Multi-National Marriage?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In another thread, I’ve just seen yet another poster who is Canadian, married to an American, living in the USA.

I’m curious as to how many multi-national marriages we have on the boards, who moved where, and why they moved. Also, how you met.

I moved to the US to be married to Weirddave, who I met here. He’s self-employed with an established business, and I worked for someone else. I’m also pretty good with moving (although the first year was really hard) and it was easier for me to immigrate to the US than him to go to Canada. I don’t guess that’s the same story now, having spoken with others who have made the same move.

We still celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving, which is a month earlier than American; and I still consider Boxing Day to be a holiday, as well as Easter Monday. I bemoan the loss of my national health care and the Canadian banking system. I miss my family, but we go up every year and in the process of doing so, we get to see some of our friends along the way, and see more of this great country.

What can you tell me?

2

I’m British, married to a Japanese man (as seems to come up in every flipping post I make - I don’t mean to be boring about it, honest! It just influences everything I do…)

I came to Japan in 1991 on a one year contract, met The Man the first week (he remembers me, I have no recall of him till about four months later, by which time I should have known his name and it had become embarassing to ask. So in my head I called him The Dark Man because he looks tough and has a monobrow.)

We decided to get married two years later, and married in 1994. We now have two boys and two years ago bought a house about five minutes drive from his parents, in his home town, though we have lived all over Japan in the past ten years.

There was no real decision about who lived where. My husband identifies as Japanese very strongly, and really only started to learn English for me. His English is now fluent and is the language we use as a family, but we have a shorthand and I know the words he knows, so it’s not developing much any more. When we go to England he is often lost. Aside from the language, he is a career man, and what he does is not exportable to England. He is good at his job, and another huge chunk of his identity comes from that.

For me, I came to teach English, having got fed up with admin work for a charity. (We got 2 weeks a year in the field and one day it dawned on me that I could switch the percentages and get a job that gave me 50 weeks a year abroad!) At the point I went, I didn’t much care what it was I did, just that I got away to somewhere interesting for a year or so.

Once we got together, then it became clear that I either stay or we split up, it just wasn’t practical any other way. My husband loves England and things foreign (he got a ragging at his wedding for loving American rock, foreign cars and now getting a foreign wife!) but he could not cope with living there. On about the 10th day in England he has a kind of crisis and shuts down with the stress of it all!

Me, on the other hand, I get my security from him. If he is there, then I am “home”; it doesn’t particularly matter where that physical place is.

Then there is the fact that he is the oldest son, and has family responsibilities. We have disappointed them enough (refusing to live with them or participate in any Buddhist ceremonies apart from funerals) without disappearing on them and breaking their hearts. So I also agreed to live in his hometown, near enough to help out as his parents get frailer. (They are OK so far but in their late seventies.)

And then there is the dual culture thing. It is easier to maintain a little island of England in Japan, where there is bilingual TV on some channels, and books and videos in some stores. Go to England and there isn’t a shred of Japanese in most towns. And although I am completely fluent in spoken Japanese (I read like an an elementary schooler!) I don’t use it much with my kids unless we have friends around and we don’t want them to feel excluded. It would be hard to keep it up in England.

So, we are in Japan. I do feel I lost a lot of my freedom to live here permanently. Women here have an odd position in society which in some ways is subservient to men but in other ways allows them to treat men as foolish children to be indulged, decieved and disrespected. I refuse to do either to my husband (nor does he want it, thank goodness) and it sometimes leaves us in uncomfortable social situations. My kids tend to think differently and a bit “out of the box” compared to kids here, and sometimes they are punished for it. On the other hand, I think we have rich lives, and compared to someone on a similar income in the UK, we have a better standard of living here. (Because we live in the north of Japan - this would not be so in Honshu.)

This is too long now, so I will stop and just finish by saying that on the whole, I like my life. I love my husband and he loves me. Our kids are mostly happy, and that’s enough for us.

3

I’m an American living in Australia with my Australian husband.

