What with all of the wonderful reasons why marrying a
foreigner is fantastic fun, there are some definite downsides as well. International marriage
isn’t always filled with rolling R’s, melt-in-your-mouth chocolate, blossoming
roses and “until death do us part.” It also comes with heart-wrenching and, at
times, heart-breaking realities that make us question our choices.
Below are a few reasons for why I find international
marriage difficult. Although I wouldn’t say these are necessarily reasons not
to marry a foreigner (I chose the title to match our other fun, more positive
post), you might want to think long and hard about these before tying the knot
with your international spouse-to-be:
1 Far away from family. One of us is always living far,
far, far away from family and friends. There will never be a time when we are
close to his family as well as mine.
2. Loss of holiday traditions. My husband especially feels
this when Christmastime rolls around: There is nothing even close to a
Weihnachtsmarkt here in Seattle (and where is the smell of roasting nuts
filling the air?). When I lived in Germany, Thanksgiving came and went without
even the sighting of a turkey, let alone family getting together to celebrate.
Things just feel a little less warm and comforting when our holiday traditions
disappear.
3. Cultural misunderstandings. My husband and I have learned
to appreciate most of one another’s cultural quirks (this has actually been a
fun process overall). However, there are times when our cultural differences
rub one another the wrong way. The cultural idiosyncrasies of my husband that I
love the most can also cause me the most frustration when I’m not at my best
(and mine can do the same to him!).
4. What if we divorce? Being that one can never know where
life will lead us, if my husband and I were to divorce (God forbid), I have no
idea how difficult things could get. What if he wanted to move back to Germany?
Where would the kids live? Would they live with me or him or travel between us
both? All in all, international couples who divorce tend to have more difficult
decisions to make when compared to those who live in the same country.
5. Learning the language. Being that I am not fluent in
German (and my German seems to decline steadily each year that we live in the
USA), it pains me not to be able to understand nuances of my husband’s
language. When we visit his family, I often don’t understand subtle jokes and
can feel like an outsider. My husband is completely fluent in English yet he
can still feel out of place when he hangs out with a bunch of Americans using
slang and subtle cultural references. I can’t even imagine what it is like for
couples who don’t speak each other’s languages!
6. It takes a lot of work. Marriage in general can be a lot
of work. However, international marriages take just that little bit more. My
husband had to listen to my complaints (for a long time) about how different
life was in Germany. Then I had to listen to the same from him when we moved to
the States. Aside from getting used to living with one another, we had
overarching cultural differences to deal with which could really wear us down
and test our marriage. Even today we hit cultural nuances that test our
boundaries.
7. Never completely at home. Even though my husband feels
very comfortable here in the States, he still doesn’t feel 100 percent at home.
Not only do others treat him as a foreigner, no matter how hard he tries, this
country will just never hold the same degree of comfort as his country of
origin. The knowledge of this weighs heavy on me from time to time.
8. The end of true vacations. Ever since my husband and I
have been together vacations have taken on a whole new meaning: Visiting family.
I can’t remember the last time we took a long vacation that didn’t have as its
core visiting family members. Since we live relatively far from my American
family, we alternate vacation years so that we can visit his family one year
and mine the next. How else can our families see their
grandchildren/niece/nephews grow up? We love visiting family but it can put an
added strain on our marriage since we never really get a “true” vacation to
places that we’d like to visit and don’t know a soul.
9. Airplane flights are expensive. While others are
investing their extra dollars in college or retirement accounts, we are saving
up for our next airline tickets to Germany! $7,000 is a lot of money which we’d
love to be able to invest for the future. Our choice to invest it in the
present to visit family in Germany is important to us but it does hurt at
times. Our children’s grandmother won’t be alive forever so we do what we can
to visit her as often as we can. We’ll hope to work out college and retirement
as best we can.
10. At least one set of grandparents is always far away. Our
children will never be able to have both sets of grandparents living nearby.
Someone is always going to be far, far away. Skype is a wonderful thing but it
still doesn’t replace spending time with real, live grandparents, aunts and
uncles. This can be extremely heartbreaking at times.
And here is one more general question: Where will we be
buried when we die? Will it be in the country that we live in now? Or in our
country of origin? Or will we let our children decide based on where they are
living? Many of us know the answer already while others have no idea.
Despite this list of reasons why international marriage can be tough at
times, I would never, ever exchange it for anything else. My
relationship with my husband has been the most wonderful experience in
my life. We feel so very lucky to have found one another.Written by Corey
