Photo Credit: LiangHH

This is the sixth post from my ten question series on questions and discussions that are particularly important for intercultural or interracial couples to have. All of the posts from this series can be found on the series index, The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss.

Home. It’s the place where you should feel comfortable, accepted, and loved. Where you should feel perfectly free to just be yourself – and the same is also true for your partner. However, since intercultural couples often grow up in very different homes, how you picture home and how your partner pictures home may be two very different things. In order for you both to feel comfortable and “at home”, you’re going to need to talk about what sort of mixed culture at home you want to create.

People of different cultures, while having the same fundamental needs (eating, sleeping, procreating, etc.), may very well have not only quite different wants (social and psychological) but also quite different ways of perceiving their needs. Both are convinced of the “rightness” of their ways, because they are behaving instinctively, naturally, and properly according to their own cultural logic. There is potential for conflict because what is natural for one is not always natural for the other. Their divergence is further complicated by the fact that many, if not most, of their behavior patterns are based on unconscious values and cultural assumptions about how life should be lived. They have “learned to breathe [their cultural] logic and to forget that they had learned it.”

Digging into the question

When dealing with such a big, overarching question, I think it’s always easiest to break it up into a series of mini questions on smaller pieces of the whole. So ask yourself and each other about the pieces of home life that you find most important, and then work from the specifics to a more general picture:

• Location
  Where will we live? Your country, my country, a third country? Near family – and if so, how close is close enough? Is living in a diverse area important to us? What if one of hates the area we’re living in or gets homesick for their own land? How will the employment situation affect where we live?
• Work and Chores
  Labor is a part of life – so how will we divide it? Will we both work outside the home? Who is responsible for what sort of chores in the home? Is some work “men’s work” or “women’s work”? How do we want to decide what chores are important, and which we can let slide? What does a “clean home” mean to you? How do you want to handle the whole life-work balance, especially when there’s a trade-off between location and money or hours worked?
• Type of House
  Is having an extra bedroom or two important because we often house guests or family? Does one of us want a backyard for greenery, gardening, children or pets? Do we prefer an open-floor plan or something more traditional? A suburban style house or a more urban apartment?
• Language
  What language or languages will we speak at home? How important is it that one partner be fluent in the other person’s language? Should we budget in money for special media – books, movies, television channels, music – in a second language?
• Religion and Philosophical Values
  Do we share the same faith or philosophical creeds? If we do, is our understanding of the values the same, and our beliefs about how it is practiced day-to-day similar? If not, what sort of compromises will we need to make to live under the same roof?
• Children
  Do we want kids? If so how many – and how will we get them (the traditional way, adoption, fostering, or something else)? Why do we each want children or not? How do we envision them impacting our lives compared with today – are we at least in the same book, if not the same page, on this matter? And, of course, there are a million and one small and large questions on how we want to raise children.
• Decoration
  What do we want our home to be like? Do we want to try to decorate with furniture, crafts, accessories, textiles, and art from one particular culture, or mix it up? What sort of things does a home simply need in order to be a home?
• Pets
  Do we want animals in our lives, and if so, what type? What role or function do pets play – are they “fur kids”, companions, friends, just animals that we keep around ’cause we like them?
• Meals
  What sort of food do each of us like to eat? Who cooks it – or do we eat out? Where do we get the groceries from? Do either of us have dietary requirements or beliefs – and how do they fit into the other person’s diet? How elaborate should each meal be?

These questions are only scratching the surface – I’m sure each of you has another topic or three that is important to discuss in order to build a shared vision of a home you both will love and feel at peace in.

The bottom line

In the end, the goal is for each of you to understand what the other person needs to feel at home in your house and in your relationship. From the specific answers you tell each other, try to build a shared image or story of what your ideal “home culture” would be. What would a day look like in the life you want to live? What would your home look like, sound like, feel like? And, when things are tough, what can each of you compromise on while keeping a home life that truly embraces who each of you are as a person?

Photo Credit: Jaci Berkopec

Friday Connections: a time when I give links and a bit of commentary to things I’d blog about if I had the time. This week the categories are three perspectives on “Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid”, two in-depth profiles of extra-ordinary men, and a crazy number of “gori blogs” that I’ve been finding and catching up on – still more to go!

Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid

Three related articles on foreign aid and development.

• D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution
  We’re all looking for ways to help others – and it can be especially difficult to see the poor in developing countries struggling with so little help. This NYT article profiles three women who jumped into the mess, and started working to help others. However…
• Don’t Try This Abroad
  …as this Foreign Policy article points out, there are real concerns with development amateurs trying to do what so many experts often fail at. My perspective on this is that, unless you’re on the ground in a developing country, know the community well, and already have a good background in development do’s and don’ts, you’re probably going to do the most help by channeling your efforts through already-existing, proven-effective programs.
• When A Child Moves To Nepal
  Finally, we have a third perspective on this issue – how does it feel to be the people cheering the DIYers from the sidelines? Especially when it means that your young adult daughter is working in a rural part of a developing country.