We met in the U.S. My husband was there working and we met on a blind date…a guy on his rugby team set us up for their Christmas party. We lived in the U.S. for another 7 years (making a total of 10 years in the U.S. for my husband…basically, most of his adult life), then moved here. The main reason we came is because my father-in-law was very sick; he passed away at the end of last year. We also came because my husband was a little homesick, but now he’s homesick for the U.S.

I really don’t like it here. Our standard of living is far below what it was in the U.S., we’re finding it harder to make friends, and my husband’s family is…well, let’s just say “very different” from my family. My family is very friendly with us and we tend to get together for the holidays and family events. My husband’s family pretty much ignore each other.

So, we’re moving back to the U.S. My husband is glad we came here, just so he could see that he wasn’t really missing anything, but he’s getting excited about going back. He actually just said last night that he feels like he’s going home. We’re not moving until the second half of 2006.

GingeroftheNorth, we’re actually considering moving to the Baltimore area. I’m from Maryland and also, we do want to keep our children (just one right now) involved a bit in Australian culture. There are a few Australian-American clubs in the D.C./Baltimore area because of the embassy in D.C. It would be nice for them to enjoy a game of backyard cricket every once in awhile.

4

I’m Canadian. I married an American and emigrated from Canada to live here.

I’ve mentioned this what seems like too many times, so I hope I’m not boring you folks! My wife started out as a customer. We became friends by mail. And now we’re preparing to go out for dinner on our 7th anniversary.

We looked into her coming to Canada, but up there I had nothing. No reason to stay, nothing to look forward to, no prospects. Here, I have no choice but to be self-sufficient, and since the day after I got my work permit, that’s what I’ve done. I’m so much better off for it. It was the best thing I’ve ever done.

5

I am Italian, and married a Malaysian Chinese. I met the girl who would become Mrs Aruns during a holiday in London (you know, I was thinkging Wow! London! Such an exotic place!). After a few visits we fell for each other and decided to live together, and then get married, in England. So we have a dual cultural island to maintain, a Chinese and Italian one. It’s been tough but we made it and friends find us delightfully exotic :slight_smile:

Luckily we found a few cultural overlaps - the importance of your extended family, for example, or interest in good food - and there are also quite a few other Italian and Chinese immigrants around Newcastle so we get people to speak our own language to and behave in our own style with.

One thing is funny: the first question many people ask, for some reason, is How are your kids going to look like? Ah, I would like to know. Short, dark and with epicanthic folds? Eastern faced and loudly chattering? Two things we’re sure they’ll have are full lips and a tendency to be fatty.

6

Canadian married to an American. We met years ago, kept in touch, became best friends, he invited me out for Christmas vacation, and I’ve pretty much been here ever since. Had no intentions of getting married when I came here, though, that was an interesting twist. We’ve been winging it ever since with the paperwork deal, going the long way 'round and all that, but at least we’re getting there.

I, too, miss the health care (checkups cost money?! GAH!), the banking system (thoguh I’m getting the hang of it now), but mostly I miss Tim’s coffee and Cadbury chocolate. (and Ganong’s candy, which is a local chocolate company - nothing compares to the stuff you grow up with).

However, I do love it here, and I will be very happy to raise my kids here. I will have a lot to tell them about their heritage as they are growing up, and many interesting stories about a place they may only get to see once a year or so. It seems odd to me that they won’t grow up speaking both French and English if I don’t specifically teach them (They may hear random French exclamations out of me, but hardly learn the whole language from me). They won’t grow up hearing the interesting mix of accents from my area, the Brits, the Scots, the funny Newfies, the Acadianne French, the Cajun, the Irish. They won’t hear the Celtic music at every festival by the sea, or the bagpipes on most every occasion. They will learn customs and traditions that are still mildly foreign to me, celebrate holidays I don’t quite grasp, and never see the Queen on their money. They will know how to quickly count money better than their poor old mother can - to me it’s all green!

