My friend was picked up by her Brazilian wife (lesbian couple) when she was DJing at a club night in London. Her partner lived in Sao Paulo but worked as an Air Steward for British Airways, doing long haul weekly from Brazil to the UK which made dating remarkably easy across such huge distances.
The Brazilian eventually got a transfer to London within BA.
A friend of my brother’s is one of those guys who go into spasms if they’re ever far enough from the town of their birth that the soil changes color. Dude doesn’t ever go more than 40 or so km away. His wife is Chinese (moved to Spain on her own, works as a translator and tour guide and helping companies from Spain and China contact each other; they met in a bar where she was eating alone and his party invited her over).
One day, shortly after their first child was born, someone asked them that same question. The husband answered “well, the way I see it, we have the advantage of being very conscious that there will be differences in basic stuff.”
My other brother and his wife courted for seven years, but when they got married, both were surprised to discover that their idea of “dinner” was different. They’d never had dinner at each other’s houses, they’re from the same country, so why would they have different ideas of what’s appropriate for dinner? Well, they do - but it blindsided them. It didn’t blinside that other guy.
Oh dear… I didn’t know that. He spent a lot of time at the embassy there renewing his visas while he waited for his papers to go through the Norwegian immigration department though, so he probably knows, but I’d hate to get that letter in the mail.
I went to Norway over the 2010-2011 holiday to help my friend babysit his not-yet-one-year-old daughter while they waited for the local daycare to clear a spot for her, and I can’t understand more than a few words in Norwegian, so I hear ya there. Christmas party, new years, AND the daughter’s birthday, all with the wife’s family, and almost no english. Though, that was the only time anyone really spoke Norwegian and I was hoping to pick it up there, so it wasn’t all bad. I still only know kvittering is the word for receipt, and pose is the word for bag, though.
That and a *particularly * insidious theme song for a show called “Drømmehagen”.
And Nava, that’s really interesting. I never thought about it like that, but when you say it, it makes perfect sense.
I get in this argument occasionally with my wife also - particuarly between her and her father.
They will speak Cantonese to each other, even though both are fluent in english. It totally excludes me from the conversation. Even amongst folk of our age group, I have to give pretty frequent reminders that “hey, I’m here and I can’t understand a damn word you’re saying” - even when all present can speak english.
I don’t have a frame of reference as I’ve only been married once but, like most things I guess, differences diminish over time.
Other than her propensity to switch to rapid-fire Spanish whenever she becomes angry, or when speaking with members of her family, which doesn’t really make anything harder as I speak pretty good Spanish too, I don’t imagine our relationship to be any different than that of two people from the same background.
I’ve even gotten used to much of her culture’s foods that I’d never heard of before we were married, e.g., carimañola, checheme, etc… That is not to say that I like all of it; Checheme is some nasty looking stuff, but I’m used to it.
Another tradition I found quite confusing had to do with funeral practices.
I met mi Colombiana about three months after her maternal grandmother passed away. She never knew her father so this was the only grandmother in her life.
Imagine my surprise when about 9 months later she informed me that they were holding the funeral mass for her grandmother. 
Seems in her local custom you only rent a full cemetery plot for a year to let the flesh decay away. Then you dig up the bones, have a funeral mass, and store the bones away in an ossuary.
For me it has always been these sorts of random things that have caused me the most confusion. It shows how deeply ingrained certain customs are that I had never even considered things might be done differently in her traditions.
I’m an American who lives in Japan, married to a Japanese woman. We met at a birthday party a friend held. She was invited by a friend of that friend. No difference between the way we met and the way people meet in most places. If you live in a foreign country, you’ll meet people you’re attracted to, and you might end up getting married. No mystery.
Of the international couples I know, most met in relatively normal ways. Friend introductions, parties, group activities, etc. I don’t know anyone who had a long-term relationship from a tutor-student type of introduction. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, just that I don’t know anyone who has done more than date for a while from that kind of start. A very small number are fellow expats who met in Japan, most are foreign men married to Japanese women, and I know only one foreign woman who married a Japanese man.
Like other posters have pointed out, one advantage of a cross-cultural marriage is that you know there are going to be differences. This makes you more likely to discuss things, and sometimes more forgiving when the differences put you at odds. You have to connect at a human level pretty quickly. You can’t even fall back on common interests most of the time, because you had such radically different upbringings. Language can be a barrier, especially when you’re fighting. She speaks good English and my Japanese is pretty good, but I’ve had a few arguments with my wife that sprang from miscommunication on the non-verbal level. You’d be surprised at how many times conversation styles between cultures come into conflict more than miscommunication of meaning based on words.
Those of my (South African) friends with foreign spouses usually met them while they were working overseas in London (spouses from, variously, UK, Portugal, Japan, Australia, Korea, Poland), often at their workplace - it generally takes just one summer visit here to convince them to move, I’m led to understand. The only exception is the guy who met his Japanese wife when her dad was here working for the embassy.
I’m American, my wife is Taiwanese, and we met here in Japan at my friend’s birthday party. My wife was friends with my friend’s girlfriend.
I don’t speak Chinese, and her English isn’t that good, so we speak Japanese to each other. One nice thing is that puts us both at an equal disadvantage.