Extra-Ordinary Lives

There’s nothing much hanging these two articles together, other than the fact that they’re thought-provoking profiles of two men from two very different cultures and time-periods.

• Abd el-Kader and the Massacre of Damascus
  His obtituary read “If to be an ardent patriot, a soldier whose genius is unquestioned, whose honor is stainless; a statesman who could weld the wild tribes of Africa into a formidable enemy, a hero who could accept defeat and disaster without a murmur – if all these constitutes a great man, Abd-El-Kader deserves to be ranked among the foremost of the few great men of the century.”
  This is the story of truly one of the greatest men in historical record. A man I knew nothing about until reading this long – but amazing – article. If there is one thing you read today, read this.
• The Last American Man
  “Eustace, has been living in the woods for twenty years now. He makes, builds or kills anything he needs, so it’s somewhat difficult to buy the guy a house gift. Still, my mama taught me never to visit anybody without bringing a present. This caused a dilemma: What do you give the man who has nothing?”
  If you read this article, I guarantee you’ll come away with a new thought on the way American culture has been shaped by its frontier roots.

Catching up on more “Gori Blogs”

There’s still more to go!

• Double Puja Day from Married to the Masala
  I found this detailing of the pujas that Hedei and her husband did fascinating.
• The Indian Way and the American Way from The Dosa Girl
  A description of the “scripts of life” that we’re handed by our various cultures. I do think it’s important to remember that these scripts vary not just across countries but within them as well, though. It’s too easy to think that the way you grew up is the way that everyone grew up!
• Old newsreel about India and Pakistan’s Independence from IndianTies
  Props to Heather for finding this supercool newsreel on YouTube!
• Thoughts on “Nine Lives” from Minnesotameetskarnatak
  I’ve been thinking about picking up this book for awhile, so this review was very welcome!
• Anthropology 101 from K&D
  kaurd writes on her anthropology background… and the teasing she gets for it.
• Sorry! from Miscellany from Metroland
  D. Jain apologizes for being MIA – just like me. Maybe it’s something in the air in DC…
• How Long Did You Wait and Why? from My Indian Love
  MDG’s question, prompted by her own relationship, has gotten a lot of great responses and differing points of view. Really interesting stuff!
• Multicultural Food from Samba Meets Sambar
  Samba is a Brazilian living the post-doc life in Norway married to a South Indian she met in the US who is getting his MBA in Paris. I have no surprise that they’ve had food issues. (And I’m very glad to find another economist gori blogger!)
• The Great Hindu Wedding Adventure from The Milano Has Landed!
  NeoKalypso finally had her big ol’ bash in India, and blogs about it here.
• Being a Woman in Nepal from white girl in a sari
  A thought-provoking post on the gender inequalities in Nepal
• Memories from My American Life
  This is one of the ways Aditya ruins food too. Le sigh…
• Hindi Breakthrough from Pyari Buaari
  Ah, we all have our learning the other language stories and woe, right? I could really relate to this post!

In the process of packing up and shipping all of my office files, notebooks, computer equipment and such from Virginia to San Francisco, I noticed that a few Indian accessories have crept into my desk knick-knacks over the years. In celebration of completely unpacking all of my office stuff (fist pump!), I thought I’d share some snaps of the various items with you guys. We have plenty of Indian accessories at home, too – you can expect a celebration post for finishing unpacking the house in maybe five or six months…

The first picture, at the top of the post, is an Indian folk art painting that Aditya and I received as a gift at our Hindu wedding. I snapped it up immediately for my office – it just adds such a nice spot of color to the rather bland walls of corporate America cubicals!

My favorite item, though, is the smallest of the bunch: a little Ganesh statue which sits under my monitor. No conclusions yet on whether he removes excel errors – the biggest obstacles keeping me from getting home at a reasonable hour – from my spreadsheets or not.

And then there’s the obligatory picture of Aditya and me on my desk. This one is of the two of us in Indian clothes for Halloween (yes, lame, I know – we were feeling lazy) a whole six years ago – back when we were in college! Aditya looks a little younger in the face, but otherwise he hasn’t changed much at all.

I always have a few packets of Maggi noodles on hand for days when I forget lunch, and an Indian shawl for when the office is more freezing than usual, but I’ll spare you pictures of those rather mundane items. Then there’s a lovely little Indian textbook on actuarial statistics that has saved my butt a time or two – it’s better than my graduate texts in econometrics for some things! But I try not to inflict my bookshelf on anyone who hasn’t already expressed an interest in multivariate analysis.