I will be happy to tell them about my home country, but I want them also to be proud of their own unique heritage. I’m a proud Canadian, but I will also be a proud American. After all, my kids will be a little of both. :slight_smile:

7

Not me, but my parents.
Dad was a $10 pound Pom, as they call them here - that is, before Immigration revised its policies in the mid-seventies, Brits were encouraged to emmigrate to Australia via a very cheap fare - 10 british pounds.
So yeah. Dad emigrates to Aus.
Mum is from India. She studied in the US, loved it, went home after graduating. Decided that after the US she couldn’t live her whole life in India. So decided to emigrate as a skilled migrant to Australia. She came when few Indians were to be seen in Sydney, so she was seen as rather “exotic” and got stared at a lot.
So one evening Mum and her flatmates go out for the evening. They are at a nice bar somewhere in Sydney. A young Englishman is suavely propping up the bar. After the jazz set finishes, Mum walks past him to talk to some people on the other side of the room. On the way back over, Dad catches her eye and strikes up a conversation. They start dating. Six months later they married.
And I am the result. They’ll be married 30 years this year. It’s funny how several chance, major decisions resulted in them both being in the right place at the right time to meet each other. It must have been fate. :smiley:

8

I am an American, married to a New Zealander. We live in the Southeastern US.

We met, actually, as a result of this board–though we were just friends for awhile before we got together. Then last year, he came over, we got engaged, and then married a couple of months later. Some Dopers came to our wedding.

It’s a bit of a culture clash for him, but overall he seems to be adjusting fine. I do not think we will stay in the US for very long, but I doubt we’ll move to New Zealand permanently either. We’ve discussed several places.

My family is getting used to him–well, my sister and my grandparents took to him immediately, and my father came around pretty quickly. My mother’s taken longer, but she’s finally getting used to the idea of him and the idea of my being married, so it’s worked out fine.

9

I am an American married to a Ukrainian and we live in Boston. In two weeks we’ll celebrate our second anniversary and a week after that we’ll be moving to Durham, NC.

A good friend of mine was having no luck find a GF, so an a whim, he placed an ad in a local dating pages and met a Russian woman who also had no luck finding a BF so, on a one time only lark, she decided to look at the dating pages and happened to spot his ad. They dated and got married a couple years later.

My friend’s bride was friends with one of her college professors (since they both spoke Russian) and invited her to the wedding where we met for the first time. After that, my friend’s wife knew that I was lonely and looking and suggested I date her friend who was also lonely and looking.

Our first date was less than spectacular and I’m still not sure why I agreed to go on a second date (I was very sure that I had no interest in her). But on that second date she took me to her office and played some music, including a few of her own compositions. (She is a classical composer and pianist.) The instant her fingers stroked the keys, she changed. Instead of the restrained, uptight mouse that I thought she was, she transformed into this passionate, expressive tigress who I fell in love with. When she finished playing, I pulled her into a kiss and we didn’t break our embrace for nearly an hour. Within a year we were married.

She likes it here and only has her mom and step-dad in Odessa, while I have a large family scattered around the states. In a year, once she has her citizenship, we’ll go over to visit her mom and she’ll show me her hometown, something we’re both looking forward to.

One side note – As an American, I had been taught in school that the Ukraine was ‘the breadbasket of Russia’, so in my mind that made her Russian. It’s taken her a while to break me of that habit, because to her, the Ukraine was NOT part of Russia, it was only controlled by it. But she ony sees herself as technically being Ukrainian, she mostly sees herself as Jewish (even though only her mom was Jewish and she doesn’t practice the religion). To her, being Jewish is as much a nationality as being canadian or australian and is not about it being a religion. I’m not saying anything about it myself, only stating what she says.

10

I’m an American guy married to a Chinese gal and we live here in the US. She moved here from China after selling her business. We met because one of her coworkers’ boyfriends worked with me and they decided to hook us up. We have been married 7 years now and the couple that hooked us up have been broken up for about 5 years. Many of her family members still live in China, and she has gone to see them a couple of times since we have been married. I’m looking forward to going over to China in the next year or two.

11

I’m an American married to an Armenian woman from Tehran. She moved with her family from Iran about 6 years ago. I met her at work, though at the time I had no idea where she was from or anything else about Armenian culture. I’d love to be able to travel and see the country she was raised in but obviously it’s a bit of a hotspot right now.

