have to laugh a little, because if you believe that "Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus," then any relationship has the potential to be VERY cross cultural.

But before we go too off-topic, as Nona has pointed out, I think it's interesting to note that "cross-cultural" can be on a lot of different levels. Thirty years ago in the U.S., a Jewish-Christian marriage of people in the same town of the same socio-economic status, who went to the same school and knew the same people, could be considered a huge problem. That would be have been considered cross-cultural.

So there are the huge issues - living in a different country than the one you were raised in, and learning a new language, etc. But there are also the smaller issues that do affect your life on a day-to-day basis when the "cultures" shouldn't seem that different. Stories like a fundamentalist Christian sister who tells you every time she sees you that she continues to pray for the soul of your "heathen Jew" husband, even though she's known his family her whole life. And inter-racial marriages are still subjected to extra scrutiny.

I think it takes extra energy because someone is always looking at you harder than than they do a homogenous couple. And even if you don't really care what other people think, it can be wearying.

Annvan · Answer

I'm English and have been married to a Dutch guy for the last 19 years. To, e.g. a non-European, this may not seem like a very cross cultural marriage, but, believe me, there are some deep cultural differences between the Dutch and the English! However, these differences, especially in terms of how we communicate, only give us more opportunities to exercise love, trust and respect. (Communication presents a challenge in any marriage!!)

Thanks for the link Gaijin. One thing I would add to that list is language (though it is mentioned in no. 6 with reference to the children). In which language are you going to speak to each other? Is this acceptable to both?

BarbaraPA · Answer

BTW, Ann, my brother's wife is Dutch. They live in Canada. (I asked if their daughter was bilingual and he said "Yes, the nanny speaks to her in Spanish.") They speak English at home and keep Dutch as their "secret language." It lets them, for example, have one ask the other "Do you want to go out for ice cream?" and be able to say "No, not tonight" without having a daughter jumping up and down saying "Yes yes yes! Let's go for ice cream" because she doesn't know what they said. I can see advantages in that. Once your kids learn to spell, "parent secret language" is no longer an option in a single-language household!

Chocaholic81 · Answer

Hey, Im in a relationship with a Macedonian guy and Im english. We're both in the place of making decisions about our future and both would like to get married. He has been refused a UK visa so we're debating appealing but also me moving to Macedonia. I wondered if you had any advice about how to make a cross culture relationship work? Is it just that you have to communicate more? How have you found it? Thank you

CARAMEL · Answer

There was someone from another country, another culture and traditions asked me for marriage. Although I considered him the perfect partner for me, the disadvantages will be more than advantages, so I apologized for him after that and told him that he deserved to have a peaceful comfortable marriage from someone near to him instead of chasing after me. I read the ten top considerations of cross culture marriages and I agree with. My reasons for not accepting to have this kind of marriage are: my family is a restricted one, I mean there are no girls who have relationships with men before marriage, my family chooses the man after knowing his family, his morals, his financial status, and his behaviors. In my country there are strict rules if a woman married a man from another country, her rights will be less than those who married from their own country. Another reason, my family will not accept that I live outside my country especially that I’m a girl; although my brother lives with his wife in an apartment in the same country but my mother feels longing to him and feels sad if he didn’t call her or visit her for more than a week, so how about if I married to someone and lived outside my country for years!!! Around my family, there are no girls who married from someone of other country; however, there are men who married any type of girl of any country. For me, I don’t have any objecting of marrying men of another culture but these obstacles that I described will be difficult to cross by without solving it. Also, in my country, children follow their dad’s country, e.g. if he is from certain country, his children will be from that country.

Anastasi9 · Answer

I was a bit insulted by the consideration number four.

“Is she intent on getting out of her country at all costs?”

I am myself from . And I know that most of the people in the western countries consider all girls from to be like that.

One of my friends was going out with a German. And she heard several times when his friends told him something like “Why are you going out with her? Don’t you understand what she wants from you?” and so on. He tried to disagree at first but after they repeated it for probably several hundred times he finally said “ok, maybe she IS like that” just for them to stop this conversation. But she had already heard enough and she dumped him. This was the right thing to do.

Maybe I will marry cross culture. Cause I'm not going to stay home and will go abroad to study. I might meet my future husband there…But I am afraid to get in the same situation.

And I also think I will never be able to marry an American. I once went out with an American. First he might have found me amusing but then he thought I was too difficult for him to understand. He said we have different backgrounds, not very much in common. And I didn’t really succeed when I tried to explain him things.
So it was like we were communicating about different subjects, we both saw that what one'd said was most often misapprehended by the other.

Anonymous · Answer

Aloha from Hawaii!

I completely agree about the gender differences being cultural. After reading Men are From Mars, I became a true believer.

But as someone in the cross-cultural field, I'm compelled to wonder about both similarities and differences in "gender cultures" around the world. In my case, my wife is Japanese. I see similarities in her "female" side with American female counterparts. But the "Japanese" cultural differences are huge, probably the biggest one being that Japanese in general tend NOT to be romantic, both men and women. In fact, they are extremely practical. Would love to see a study comparing the gender issues that muddle communication between Japanese couples versus American couples (or other countries).

Also would like to get my hands on data showing divorce rates among cross-cultural couples. Not sure it even exists. My hypothesis is that the divorce rate would be higher than couples from the same culture, but who knows. Speaking from first hand experience (happily married for 30 years to a Japanese lady), it was definitely challenging working our way through the gaps over the years, and we are both knowledgeable about each other's cultures! Can't imagine how tough it would've been had we lacked this knowledge.

Anyway, I recently wrote this piece, totally pertinent to this discussion. Not too long...if the spirit moves you:

Married to an Alien: Can Love Conquer Culture? http://wp.me/pnmlQ-13r

Cross Culture Marriages

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