Rounding up my desk knick-knacks are two European items – one German, one Italian. First, there’s my German mistake-of-the-day calender for language learners that I purchased the last time I was in the country. (Yes, mistake-of-the-day, not phrase or word-of-the-day. This is the culture that is Germany).  I also have a cool figurine from the Vatican that Aditya got me. But he suffered a flesh wound en route from Virginia, and still needs to be patched up.

(To learn more about flesh wounds, watch the following clip.)

This is the fifth post from my ten question series on questions and discussions that are particularly important for intercultural or interracial couples to have. All of the posts from this series can be found on the series index, The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss.

A few days after moving into our new home in Silicon Valley, Aditya and I sat down to figure out what household items and furniture we would purchase to replace things sold or given away back in DC. Aditya’s list was about six lines: three electronics of some sort, trash bags, trash cans, and “food”. Mine was a little over two pages – typed.

After Aditya recovered from the stupefaction induced by seeing my list, he started to give me a mathematics lesson – specifically, how the dollar value of the items on my list was a number much larger than the value in our bank account. It was a fascinating lesson, but, in the interests of time, I interrupted him to explain that my list was created with the expectation that we’d only be getting some of the things – we just had to figure out what we both agreed were the most important. In other words, it was a classic “Asker” list.

The Asker vs. Guesser paradigm was first described in an obscure comment in a metafilter thread, and has since been discussed in articles across the web.

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you’re a Guess Culture person… then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you’re likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.

If you’re an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.

While anthropologists describe this difference in the classical breakdown of high-context vs. low-context cultures, I believe the Asker vs. Guesser idea is much more useful for those of in intercultural relationships.

Digging into the question

This question, like “What Are Our Biggest Communication Challenges?” is about communication, but instead of focusing on how well (or not) you communicate with each other, this question’s focus is on how each of you prefer to communicate in general.

It’s easiest to understand Asking & Guessing as a continuum, with extreme direct Asking at one end of the scale, and Guessing at the other. Askers say things directly, and Guessers mention, hint, and hedge. As some of you might have guessed (hah!), I’m a pretty die-hard asker – which can often come off as pushy or too demanding, even to people who have managed to stand me for a long time, like Aditya. In comparison, Aditya looks much more like a Guesser, even though he can be quite direct when he wants to be. Of course, we all operate like Askers some of the time, and Guessers some of the time – but, just like other personality traits, there’s one mood we tend to be strongest in.

Frankly, I think a fair amount of the marital tension between Adtiya and me can be tracked down to this one major dimension of how we think of communication. I will put out a statement: “I think we should do do this!” or “I think it would be better if we did this!” In my mind, those statements are still tentative - I’m asking them as questions, expecting to hear rebuttals or a different point of view from Aditya, and I’d be okay with a potential “no.” But Aditya can’t stand it, because he reads those statements as my final marching orders, and feels upset that his voice isn’t being heard in our decision-making. In a nutshell, he thinks that I think I’m always right, and I feel like I’m always left hanging, waiting for rebuttals which never appear.

Is Asking and Guessing cultural or individual?

When we start talking about Asking vs. Guessing in the arena of intercultural relationships, one of the obvious questions is whether the culture you grew up in influences where you end up on the Asking/Guessing continuum. And, of course, the answer is a big fat yes, although I don’t think it’s so simple as “India is a Guessing culture, America is an Asking culture”. Anyone who’s heard of the Indian Head Wobble - one of the most ambiguous gestures known to mankind – could figure out that India, taken very generally, leans towards being a Guessing culture. And anyone who has been in New York City will realize that some Americans, at least, are very direct Askers. But a comparison of New York City abruptness to “Minnesota Nice” should make it clear that the US is a mix of Asking and Guessing subcultures – just like India, I would suspect.

However, culture can play a big part in what both Askers and Guessers consider unnecessary to say – what is simply presumed to “go without saying.” Now, there is no way to ask the question “What do you presume that I don’t presume?” and get a coherent answer – so I won’t. But as you discuss Asking and Guessing – two ways of communicating – with your significant other, try to think back on how you communicate, and recognize whether it’s the asking/guessing dimension that is affecting your communication, or if it’s your differing assumptions about what needs to be discussed at all.

The bottom line

Asking and Guessing represent a continuum of how people think to communicate with others – it’s about what we expect to say, and what we want left unsaid. Understanding where your significant other falls on this continuum – and how far that is from you – will help you understand why they communicate the way they do, and how you two can communicate better in the future.