12

Not me, but many of my friends over in the US are multinational marriages:

  • the Cuban-turned-American PhD student who met the Costa Rican elder sister of another PhD student when she was visiting her brother, took her out to dinner, returned her just in time to catch her plane, spent the next three months writing daily (snail mail at least twice, email by the dozen), then she migrated to the US to marry him.

  • the Physics PhD student who one day, talking with some friends in his favourite MUD (can I plug it? ok, ok, I’ll be good) discovered one of them was a female physics PhD student in his own college. He hadn’t noticed the little Taiwanese before, but she knew perfectly well that he was the 7’-tall American with the black hair. They went on a date, he left her home, got home, went into the MUD to tell his friends… and of course she was there telling her friends… which was basically the same people. On their third date, they were at Denny’s and he said “listen, will you marry me?” She looked at him sideways for what felt like an eternal minute and said “ok.”

  • the Armenian chemist who met an American-born-of-Cubans banker (she was in charge of corporate accounts) while he was studying in America

  • the Spaniard whose parents migrated to the US for political reasons when he was 2 years old, brought him over when he was 7, has stayed since, refuses to become an American (he would never be able to renounce all loyalty to Spain), met a Cuban immigrant while he lived in New Jersey (she is staying a Cuban as well, same reason). Their two daughters are American and when I met them they lived in Miami.

My own family is not multi-national, but my parents were from different parts of Spain (with different cultures and, in many things, different laws) and the same applies to all my grandparents and great-grandparents. Like one of the gramps says, “mongrelin’s good for you.”

13

I’m American, and my wife is a 1st generation Canadian from Hong Kong. We knew each other for years in an IRC chat room before we met, became friends, a couple, and then husband/wife.

She was already living/working in the U.S. (Ann Arbor) when we met, so she was pretty much used to the way things are here. She did move to Cleveland to be with me before we got married. We both readily accept other cultural identities, so she has no problem accepting Black-American culture and I have no problem accepting Chinese culture. Both sides of our family get along great. Her family lives mostly in Windsor / Toronto and we visit both areas several times a year.

I’ve developed a strong affinity for Canadian culture and I acknowledge just about all of the Canadian holidays and am a staunch, die-hard fan of Tim Horton’s! My wife maintains a strong Canadian identity so she is a bit more resistent to accepting American values, although over the years she has softened somewhat :slight_smile:

14

I’m American, wife is Mainland Chinese. Met and married in Tokyo. Lived in Tokyo, Hong Kong and now Shanghai. Moved mainly for my employment (with differenct companies), and last move to Shanghai for quality of life as this is where my wife is from and all of her family lives.

Wife has a US green card, I have a Chinese work permit and will be eligible for a Chinese green card in 2 more years.

We’ll probably stay in China for a while. 3 girls including twins + affordable domestic help means not moving. Also, we want the bambinas to get a good grounding in Chinese, which means probably elementary school here.

15

A good friend of mine is Chinese, living in Hong Kong. A few years ago, she and two of her friends saved up and did the big tour of Europe. She said that in most countries (especially the UK) the group of friends would draw disapproving looks and clicks of the tongue for talking so incredibly loudly on public transport and the like. She told me it was a relief to get to Italy, where nobody batted an eyelid because the Italians were all talking at the top of their voices too. It was her favourite country, by far.

16

I’m an Australian, who also has Canadian and UK citizenship. My wife is an American (well, a San Franciscan :)), and we are both grad students in Baltimore, which is also where we met. I came here to go to grad school, and so did she, one year later.

We’re not really sure where we’ll end up yet. The academic job market is such that you often don’t get to pick your location. Both of us would be happy to end up in the US, Australia, or Canada. Actually, for both of us i think the city or region is probably just as important as (if not more important than) the country.

17

American, married for almost 6 years to a Korean woman whom I met in the Philippines while we were both on holiday there. No problems except for the odd language difficulty–neither of us is fluent in the other’s language. Most of her friends are Korean and most of mine are expats, but we have a few in common.

We’ll probably be in Korea until I retire, at least. The main thing I don’t like about it is the difficulty of ordering things from US companies and having them shipped here. Not often a problem, though. They sell stuff here in Korea, too.