Intercultural Couples

Crossing Boundaries, Negotiating Difference

Jill M. Bystydzienski

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814709474
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Discriminazione e rapporti razziali

Despite the growing presence of intercultural couples in the United States and worldwide, their stories often go untold. In Intercultural Couples, Jill Bystydzienski provides a rare and comprehensive understanding of the multidimensional experiences of intercultural couples, drawing mainly upon in-depth interviews with persons living in domestic partnerships—heterosexual and same-sex—representing a broad spectrum of ethnic, racial, religious, socioeconomic, and national backgrounds. In these relationships, each partner brings a different set of cultural experiences that may include gender expectations, ideas about appropriate relations with family members, childrearing, financial matters, and general lifestyle. Sometimes differences may be unrecognized or seen as minimal, yet some can become salient, forming the basis for conflict, enriching diversity, or both.

Bystydzienski's findings show that, despite hurtful incidents from persons outside the couple partnerships, intercultural unions are a source of satisfaction for the partners, and are able to bridge divisions and reduce inequalities between persons of diverse backgrounds, providing a rich portrait of how these couples negotiate their identities as individuals and as couples in relation to the outside world.

1
The Couples

We came into this [relationship] knowing full well that because of the very different ways we grew up, our different cultures, it was important for us to really pay attention to each other’s perspectives. Then … we discovered that we had much more in common than we imagined. But still, sometimes we clash, and when that happens we take the time to discuss it. And also, the longer we are together, the better we know each other’s cultures and the easier it is to understand why she does or says things that I may not agree with.

—Banu (Asian-Indian American woman living with a Mexican American woman)

Thirty-five couples were interviewed for this study of intercultural domestic partnerships. A most interesting and enjoyable aspect of the interviews was the range of experiences, backgrounds, and personalities the couple partners revealed in the course of our conversations. The study participants come from twenty-five different nations besides the United States: Algeria, Brazil, Burma, Canada, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, England, France, Germany, Ghana, Honduras, Hungary, India, Iran, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Switzerland, and Tanzania. Fourteen different U.S. ethnic groups are represented in the sample as well as the broad U.S. “racial” groups: Black, Hispanic/Latino/a, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American, and White. The partners sometimes met in unlikely places far from their homes of origin, only to discover that they had much in common with the “other” who at first appeared inscrutable. Sometimes, the partners’ initial shared interests and understandings gave way, over time, to discovery of deep-seated cultural differences that emerged as the couples’ circumstances changed.

As might be expected of such a diverse sample, the personalities of the participants span a wide range from extroverted and highly animated to reticent and surly. While each couple is different and has unique stories to tell, common patterns became noticeable after several interviews. A striking commonality among these otherwise very disparate couples is that almost all make a distinction between differences that are meaningful inside their relationships as opposed to those that matter to people outside the couple—a focus of two key chapters of this book.

The majority (thirty-two) of the couples in this study are heterosexual and six are same-sex partnerships. Twenty-four, or 63 percent, are international relationships in which one of the partners was born and raised in a country other than the United States. Twenty-two (58 percent) of the couples are interracial, twenty-seven (70 percent) are interreligious, and twenty-one (55 percent) have partners from different social class backgrounds. It is obvious from this breakdown that many of the couples possess several dimensions of difference simultaneously. Although they were selected on the basis of having at least two social characteristics that varied between them, the majority of the couples in the sample (66 percent) hold at least three. Thus many couples are simultaneously international, interracial, interfaith, and/or interclass.

The participants range in age from twenty-six to eighty years; the average age for the sample is forty-four years. The partners tend to be close in age; the modal (most frequent) age difference for the couples is two years. The biggest age difference between partners is fourteen years and the smallest is one year.

The average length of living together as a couple for all the unions is twelve years, ranging from two to thirty-six years. This suggests considerable stability for the relationships given that the median length of marriage in the United States in 2000 was seven and one-half years (U.S. Census Bureau 2008a). The couple partners knew each other on average two and one-half years before they either decided to marry or to make a commitment to stay together. This supports other studies that, contrary to conventional thought, have found that intergroup couples invest a considerable amount of time into their relationships before committing to long-term unions (Bratter and King 2008; Diggs 2001; McNamara, Tempenis, and Walton 1999).

There is significant variation among the study participants in education and occupations. Some have only a high school education, others hold college degrees, and some have attained advanced degrees. Within couples, the partners generally have similar levels of education, although in six cases one partner has considerably more education than the other. The jobs held by the participants range from being self-employed in a small business to college professor, journalist, high school or middle school teacher, restaurant server, or store clerk. Most couple partners’ occupations tend to be similar;¹ however, in seven cases (18 percent) one of the partners has a white-collar or professional occupation (e.g., teacher or counselor) and the other a working-class occupation (e.g., clerk or construction worker). Women are homemakers in 22 percent of the heterosexual couples.