Friday Connections: a time when I give links and a bit of commentary to things I’d blog about if I had the time. This week the categories are the geopolitics of international population flows and trend, the Commonwealth Games in India (which I didn’t follow much, to be honest), and “gori blogs” that started up while I was on a blogging break.

International and American Population Trends

I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I’m an economics geek – and love the social sciences in general! Here’s some articles on recent news in international demographics.

• The Global Economic Impact of Immigration
  Immigration is great for the immigrants – they wouldn’t be moving if there weren’t some benefit, right? This paper estimates that “the typical individual who migrates from a poor developing country to the United States sees an increase in income by a factor of four.” However, immigration is also helpful to all of us:  (current) ”migration from Mexico to the United States raises global income by an amount equivalent to roughly one percent of US GDP.”
• Nation’s Foreign-Born Population Nears 37 Million More Than One in Five People in the U.S. are First or Second Generation US Census Bureau
  The US is have a large surge in the percentage of its population with familial ties to other nations - “36.7 million of the nation’s population (12 percent) were foreign-born, and another 33 million (11 percent) were native-born with at least one foreign-born parent in 2009, making one in five people either first or second generation U.S. residents.” Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on whether you believe the article above – and whether you can deal with the increasing diversity.
• As Populations Age, a Chance for Younger Nations
  Another huge trend in international populations is the aging of many Western nations – and China as well, due to its one-child policy. Nations like India, with a relatively high percentage of young people, may be able to grow their economies faster in the coming decades with lower health care costs and more workers in their prime.
• The Gray And The Brown: The Generational Mismatch
  Combining the trends of the last two articles, demographers are predicting another culture war in the US – one between a young brownish generation (mine) that’s in the workforce and the whiteish Baby Boomer generation (my parents) that’s headed towards retirement. If you read any of the articles in this list, read this one.

Commonwealth Games in India

I’ll admit I haven’t been following the games closely – or the hullabaloo surrounding India’s preparations or lack thereof.  NFL football and the Australia-India cricket matches are the main sports I’ve been tuning into lately. But here’s a few links of interest…

• The Big Picture’s XIX Commonwealth Games
  The Big Picture always has amazing photos – here’s their picks for the games.
• As Games close, India ponders a deep-seated ‘it’ll do’ attitude
  If you’ve been following the games at all, you’ll have heard about the complaints regarding India’s preparations, often with comparisons to how China showed off to the world during the Summer Olympics. Here’s one of the many takes on why there were issues, and what it means for India’s future.
• India: making history or living in the past?
  A blogger in Bangalore during the games considers how India’s hosting performance during the games, as well as the multitude of contrasts on Indian streets, are examples of India’s uneven development. It’s a growing stage it seems all adolescent industrializing nations must go through.
• And a video via Aditya – I won’t tell you the result:

New (to me) Gori Blogs

While I was one a blogging break featuring a summer of 80-hour work weeks and a cross-country move, a bunch of new “gori bloggers” started writing about their stories. I’ve been going through them one at a time (as well as catching up with the other blogs I love to read) – if I haven’t gotten to yours yet, it’s because I can only read so much each day! So here’s an interesting post from each of the blogs I’ve been able to read so far.

• This wedding… not “the” wedding from By Two Kaapi
  Meeka contemplates not having “a wedding” but having three of them as part of an intercultural relationship. Right now they’re one down, two to go.
• Butter Chicken: A Love Story from Kya Dekh Raha Hai?
  A story of true love.  Obsessive love. Don’t get between this girl and her butter chicken!
• When Compromising Compromises Yourself from Mr. Brown and Mrs. White
  A conversation about when – and what – to compromise in an intercultural and interfaith relationship.
• Kadi Patta from The Milky Chai Life
  I need one of these in my kitchen! What a neat idea.
• Stick in the Power Struggle from Kat’s Daily Gori Story
  Kat describes a power struggle that I think is common to a lot of  intercultural/interracial couples where the parents are objecting to the relationship, and details how she and her partner are working on the problem.
• Would you join an online book club? from Pyari Ladki
  Jessica is planning on starting an online book club – go to the link if you’re interested too!
• Where it all began from The Bad Bhabi
  If you’re interested in reading about Grace’s story, it’s probably best to start at the beginning with her first post.

Allow me to introduce you to my new favorite artist, Nidhi Chanani. I first stumbled on Nidhi’s work on etsy, which is an online community for buying and selling handmade items. I was immediately in love with her whimsical, joyful drawings. Once I found her personal website and bio I realized why the art brought such a smile to my face – while Nidhi was born in India, she grew up in California, is married interculturally – and infuses her art with the diversity of her life.

From an immigrant mother shopping in an American grocery store…

I followed my mom everywhere, holding on to the edge of her sari. It was soft and silky like the comfort of her love.

