I ask because I had a friend who co-habitated for 2.5 years before they got married. At the wedding, his dad said something about, “Now we can come visit you” which insinuated they knew everything. The son asked, “Why didn’t you tell me you knew?” The response: 1. It was too funny watching you try to hide it 2. We weren’t thrilled about it but knew we didn’t have a say so the guilt you felt was good 3. It made you come visit us more often 4. It was our only way of still parenting you 5. if it didn’t work out, the shame/guilt/awkwardness would have been much worse.
Parents have been around a long time and know you better and society better than you think.
Well, that’s nice, but (as others have said upthread) did you get into Harvard? (I don’t know what your parents are like, but all the Korean parents I know think, for no good reason I can tell, Harvard is the center of the universe, even compared to schools like Cambridge.) And if you did, did you go? And if you went, did you get straight A’s? And if you had good grades, did you either go to medical school or make a 7-figure income? And if so, did you manage to find a nice boy who is always respectful and never talks back and never holds an opinion different than your parents? If not, what’s wrong with you?
Heh. Yep. The cousin in question has other problems, but somehow those never come up…
My sympathies, HazelNutCoffee. My parents are super-liberal by most standards, but even my mom was asking me why I didn’t get married first before I moved in with my boyfriend. It’s not that she had a problem with me moving in with him, she just didn’t want to tell all her friends in the community that her daughter shacked up with a guy without getting the ring first. It was said half-jokingly, but there was a real sentiment behind it which I understand, since it would reflect badly on my mom’s parenting.
Having grown up in a predominantly Asian-American community, it’s pretty common for Asian parents of all types to push their kids very hard, Mississippienne. There’s exceptions, such as my parents, but even they are prone to making guilt-trips and comparisons to their friends’ kids sometimes. Part of this is because in Asian cultures, there is a greater sense of family than in many of the Western cultures that I’ve experienced. Parents will support a child till they’re in college and beyond and in return the child will support the parents in their old age. So, in effect, they push their kids hard in order to get a greater return on their investment. This certainly isn’t the entire reason, and the other posters mentioned some of the other points, but it’s one big reason.
May well be; see the first sentence of the post you quoted. Still, if my family was going to disown me (as opposed to threatening same, which is a common enough occurrence) for displeasing them with things that are patently none of their business, I’d have a hard time convincing myself that I wouldn’t be better off with out them. That’s not meant to be glib; I just have a very low tolerance for active judgementalism. Your mileage may vary, and if it does, your decision here is all the more difficult.
Once again, HNC, I’m sorry you’re having to deal with this.
Actually, my mom has never seriously threatened to disown me (though she’s threatened to never visit again and the like – though only where we both kind of knew that once she calmed down she wouldn’t mean it). My dad did once. Seriously. He didn’t yell or scream; he stated very calmly that he had thought about it, and he could not deal with the ethnicity of my boyfriend, and that if we got married he would have to cut me off. He said it in a loving way, even. It was the scariest interaction I have ever had with my parents. The hell of it is that I know (knew as he was telling me this) he loves me and my sister very very much, more than anything in the world. I know (even though he doesn’t talk about it) what sacrifices he and my mom have made for me, and how much he has turned from his (really very awful) parents. It’s hard to say “well, I’d be better off without them” in the face of that, even if he was being extraordinarily awful about this particular thing. (I think he even knew he was being horribly irrational. He just couldn’t escape his upbringing on this point.)
(…I kept dating the guy for several years, though we kept it secret from my parents. (I think my mom probably knew, though she didn’t press the issue.) We didn’t end up getting married, not exactly because of my parents, but certainly that didn’t help. I didn’t bring it up before because it doesn’t appear HNC’s parents will disown her, even if she’s in for the screamfest of the century. )
(HNC, you appear to have struck a nerve with me. Sorry for droning on and on about my parents.)
LOL. I was rumored to be a lesbian in grad school, come to think of it.
We’ve been on vacations together and his mom lets us sleep in the same room (same bed!) when we stay with her. I dunno how my parents explain that to themselves.
Hardcore. At least my parents have never bugged me about plastic surgery, although they do constantly tell me I’m fat.
Like Nava said, we are living in Seoul and my parents live about half an hour outside of the city center. He’s Irish and his family lives near Belfast. My extended family has no problem with him being white; my parents did in the past (not any strong objections, just “well we wish you’d at least try to meet a Korean guy” sort of passive aggressiveness) but now they know him and like him well enough.
