Intercultural Marriage

Just as some of Asian women are eager to have a Western life-partner, which is known as a romantic partner, some of Western men also desired an Asian life partner because they thought an Asian wife is responsible to their future family. Things are perfect in our imagination, yet it changes when we confront reality. Marriage is not only unification between a male and female who love each other, but also a commitment between two people to appreciate and to encourage one another no matter in joy or sorrow.

Before there were only minor couples that had courage to take an intercultural marriage because its too risky. Nevertheless, nowadays the number of intercultural marriages have been increased due to the easiness of immigration. There are many difficulties of an intercultural marriage, such as living environment (style), communication and way to bring children up. The first difficulty of an intercultural marriage is the living environment. Marrying someone from a different culture is absolutely not the same as marrying someone from same culture.

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Every country possesses its own living style and different habits as well. People who grow up in a different culture have different backgrounds and views concerning family. Some cultures consider their family important while some cultures don't. For instance, Asian people are taught to respect their parents even though they already got married. On the contrary, Western teenagers usually leave their house and prefer to live with their lovers at their 20s. Sometimes, these individuals' families demand too much on their son/daughter in law which is uncomfortable.

For instance, when the Chinese New Year comes, the family from the wife and husband will assemble together. It's already a tradition that the oldest son's wife has to prepare everything like cooking for the big family, cleaning and setting the house and etc, which is tiring and very hard. Problem is caused when either side doesn't agree to do the duty. These things usually will cause conflicts to the marriage life. In brief, even though living style is a small problem, it's too sensitive that conflicts could occur between the couple.

The second obstacle that an intercultural marriage couple might encounter is communication. Communication is an essential part in every relationship. Due to the fact that an intercultural marriage couple speaks different mother language, lack of language is the first problem to exist in their lives. In this case, husband and wife normally will choose to a speak well-known language, English. Speaking a second language is troublesome; we aren't able to express our true feelings, there would be some words that we couldn't interpret into English properly.

For instance, when couple having fight, clear explanation is the best thing to end the quarrel. Using a second language, we can't actually express something easily and directly. Sometimes since we have to think what is the word in English which is make us fretful and become angrier. Because of this reason the quarrel is become worst. For Language problem could lead the couples to misunderstanding that caused a quarrel. In the end, sometimes lack of language might be the most destructive thing to an intercultural marriage.

The third obstacle that an intercultural marriage might go through is about how they are going to bring their children up. For this problem, parents have to meet an agreement; whether they will raise the children as a bilingual or not, whose culture they want to emphasize in the family etc. For instance, in our country, when we are eating with parents or with someone who older than us we have to say permission to start eating the food. On the contrary, in the U. S we don't have to do that, we can eat without having permission from the others. Then, different from the U. S, in my country it's really disrespectful to enter someone's house without taking off our shoes. Some different cultures have different habit, sometimes spouse start criticizing one and another about their foreign habit which is unpleasant to be seen by the children. Parents also have to decide which language will the children speak.

Every parent wants their children to be able to speak their native language, it would bring pride to them. If they can't meet an agreement then it would be a war in their lives. In conclusion, there are a lot of obstacles in intercultural marriage that he couple couldn't avoid. Marriage is not a simple thing to do, we don't have to be hurry on making the decision. All of people have the same hope that married only once in a lifetime and have a happy existence. We have to think the benefits and the challenges of an intercultural marriage as much as possible. There are three most common obstacles in reality; life style, communication and method to raise their children. People might think those things are small problems, but sometimes those problems could break the couples up.