…to India’s faiths…

…to a group of friends driving along chatting…

to a tribute for her first wedding anniversary…

… all of Nidhi’s work seems to celebrate pieces of the world that I love too.

I could keep posting more images, but instead I encourage you to browse over to her store or page through her extensive blog obsessively (like I did).

If you want to know more about Nidhi, here are two recent interviews at Septa Mutiny and the Anti-Achievers. Oh, yeah, and she apparently makes a mean paneer and takes commissions for artwork. I’m still working on Aditya to get us a personalized image of the two of us and perhaps the two pups as well.

Esther Duflo, a development economist at MIT, recently won the John Bates Clark Medal – which is basically means the economics field is saying “You’re brilliant, doing amazing work, but not quite wrinkly enough to win win the Nobel. Please stick around for 20 more years and Sweden will be calling.”

Duflo’s work is all about figuring out what sort of aid programs work and what don’t, so that our aid efforts end up actually helping the poor – basically, she’s taking development work out of the dark age, “we think using leeches to rebalance the humors will help” era of thinking and into an era where scientifically rigorous experiments will let us know what actually does work. In the video above (from the wonderful TED) she explains the sort of work she does, and the results from some of her studies – for instance, in one experiment in Udaipur, India she was able to figure out a way to increase full child immunization six fold for only pennies per child. It’s a very understandable and clear talk, and I highly encourage you to give it 15 minutes of your time.

Development economics is a field very near and dear to my heart, since I think we all have a duty to help  the absolute poor around the world (but not by giving money to beggars). Moreover, as I’ve written before, it’s critically important to help out in ways that are effective – not just the ways that make us, the donors, feel good. Yes, starting your own charity to help the poor back home (something I see and read about many NRIs doing) makes you feel good (and heck, I’d like to have a charity named after me: the “Jaclyn Chaudhuri Foundation for Malaria”, I’d call it). And, yeah, you’re probably doing some good – but not as much as you could be doing. It’s much better for you to donate your money directly to existing organizations which can leverage your money into their existing – and proven effective – programs. For a list of such programs, both in the US and internationally, I encourage you to visit Givewell.net, an organization which has done all the hard work of figuring out what programs are doing the best job at making real and measured progress at improving people’s lives.

This is the fourth post from my ten question series on questions and discussions that are particularly important for intercultural or interracial couples to have. All of the posts from this series can be found on the series index, The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss.

As all of our friends and family (and, heck, most of you) already know, Aditya and I have this wee little tendency to argue… about everything under the sun.  While most of these arguments are playful in nature – the person who’s wrong either owes the other one hundred million dollars or an extra turn at washing the dishes -  occasionally one of our arguments can turn quite nasty. We’ve gotten better over the years at discussing things like civilized people (by both of our cultures’ definitions of civilized), but clear, careful communication remains our greatest problem as an intercultural couple.

Talking and debating things – especially about the big issues – can be a challenge for all couples, but intercultural couples can find it especially difficult. When you grow up with dissimilar cultural expectations and social norms, it’s to be expected that your assumptions about what good communication is will be different.

• Is it acceptable to rant and rave and get all your frustrated emotions out during a disagreement, or is it better to stick to the logical facts & reasoning – even if that makes you seem as emotionless as a Vulcan?
• Should you say please & thank you to your close friends and family?
• Can you talk about death or other bad things around the dinner table, or will that lead to bad luck?
• And in all these conversations, what language should you be speaking, anyways?

I’ve written previously on the steps to becoming a good general intercultural communicator, because, well, it’s a hard & long process. It’s one that Aditya and I are still going through, as we figure out how to get past our cultural assumptions about communicating with others and onto the subject of today’s post: identifying what’s stopping you from communicating well with each other – what steps of the communication process are you stumbling over?

Digging into the question

There are a number of ways an intercultural couple can get (especially) tripped up when communicating – and identifying which are your biggest problems is half the battle. So sit down with your significant other sometime, and try talking about how you talk – what sort of issues are you running into again and again?

Fluency Issues

When one person lacks fluency in the common language (or languages) that an intercultural couple shares, it spells all sorts of trouble. Sometimes it can seem that the more fluent speaker always wins the arguments by default because they grew up thinking and arguing in that language, while the other didn’t. The less fluent partner can get frustrated by their inability to communicate nuanced ideas easily, both within the relationship and with the outside world (especially in a business setting, where language is often more formal) – which can cause strain on the relationship as a whole.

This isn’t a particular issue in our household, given that Aditya was an English major and all. However, there is some frustration on Aditya’s part on my lack of fluency (to say the least!) in Hindi or Bengali, which were the two languages he spoke growing up. While he’s perfectly fluent in English, he feels that our bicultural household should be at least bilingual as well – a point that I can’t really disagree on, thus the on-going Hindi Project.

