Multicultural marriages
For once, I want to write about something that's timely, given that it's Valentine's day: love. I just spent the better part of a weekend with my fiancee finalizing wedding plans, so it's a topic fresh on my mind. Specifically, we were talking about what marriage really means nowadays, when there are far fewer institutional reasons for getting married. Thankfully, the days are gone when there was a huge stigma on living with your lover before marriage. I'm not sure I'd ever want to have a child out of wedlock, as that stigma remains, but apart from that there are few solid, tangible things pushing us to tie the knot. Instead when we talk about marriage it's much more about an idea, the urge for something more committed and spiritual and deep than a relationship that's just for fun. These are scary words to say for my generation, born "after God," as Douglas Coupland once said. But that depth, that weight, is something we as a couple want to try for.
My fiancee asked me something else this weekend that surprised me. She wondered if her foreign nationality had somehow made her more attractive when we started courting one another. The answer I think is, honestly, no. I was attracted to her because she was a beautiful, politically active, smart woman. Her cultural background was, if anything, only attractive in the sense that it guaranteed she'd have tolerance for other cultures and religions and peoples, something that's really important to me. All the rest of her foreignness- the exotic foods, the bizarre music, her beautiful eyes- was not so much orginally something that drew me to her as it was just something fun to learn about. If anything, I went into our engagement perhaps not fully understanding how deep some of the cultural divisions between us are, as I viewed such differences as mere window dressing on our more fundamental selves. Over the past year we've plumbed the depths of that chasm as we've planned for our wedding, and I think we're a stronger couple for it. But I can't say I fell in love with the otherness- I fell in love with her, all of her, including the otherness.
