You seriously want me to answer that second question?
Look, if he is married to you, and assuming it wasnt just one of those Las Vegas things, it means he totally loves you and wants to make a life with you. Also before my wife and I got married 19 years ago we sat down with a marriage counselor and worked alot of things out like talking about our needs for children, sexual compatibility, power issues, and finances.
So getting married is a big step.
Now I’ll tell you my wife and I are Christians so we have other values you might not have and thats ok.
*Can I ask one question? If your parents were so big on you marrying only a Korean man why did they move to the US? I mean they must have known you would grow up in a culture where Koreans, and Asians in general, are a minority.
sarahkb23, do you want children? Because if you do, you have a time constraint. If you want to have children, you need too learn somewhat quickly whether your boyfriend wants to commit to you and your mutual offspring, or not. If not, you should break up with him and look for a more compatible long-term partner.
If you don’t want kids, you have more time, and you could continue living in the limbo you are in now. It would still be better if the two of you had some explicit conversations, possibly mediated by a couples therapist, about what your long-term goals are. But the need is less urgent.
In the meantime, I second the suggestion someone made up-thread about spending time with other friends, so if you do break up, you have someone to turn to for support and a social life.
In so many different aspects, not just relationships and family, culture, language, and other practices get fixed in time when they break off from the mother ship.
It happens in may other aspects of life too. Live in NY for the first 25 years of your life then move to LA. 25 years later you’ll still be talking up the wonders of NY’s people & culture. But it’s the one from 25 years ago, not the current NY.
The same thing happens when companies merge. The folks subsumed into the mother ship idealize the culture at the old place. 15 yeas later they’re still talking about how good it was at the old firm pre-merger. Not forgetting that had the old firm survived, its culture would have changed beyond recognition over the intervening 15 years too.
Imagine you moved to Saudi Arabia because you got an amazing job offer. Wouldn’t you be a bit disappointment of your kid married a local? Wouldn’t you worry about the cultural differences, be troubled by the grandkids not celebrating the your holidays and be disappointed if they didn’t learn to speak English? Wouldn’t you worry their spouse would have expectations that go against the values you raised your kid with? Could you imagine a passel of little Saudi Arabian grand kids?
People mostly move for opportunity, not to participate in cultural exchange. I’m all for cross-cultural marriages, but they are hard, and it’s tough to blame parents for being worried.
I’m not sure that that is a good example because what I hear in Saudi Arabia is that westerners stay in their own separate areas so its not like your kid would be dropped into a Saudi school.
Maybe “everything that involves women?”. That is closer to the truth than you realize.
The cliche is “Afraid of Commitment”.
I’m 66, male, heterosexual, never married. There were two women who were “almost certain” that I’d suddenly change my “I am not interested in marriage, at any time, to anyone” mantra because.
Why? ‘Just Because’.
Your mama may have assured you that ‘all men say they’re not interested in marriage, but you can change him’.
Some of us actually do mean it.
I have not been following this thread, so I have no idea what is going on in your specific case.
(How’s that for a disclaimer?)
You’re proving sven’s point for her. Westerners stay in those separate areas because they don’t want themselves or their kids assimilated into the culture there - the same way sarahkb23’s parents don’t want their daughter assimilated into American culture.
If you don’t want Saudi Arabia as an example, choose any place with a vastly different culture. Choose Korea if you like. How would you feel knowing your grandkids would likely never speak English well enough to talk to you? How would you feel watching your family celebrate holidays you feel no connection with, while the holidays they grew up with are just another work day? How would you feel about vastly different gender roles?
Immigration is a tricky thing, even for the most enthusiastic immigrant. There are things that you are going to love, and things that you are never going to adapt to.
And family is special for everyone. We are willing to make lots of compromises for ourselves, but often that vanishes for our kids. We want the best for our kids, no matter what. And we often define “the best” as what we are familiar with.
I think Saudi Arabia is an excellent example. How would you feel knowing that your Grand Daughters would never be allowed to drive a car? Go to a store on their own? Show their hair in public? How would you feel knowing that they could be beaten with sticks by total strangers on the street for allowing their ankles to show if they stumbled? Publicly whipped for wearing clothing that showed their arms?
That’s how Korean parents feel knowing that their daughter’s virginity can be taken (or given) without honor or commitment. That she could be impregnated at any time by a man who may or may not take up his half of the load, and whose parents may be similarly uncommitted to the welfare of the offspring. They can not fathom the irresponsibility of taking such a risk. Why, the child could end up spending time in a commercial daycare, with complete strangers instead of being cared for by Grand Parents while Mommy and Daddy are at work!
It’s old fashioned to us, but to them it’s unthinkable. It’s OK to understand them without agreeing with them. And while acknowledging the values and priorities of the other doesn’t solve the problem, it changes the tone of the disagreement for the better.
I think once the parents decide to make the decision to immigrate, they give up the expectation of everything staying the same for the kids.
If my kid was in the Saudi example above, I’d be disappointed, but I’d blame myself for going to Saudi Arabia in the first place. It doesn’t matter what situation I was fleeing from, or what opportunities I was seeking, the move to the new country is proof that there is a positive of moving that I have accepted, and change and mixture into that new culture is a result that I am forced to accept too. The parents have a cognitive dissonance between wanting to be in the new country and staying connected to the old. They cannot have it both ways, whatever they experience will be a mixture of the two.
Pushing that onto an innocent kid raised in that new culture is unfair to the kid, they have about as much connection to their old culture as a person reading a history book about that culture. I’m a bit adventurous, so my response would be that I would learn the language of my new culture to better communicate with my grandkids, I would learn about the new holidays of this country so I can celebrate it, and if I didn’t like the gender roles, I’d accept them as normal anyway
Well, disregarding the “everything” part for the moment, this is very easy to say, especially if you are part of the dominant culture.
But, really, this kind of conflict is merely a more intense version of intergenerational clashes that pretty much any kind of parent and child can go through, even if there is no immigration factor.