My relatives just bug my mom about marrying me off, they don’t really care to who, I think. When I left to attend UChicago for my MA, some of my more elderly relatives commented that another degree wasn’t going to add to my chances of landing a husband. :smack:
Trust me, if they knew, they would have made a fuss about it. My parent would never let something like that pass. I remember making a joke about moving in together a few months ago and my mom nearly had a stroke just at the thought!
Thanks for sharing stories and the sympathy everyone. raspberry, your parents sound more hardcore than mine. I can’t imagine my parents every cutting me off (knocks on wood).
I do have a friend (graduated from Yale law, now working for a hotshot firm in NYC) who was dating a guy for a couple years - they were planning to get engaged but her parents kept insisting he wasn’t good enough for her (he was Korean, but wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer :dubious: ). He tried to get to know her parents and win them over, but my friend told me that after her boyfriend and her dad played a game of golf together, her boyfriend said “I think he likes me, we had a good time!” while her dad said “He’s a loser and you are forbidden from marrying him.” Eventually they broke up.
I think you’re on to something. Thank goodness I didn’t have to deal with any of this with my parents, but one of my college friends (a nice Italian guy) married a nice Korean-American girl. She had been in the U.S. since she was a toddler, but in many respects her parents were very concerned about what their other (Korean) friends and business associates would think if they knew about their grown, Harvard-educated, master’s-degreed daughter and her premarital activities.
So on one hand, her parents actually helped her move in with him not long before they got engaged, but on the other, I apparently made a major faux pas when I mentioned in passing in my toast at their rehearsal dinner that the bride and groom had (gasp!) gone on vacation together before they were man and wife, because that meant her parents’ old friends who had flown in from Korea would know that their 30-ish daughter was no longer a virgin.
(And these were parents who had already been broken in by their three older daughters, who had all done pretty much the same thing…shacked up with, and then married white boys. This information threw a whole new light on the invitation to the post-wedding brunch hosted by the bride’s sister and brother-in-law, which billed brunch as the bride and groom’s first breakfast together, or something equally ridiculous. Now that I have met her sisters - they were all hilarious and very independent-minded - I know how tongue-in-cheek it all was!)
Oh, but the criticism didn’t end after the wedding; it was just about different things. Like when I called shortly after their first child was born, and she was venting to me about how her mom was lecturing her that she wasn’t using proper breasfeeding technique, and actually grabbed her nipple and forced it into the baby’s mouth!
I was raised very conservative Baptist. My parents still are, though mostly mom. My dad has mellowed a bit.
When I got married, at the ripe old age of 40, they wanted us to be married in a church, even if it was a small wedding. When I said we were looking at getting a justice of the peace, my mother INSISTED that we had to find one who was a Christian.
Funny though, that she never said a word (to me at least) when we had my (now ex-) wife’s best friend, a Wiccan High Priestess, officiate a small ceremony to which our parents were not invited.
Oh, ok. She said one or two words, not perhaps only that much, and not another one after I pointed out that 1> Fiance’s best friend, 2> FREE, 3> On our schedule.
In short, as above, it’s really “Oh my gosh, what will other people think about US!!!”… and less about you. They’ll get over it and you’ll be fine, or they won’t, and you end up minimizing contact with them in the long run. Really their choice in the end. Live your life and don’t worry about how they’ll take it. You’re the one who has to live with the consequences of your choices, even the choice to make them happy at your own expense.
Oh man, my mom totally did this to me. The really funny part was, my sister and I were both formula babies!
HNC, I didn’t mean to give the impression my parents were really hardcore. They are usually pretty mellow by Korean standards – it was only that one thing that flipped my dad out, and I was shocked to find that it was a problem at all, it seems to be a random Korean super-prejudice that I had never come across before (but have seen in other Koreans a couple of times since). I’ve never seen anything else – sex, shacking up, one-night stands, whatever – that would have triggered that.
Ah, okay. Yeah, I think even the mellowest Korean parents tend to flip out about certain things.
In the earlier months of our relationship, my mom tried to convince me to “meet other Korean men, just to see if you like any of them.” I was really offended by the suggestion, and she was never super pushy about it, but she kept assuming that my relationship was a casual fling and something completely separate from marriage prospects. She doesn’t do that anymore, thank God.
I do keep getting telemarketing calls from random dating agencies asking if I’m single. The fact that I’m not rarely deters them. “Well, you’re not engaged, are you? Why don’t you come down and just take a look through our profiles? Looking never hurt anyone. He never has to know!”