Went to a wedding last weekend where my American friend married his Hungarian girlfriend. They met through mutual friends while he was working here in Budapest and now live in London. Off the top of my head, I know:
a Scottish male married to a Chinese female - they met while working for the same company in Glasgow and now live in Zurich;
an Indian male from Tanzania married to a Chinese female - they met at a party while he was working in Hong Kong and are now in Budapest;
a Hungarian female married to an Indian male - they met while working for the same company in London and are now in Budapest;
a Hungarian female married to a Dutch male - they met in London where they were both on business (different companies, they met in a bar) and now live in Holland;
a Hungarian female married to an Italian male - he got her knocked up during a summer hookup in Hungary then split. He didn’t know he’d gotten her pregnant. She tracked him down via mail in Italy. This was decades before the Internet. They are still together in Italy, and their granddaughter just turned two;
also a Swiss-Algerian couple, a Hungarian-Estonian couple, a Scots-South African couple…probably a few more.
I guess one generalization from the above is that your odds for meeting a foreign spouse go up if you go to work in a cosmopolitan city and/or for a multinational company.
My dad, born in Donora PA married my mon born in Germany. They met because he was a part of the post WWII peace keepers in Germany. They married in Heidelberg and my mom naturalized to US citizenship
Costa Rican. Probably not as fancy or exotic as the OP was looking for, but if it’s worth anything, he’s gone much farther away on missions and I guess could have met a wife anywhere. But he was taken by my mom, and here we are.
It’s just rude in my opinion, and as much as I don’t like it when they do it to me what’s worse is they do it to other people. We once went to a coctail party for our childs school and there was one wonam there who did not speak japanese and try as she might to socialize and insert herself into the conversation they simply kept right on speaking Japanese and ignoring her. She finally gave up out of frustration and she and I spent the night chatting. After which I was admonished byh my wife for flirting. :rolleyes:
I’m of two minds on the speaking native language and excluding the non speaker. My wife is Shanghaiese. It is her native language although Mandarin would be her second native language. When Shanghaiese get together, they naturally speak Shanghaiese. When her relatives get together they naturally speak Shanghaiese. I speak fluent Mandarin.
I really have to work hard to make them speak Mandarin and *stick *to Mandarin. No one is trying to be rude but they just naturally gravitate to their native language. Usually we’ll start a topic in Mandarin and 2 or 3 speakers later it’s in Shanghaiese unless I’m dominating the conversation. So I can’t really fault them for the behavior but it is frustrating and the burden is on me to keep myself included.
It can be frustrating for me. Especially before I picked up a decent Shanghaiese listening comprehension (if I know the context).
I get really frustrated if my wife says something like “you’re being rude by surfing with your smart phone.”
Grrrrr.
My wife annoys me with this. I don’t speak Chinese, and she’ll get together with her friends and will start in Chinese. I’ll even be speaking to one of her friends in Japanese, and she’ll barge in and switch the conversation over to Chinese. It got so bad, I just started telling her to visit her friends on her own.
American, married to a Japanese woman, now living in London. I was her boss. First and only time I’ve dated anyone from work, and I hit a home run with the first pitch. Best thing that ever happened to me. I’m native-level fluent in Japanese, so our conversations are 99.9999% in Japanese. But our kids are of course growing up in the UK. Hilarity ensues <g>
We hang out with some of my non-Japanese speaking friends. She speaks just enough English to sort of know what we’re talking about, but it isn’t necessarily all that fun for her, and she knows I’ll spend all my time interpreting for her, so she usually just tells me to go by myself, sweet thing.
She complains that she can’t gripe about me to her friends when I’m there <g>.
You had me at ‘beer chugging contest’. She’s a winner <g>
I am American and my wife is Korean. We met in a small town in Arizona. I had just moved there and wasn’t looking to date (coming out of a bad breakup). But I wanted to be social so I looked for a church to join. There was only one church in town big enough to support a singles Bible Study group, so that’s where I went.
She was in my Bible class. We had never really spoken (she was very quiet) but one day she asked if I could give her a ride to Tuscon so she could take a TOEFL test. I said sure. (I had no particular thing at the time for Asian women but she was by far the prettiest girl I had ever seen in my life, so it was easy to say yes!)
We got to chatting in the car and, well, that was that. We’ve been married 10 years.
As far as the cultural/language thing goes? We live in Northern Virginia which has a huge Korean population. Every block it seems there is at least one Korean church. There are at least 5 Korean supermarkets (one bigger than a Wal-Mart) within a 20 minute drive. She has Korean TV and internet so she hasn’t have to give up too much of her culture or circle of comfort.
All of her friends are Korean. 90% of her daily conversations that do not directly involve me are in Korean. If she has friends over, they all talk Korean. This does not bother me at all.
I don’t speak Japanese, but my wife speaks excellent English, so all our conversations are in English. She thinks it’s rude for foreigners in the US who are capable of Enlglish to speak in their native language in the presence of people who don’t speak it.
I told my own story upthread of marrying a foreign spouse, but I forgot to mention my parents. My mom and her sister came from England to America in the late 1950’s when they were 18 or so, not knowing anyone, just seeking adventure. My mom attended a party in Washington, DC, where she met a young naval aviator. I still don’t know the details of how she made the connections that got her into this party, but whatever, things went well and they married a few years later. Last year they celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary.
My best friend’s husband is British/Danish (born in Denmark, brought up in the UK, his parents one from each country). They met online.
They live in the US, and he’s been a naturalized US citizen for a couple of years now–about 3-4 years after they married.