Definitional Issues

While both partners may be fluent in a common language, that doesn’t always mean that they’re going to have the exact same understanding of every word. The nuances that a word carries for you depends on your culture and background experiences. So, while we all might agree that the word dinner means the evening meal, dinner to Greg might carry memories of everybody in the kitchen fighting over containers of Chinese food, while to Pam dinner might require sitting down to a home-cooked meal as a family and saying a prayer (one not containing lyrics from Godspell) before eating. (Take out the prayer part & Robert De Niro, and this pretty much describes the differences between my family’s dinner & Aditya’s)

Or, to turn to a slightly more serious issue, consider the word respect.  In a discussion about in-laws, an intercultural couple might agree that they should both respect each other’s parents, even if they don’t always get along. Which is fine and dandy – until you realize that each person has a completely different idea of what respect towards parents entails! If, like neokalypso, you feel that your future in-laws are making unreasonable demands, is it respectful to politely but firmly disagree with them when they make these demands – or is the respectful thing to neither disagree or agree directly to their faces, but slowly persuade them to come around to your perspective? This sort of mental disconnect over the meaning of words – especially over value-laden words like respect, love, or family – can subtly sabotage your conversations because it seems like you’re communicating clearly, but you’re actually talking about entirely different sorts of things. You might not even realize you weren’t communicating well until it’s too late.

Topic Issues

In every culture there are some topics that are rarely or never discussed, even between husband and wife. Sometimes there’s a strict taboo – for instance, you might not ever speak of hypothetical illness or future deaths or brag too much, for fear of the evil eye. Other topics are just seen as rude or unpleasant – in the U.S., for example, it’s often seen as unseemly to speak ill of the dead.

While I would never suggest that a topic should simply be verboten between significant others, I do think it’s important to be aware of the subject areas that might be difficult for one or both partners to easily discuss because of their cultural background. If your partner was raised to think that “good girls don’t talk about their sexual desires”, she might have difficulty discussing this topic clearly and openly with you, or even being the one to start a conversation on the issue. And, as anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship knows, failing to openly discuss an important issue (like sex) leads to resentment on both sides bubbling up as needs aren’t met or one person feels like she’s being judged for not being a mind reader.

Manner and Tone Issues

Communication, as we all know, is more than just words. The manner in which you enter a discussion, the tone in which you speak, and the non-verbal cues you send are just as important as what you’re saying. Of course, almost no one is taught about non-verbal cues or tones – these are things that you just learn as you’re growing up in your family & culture. For example, some people see a loud & emotional disagreement as a sign that this is a MAJOR issue under discussion  – one that could be a relationship ender – while for others arguing stridently might just be the way you release the normal frustrations of day-to-day life in a relationship. At the end of that argument, the first person will exit feeling stressed out and doubting the relationship as a whole, while the other will be glad the air was cleared a bit – not exactly what I call good communication!

Or, to take a personal example, after Aditya and I had our wedding in India, Baba took me aside for some good fatherly advice on relationships and how to have a good marriage. While I appreciated the advice – and the love he was showing by making the effort to share what he had learned from his long marriage – a part of my analytical little mind couldn’t help focusing on cataloging all of the cultural differences that could be inferred by Baba’s examples from his own life. And when Baba explained how he and Maa tried to never disagree or contradict each other when around other people, a little light bulb went off.  Ah ha! That strategy of showing a united front – which was probably quite helpful when living in an extended family household – that’s what Aditya saw modeled as normal when growing up. That’s why Aditya was sometimes so uncomfortable with me disagreeing with him when we were hanging out with other people, especially in our early years together – in his family, disagreements were communicated privately. In my somewhat loud extended family, on the other hand, you didn’t exactly hang your dirty laundry out for everyone to see, but it was expected that couples would disagree – sometimes vociferously so – on big issues when others were present. Couples disagreeing with each other in public was just normal. The stumbling block for Aditya and I wasn’t that one way of communicating disagreement was fundamentally better or worse than the other – it was that we both learned very different manners of communicating from our families growing up.

The Bottom Line

I’m not here to suggest to you what steps you should take to communicate better with your significant other – that’d become a case of the blind leading the blind very quickly. But I believe that simply discussing where the two of you – as a couple – seem to get tripped up while talking is the start to overcoming your communication challenges.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being married to Aditya and engaging other intercultural couples through this blog, it’s that the quality of communication between an intercultural couple is the key factor in determining how challenging all that other intercultural stuff will be – family, friends, religion, food, and all the other compromises required to develop a truly happy, truly bicultural home.

Just letting you know that the Gori Girl forums are now back online. All previous posts on the forums have been restored, and we are now open for posting!