During the interviews, participants were asked whether their experiences predisposed them to be more open to a relationship with someone from another cultural, national, racial, or religious group.² Their responses run contrary to expectations that such individuals invariably would have traveled widely or were exposed in other sustained ways to those outside their own cultures and groups. Although some of the participants had traveled abroad considerably or lived in multicultural environments in the United States, most (60 percent) grew up in homogeneous neighborhoods or communities and had limited exposure to other ethnic, racial, national, or religious groups until they met their partners. Indeed, it was through their intercultural unions that most came to appreciate such differences.

Four Couples

To illustrate the range of variation and commonality of couples in the sample, let’s look at four partnerships in detail. The accounts and histories of the four couples should orient the reader to the issues facing intercultural domestic partnerships that will be explored in greater depth in the chapters that follow.

The four couples profiled exemplify the multiple ways in which categories of social difference between the partners (gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, religion, and sexuality) can combine to affect the partners and their relationships with others. These cases also illustrate how the couples address and negotiate those differences they perceive as significant in their relationships. Although some differences are problematic and sometimes even painful for the couples, coming from different social and cultural backgrounds is highly appreciated by the partners and perceived as mostly positive aspects of their unions.

Sheila and Gabriel

Sheila, a slender and lively fifty-year-old African American woman, has been married twenty-six years to fifty-one-year old Gabriel, a heavyset, soft-spoken black African. At the time of their interviews the couple had two children, both female, in college. Sheila is employed as a director of human resources for a large corporation, while Gabriel is the vice president of operations for a medium-size electronics business firm. Their combined income allows them to live comfortably in a large suburban home in an east coast city.

Sheila is one of three children born and raised by her mother in a poor neighborhood of a U.S. metropolis. Sheila’s father died when she was very young, leaving her mother to raise the children by herself with occasional help from extended family members. Gabriel was born and lived the first twenty years of his life in Ghana. He is an only child whose father also died when he was an infant, and his mother never remarried. Gabriel’s family was financially well off, owning a great deal of farmland and real estate property. Sheila’s family went to a Baptist church during her childhood and Gabriel was brought up Catholic; however, he later became a Methodist, while Sheila remained spiritual but not attached to any particular religious denomination. At the time of their interviews the partners were members of a Baptist church.

After getting his undergraduate degree in England, Gabriel came to study business administration in the United States. He and Sheila met on a blind date while they were both graduate students and she was working on a master’s degree in human resources. As Sheila explains,

My roommate called and set us up. [She said] “I have a guy for you to meet.” I said okay. And then I called her back, and I said, “You know, I really don’t know about this blind date…. I think I’m gonna cancel. So we cancelled. And this is my best friend. She called me back. She said, [Sheila] can you please see this guy? I think you’re really gonna like him. I said, “Okay, just to please you.” We got engaged two months to the day after we met, and we got married two months after our engagement.

The short period of time from the first meeting until they made a commitment is very unusual for participants of this study. Yet this couple took their time when it came to another important life-altering decision—they waited seven years to have their first child (wanting first to finish graduate school and become established in their jobs). A few years later, Sheila and Gabriel decided to move to Ghana; after ten years, they returned to live permanently in the United States.

The partners’ awareness of significant cultural differences between them was immediate, particularly on Sheila’s part. From the beginning, she was conscious of the fact that Gabriel, although of the same race, was from a different nationality and culture, and that this difference carried a host of implications for their future together.

That was my biggest fear, … telling my family about this man, because I knew that I’d have to leave the United States…. [Gabe] is an only child and he had an elderly mother. He had to go back, … that was something we knew had to happen…. How would my mother like that? …. She raised her kids by herself, and her oldest child’s going, not to another state, but to another continent…. I was not sure I could live comfortably in his culture … because it was so different from how I was raised and lived my life.

Sheila’s mother and siblings, however, liked Gabriel instantly and warmly welcomed him into the family after the couple married. Sheila’s mother, devastated when the couple left to live in Ghana, made Gabriel promise that he would make it possible for Sheila to come back home at least once a year, a promise he kept despite the heavy financial burden of travel.

While in Ghana, Sheila and Gabriel were both employed full time in the same business firm. Her employment outside the home unfortunately caused a great deal of friction between the couple and Gabriel’s mother and extended family, who believed that a wife’s place was in the home raising children. As Sheila recalls,

His mother felt and some of his aunts … thought that my being a career woman was just not the proper thing…, that my primary responsibility should be to my home and children, that a career and a profession was not important. That was an expectation that his family had of me…. And that was never a problem for us here [in the United States].

Very supportive of his partner’s career, Gabriel mediated between Sheila and his family. When his relatives criticized Sheila for not being home enough or not entertaining the family as was considered proper for a wife, he would step in and explain that she had gotten an education in order to work and that he and Sheila were in agreement about this. Because he took Sheila’s side, Gabriel’s family was not able to divide the couple.