I think my biggest fear is that they’ll see it as some kind of personal failure. “We didn’t raise you to be like this” is a common lamentation of Korean parents. My parents have a bit of a blind spot where I’m concerned - I’ve been away from home on extended trips ever since I was 20 and I was in Chicago for two years, on my own - yet my mom still makes comments that imply she still thinks I’m a virgin. :dubious: (Ironically my dad, who is the more conservative one, has said things that imply he believes otherwise, like trying to warn me about getting “knocked up”.)
I know in the end I’ll just have to confront them - I just wanted reassurances from people who’ve done it and survived to tell the tale.
HazelNutCoffee, I’m in a pretty similar situation - since April 2009, I’ve been living with my boyfriend as well. My parents are fairly, not super conservative - they already adore my SO and suspect we’ll get married. They would be fine with us living together if we’re engaged. However, before we moved in, we came to the decision that once he graduated we would get engaged, which is summer of next year. We weighed the pros and cons, and figured that would give us each time to save up for an engagement gift (I’ll get a ring, he’ll probably get a handgun), and also so that our parents wouldn’t freak out at us being so young (we’ll be the youngest of our parents and grandparents, save for my paternal grandparents).
You already plan to marry, you’re not young and have the money, why not just get engaged? If you’re all ready for it, tell your boyfriend how you feel. If he feels the same way, there’s no reason to not be engaged. You don’t have to plan a wedding, but if you’re going to get married, make it official.
If you’re still not ready to get engaged, can you have the key to a friend’s place and pretend you’re living there? Just keep it as a “this is my place” thing, so they can say, use the bathroom and get out immediately. This is my plan for the next several months, just an fyi. I’ve danced around my place for awhile by having them pick me up for dinner when they visit at his (read: our) place, or at the library. But it can’t go on forever; it’s stressing me out.
If you wanna rip the band aid off, go for it, but that seems awful to me as someone in the same situation.
Hah. Once my parents insisted on dropping me off at “my” place - luckily they didn’t try to park or come inside (it’s an apartment building) so I just went into the building and crouched in the stairwell until I was sure they were long gone. :smack:
Unfortunately all my Korean friends still live with their parents. Anyway, my mom would know the second she stepped into a place that it wasn’t mine. Plus the thing I’m worried about is that if my parents knew I was moving, they would INSIST on helping me move, and I would have no way of turning them down without hurting their feelings or not sounding unreasonable and insane.
I know what you mean about the stress. In a month or so I’m going to have to bring my winter clothes from my parents’ house back to our place (we don’t have a lot of storage space) and I know they’re going to offer to give me a ride. :smack: I’ll have to try and catch them at a time that’s inconvenient for them.
It’s worth noting that sometimes disclosing this sort of information to parents can have unexpected consequences for other people, especially other siblings. My girlfriend’s grandmother had some reservations about me before we’d met because I am not Jewish, but now that we’ve met, likes me a lot and clearly approves of the relationship. However, she’s now leaning on my girlfriend’s little sister to find a nice Jewish boy because she’s now the last hope for Jewish* grandchildren. Yeesh.
*I know, I know, it’s matrilineal, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely rational.
HNC, given that you’ve lived abroad so much, have you seen any indications from Mom and Dad that they have resigned themselves a little bit to accepting your no-longer-totally Korean mindset? A very good J-friend of mine clashes with her parents over things like this, and when her parents bemoan her lack of Japanese values etc., she reminds them that they were the ones who brought her to live abroad as a small child; it’s not fair for them to now insist she pretend she’s never left Japan.
Even if in your case the overseas experience is/was your own choice, can you expect a teeny bit of mellowing out/resignation, like applecider’s gf’s family up there? And do you have a younger sister who might marry a nice K-guy?
Also, you mentioned that mom assumes you’re pure and untouched, while dad is maybe a little more aware. Is one of your parents the more hardcore about all this? If, for example, it’s really mom who’s dead-set on you being as K as possible, could you approach dad, get him to help mom see your side? Or is it pretty much staunch opposition from both?
Reading lindsaybluth’s comment, I remembered that my bf and I told both sets of parents that marriage was imminent (it wasn’t yet, tho)–both sets were concerned for my sake/reputation more than his, even. Even though his folks didn’t know we were shacking up, it did hit home that he was serious, and that mom could stop calling the marriage brokers, thanks.
raspberry, your parents sound more hardcore than mine. I can’t imagine my parents every cutting me off (knocks on wood).