~A

As you may have noticed, the gorigirl.com site has been down intermittently for a few weeks. In case you were wondering…

While GG & I were vacationing in India, the blog got hacked, and some malicious javascript code was installed by the hacker to redirect traffic to a malware site.

GG & I have been working slowly and steadily on cleaning up all the code, making the site more secure, and also preserving all the precious comments (and posts) that we have received over the last two years…

Some parts of the site are still down (e.g. the forum), but we hope to have it back online by the end of this week.

In the meanwhile, if you’ve been reading the blog on the site instead of the RSS feed, and you are NOT on a Mac, we highly recommend that you let your computer’s anti-virus scan your system for any potential issues just in case.

If you do not have an anti-virus system, you can download and use the excellent AVG anti-virus for free.

Thanks for your patience, GG promises new posts soon!

~Aditya

Update: Looks like the pages beyond the home page are not showing up at the moment – I’m working on fixing this.

This is the third post from my ten question series on questions and discussions that are particularly important for intercultural or interracial couples to have. All of the posts from this series can be found on the series index, The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss.

Seeing the title of this post typed out makes me nervous. Stereotypes – and their less absolute and bigoted cousin, generalizations – make me nervous. And yet, I don’t think we can ignore this massive elephant in the corner when discussing culture – particularly when trying to really get your partner & his or her cultural background. After all, it’s likely that you have heard plenty of generalizations or stereotypes about your own culture, your partner’s culture, and dozens of others. We all know people will judge you based on their stereotypical beliefs about your culture. And sometimes you may end up thinking that a particular individual – or you, yourself – perfectly fit a particular stereotype of a culture.

An important thing to recognize with generalizations and stereotypes is that they don’t appear out of thin air. Yes, sometimes they’re just plain wrong – based on the hatred, jealousy or fear one culture may feel towards another, or developed from cultural misunderstandings. But often (again, not always) stereotypes or generalizations get made because there is some strand of thought or avowed value in a culture which promotes the stereotype. Recognizing this fact isn’t a sin.

While it’s never okay to prejudge a person based on stereotypes, it can be quite valuable to consider how the main beliefs of your culture affect you – and an easy way to do this is to compare and contrast yourself to stereotypes of your main culture (and subcultures). And if you discuss this with your partner, he or she will gain both a better understanding of your cultural background (What are the various stereotypes? How realistic are they?) and of your own personal beliefs and values (How well do you fit those stereotypes?).

Digging into the question

Discussing this question with your significant other really involves two separate, but related topics:

1. What stereotypes exists about your culture, and how closely do they mimic the real main values and beliefs of your culture – keeping in mind that all generalizations and stereotypes are, by nature, simplistic caricatures?
2. How much or how little of these stereotypes do you see in yourself – perhaps some you may identify with extremely strongly, while others you have chosen to consciously reject?

Like the previous question I blogged about (what’s your opinion of our two cultures?), answering this question should not be a simple, straightforward process. Half of the value of the question, really, is in thinking about how you’d answer it yourself – before you even talk to your partner about it!

Other things to consider when discussing this question

Stereotypes are what stand out about a culture.

In considering this question, remember that stereotypes exist because other cultures have identified (correctly or not) some trait or characteristic that they think is different or stands out in people of your culture. Even if you may not fit the stereotype of your culture, you may be still influenced by the mainstream values that drive the stereotype. Consider the generalization that “Americans are materialistic and have a lot of ‘stuff’” – in contrast to other cultures, that is. Even though I don’t think of myself as materialistic within an American context (I try to visit the mall once a quarter, at most), Aditya and I haven’t had much trouble filling up a townhouse with stuff. So while I don’t fit the “shopaholic” stereotype, I’m probably influenced more by the “stuff is good” meme of American culture than I’d like to admit. It’s rare that you can completely avoid being influenced by your primarily culture’s values, even if you don’t fit the stereotypes perfectly.

Some stereotypes are just wrong.

Before getting to know me (and my family), Aditya’s parents apparently believed that Americans are a very clean and tidy group of people. Having now observed the common Americanus in her native habitat, they no longer hold this stereotype. From my personal experience, it seems that this stereotype simply does not hold much water  – Americans might enjoy tidiness (who doesn’t?), but no more than, say, Germans do.

Stereotypes can be contradicting.

It’s often not difficult to find two competing – or completely contradictory – stereotypes about your culture. For example, “Americans are good at athletics and place a lot of importance on them” is a common generalization – just ask any exchange student new to an American high school, or an observer watching the U.S. compete at the Olympics. And yet there’s also the stereotype that “Americans are fat and out-of-shape” – a stereotype, which, while certainly not true for all Americans, does have a basis in the data. Learning about the competing stereotypes of a culture – and the reality behind them – can often point out the particular “cultural battles” being currently fought – the natural change that all cultures experience.