The couple, who had two young daughters while they were in Ghana, was pressured by Gabriel’s extended family to have a son. As Gabriel explains,

A cultural problem that existed … was the insistence by my family that we have a son. It was difficult for my people to understand that [Sheila] and I decided to have only two children, and since none was male we were not going to try to have more. In my culture it is believed that a woman who does not bear a son does not love her husband. They forget that it is the man and the woman who make babies.

Gabriel, as Sheila notes, is unlike many of the men she met in Ghana who expect their wives to adhere to traditional gender norms. He supports Sheila’s professional goals, shares with her the household chores, and the couple together makes all major decisions affecting the family.

After Gabriel’s mother died, the couple decided to return to the United States to be closer to Sheila’s now aging mother and to provide better educational opportunities for their children. Although the pressures from outsiders in Ghana were no longer a problem, differences within the couple surfaced due to new circumstances.

One such cultural difference became the partners’ very different approaches to raising their children. In Ghana, their two daughters had been raised largely by a nanny who took care of the girls while the parents were working. Upon returning to the States, the couple could no longer afford a caretaker for the children and had to take on more responsibility for their daily care and upbringing. The partners soon ran up against their quite divergent views and practices on childrearing. As Gabriel admits,

We didn’t have a lot of disagreement [about the children] until we came back to the United States. We were all okay with the kids being disciplined [by their nanny and extended family]. But when we came here we really had a difference in the way we saw things regarding the kids. The other children were doing things and I didn’t want them to do it because other kids were doing it, but [Sheila] would say, “Oh, it’s okay.” I’d say, “Oh, no, these are our kids. They can be different.”

Sheila also is aware of this divide.

We have very different views of raising children and that’s the biggest problem that we have in our marriage. My husband has a philosophy that children should be seen and not heard. It’s part of the African tradition…. A lot of that comes from the fact that we bring to parenthood all our childhood experiences. In coming out of a culture where parents and children have very separate domains that don’t cross over, you don’t even know how to cross over if you wanted to…. I’m an American—just the opposite…. I figure you have to be a friend to your kids as well as a parent…. I want them to be able to come to me with their problems and they can do that with me. If they’ve got a problem, they don’t go tell him. They go to tell mom first because she’s always open.

Sheila sees Gabriel’s strict disciplinary approach and the emotional and physical distance between him and their daughters as related to a Ghanaian cultural gender norm that a father should not be too close to his daughters. “In [Ghana], the men—you don’t touch your daughter! I don’t know at what age he stopped hugging, touching the girls. He told me, ‘I can’t do that because they’re girls, and it might be taken the wrong way.’”

As a consequence of this cultural difference, Sheila became quite close to her daughters, while Gabriel assumed the role of a distant father figure. This pattern was abruptly interrupted, however, when the younger daughter, upon leaving for college, confronted Gabriel about what she perceived as his lack of involvement in her life. According to Sheila, the daughter loudly proclaimed: “Dad, you don’t know me! You never talk to me. You don’t know who my friends are. You don’t know anything about me! You don’t know me as a person.” Sheila feared that Gabriel would “write [the daughter] off” and never speak to her again after the outburst—that would have been the culturally expected response in Ghana—but instead he started visiting both daughters in their respective colleges and spending more time with them.

Another problem the couple recognized upon their return to the United States was different attitudes regarding financial matters. While in Africa, the partners’ combined income and additional family wealth were more than sufficient to meet their needs; moreover, they generally spent less because the cultural environment did not valorize consumption. In the States, incomes did not stretch as far as they did in Ghana, their children’s economic needs were changing as the girls got older, and the temptations of a consumption society beckoned. Gabriel responded by being frugal and saving as much as possible, while Sheila took advantage of the ever-present shopping mall sales. Sheila confesses, “He feels I spend too much money…. He wants to work and put everything in the bank. And I think you’ve got to enjoy the money…. That’s what I’m working for—to enjoy life.”

Such divergent views may stem from the partners’ differing economic situations while they were growing up. During her interview, Sheila mentioned several times that she wants to “compensate for those early years of having to watch every cent” as her mother struggled to make ends meet. Gabriel on the other hand was brought up in a privileged situation, but one in which members of the extended family made frequent economic demands on his mother after his father’s death. He learned early the value of holding on to money, which gave him an education abroad. For this couple, the economic class of origin plays an important role in influencing the partners’ respective attitudes toward finances.

Despite potentially serious difficulties, Sheila and Gabriel have managed to resolve divisive issues and to maintain a satisfactory partnership. From the beginning, the partners anticipated possible problems that might stem from cultural differences and agreed how to deal with them before they came up. As Gabriel remembers,

Even before we got married we discussed, understood, and agreed upon issues that could cause problems. For example, in my culture families and friends do not have to give you advance notice before visiting you. I explained this to [Sheila] so she would know and there’d be no surprises when my people showed up unannounced…. She went along with it, and our houses in [Ghana] and America have always been opened to people…. As a male I am expected to provide help to family members who need it. This includes extended family. And it is expected that family members will assist us in raising our childr...