Use this discussion to understand, not judge.

Stereotypes are typically negative judgments about a culture: “Americans are fat.” “Americans can’t do arithmetic.” “Americans are (too) individualistic.” “Americans live to work instead of working to live.” “Americans are always that tourist when traveling abroad.” Etc, etc, etc.

This question should not be used to launch an “I-can-out-stereotype-you” competition. Every stereotype you bring up when discussing this question with your significant other should be explored deeply. Does it have a kernal of truth? What values are behind the stereotype? Does it perhaps only apply to a very visable subset of your culture? Within the culture, is it seen as a negative thing (being overweight) or actually a point of pride (being individualistic)? Do you, personally, think of the values behind the stereotype as a good thing or a bad thing? What are the complexities of the issue – perhaps there’s a subculture which rejects this mainstream value, or a generational shift underway on the issue?

Keep your sense of humor and proportion!

This could be a sensitive for both of you – no one likes to hear criticism of either themselves or their culture, and that’s what stereotypes often amount to. It could be easy for me to get offended at how quickly and heartily Aditya agreed when I mentioned that I fit the stereotype of the “super-individualistic American” – he immediately started rattling off all of the various times I’ve insisted on doing something on my own when help would have been useful (I refuse to stop for directions when driving while lost, for instance) or when I’ve pushed beyond “individualistic” to being just plain (in his words) “anti-social and arrogant in (my) disregard for other’s opinions.”

I could get offended, but, frankly, he does have a point. Everyone has faults, and one of mine is probably that I take an individualistic outlook to more of an extreme than even most Americans. Part of it’s my natural personality, I think, and part of it comes from American culture’s push towards individualism. Recognizing that your culture has influenced you (negatively and positiviely – individualism does have its good points!) isn’t the end of the world, after all.

The Bottom Line

It can often be difficult to figure out how you’ve been influenced by your culture – and then to communicate these influences clearly to your significant other – but it’s an important part of learning about each other’s background and values in intercultural relationships. Use the stereotypes of your culture as a starting point for thinking and talking about these cultural influences! Consider it a chance to engage in a shadowy area  intercultural couples often avoid (often until it bubbles out in an argument) for fear of giving offense. Shove the stereotypes out into the light, and discuss how realistic they are for your culture as a whole, and for you, as a particular individual who has been influenced by the mainstream views and values of your culture.

Photo Credit: Made Underground

This is the second post from my ten question series on questions and discussions that are particularly important for intercultural or interracial couples to have. All of the posts from this series can be found on the series index, The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss.

True story: my husband and I got into an argument last night at one am because of this question. I asked him what his answer would be, after three years of marriage to an American, he answered, and somehow the conversation devolved into a debate on whether Christians in the U.S. see Muslims as more of a threat to their religion than Hindus, and if so, why.

People who know us well will not be surprised at this – a defining aspect of Aditya’s and my marriage is that we have intense debates often.  Keeps us on our toes! But discussing this intercultural couple question is almost bound to raise some hackles, as it basically requires each person to criticize the other’s culture and/or country. That’s a feature, not a bug, though.

Digging into the question

The question at the title of the post is “What’s your opinion of our two cultures?”, but you’re meant to go a bit deeper than mere opinion. A better formulation of the question would be:

What do you think are the best and worst features of your own culture? What do you find best and worst in my culture?

Truly answering this question doesn’t mean giving wishy-washy answers like, “oh, most Americans I’ve met are really nice, but I wish they were better educated about other countries.” If someone gives you an answer like that it – or, even worse, declares that they think all parts of their culture or your culture are either totally horrible or totally awesome – it probably means that

1. They haven’t given much critical  thought to culture and the cultural differences between the two of you (bad!), or
2. They don’t really know much beyond superficial details about your culture and haven’t bothered to learn in the time that you’ve been together (badder!), or
3. They have simplistic or black-and-white, good-vs-evil notions of culture and countries (baddest!)

Truth is, every culture has its good aspects and its bad aspects – and it’s important to acknowledge and understand that, especially if it’s the culture of your significant other!

Why this question is important

It gives you an idea of how well you know and understand each other’s cultural heritages. While culture is not the most important thing ever in an individual intercultural relationship – the individuals are! – it does play a big role. A deep understanding of each other’s backgrounds is a key tool for understanding each other. This is particularly important if one partner hasn’t traveled much in the other’s homeland, or has only been exposed to a limited number of individuals from the same culture – there may be cultural generalization going on there that aren’t warranted. (Remember when discussing this topic that broad cultural trends do not mean that everyone from a culture is the same – i.e. try not to generalize too much, and never stereotype.)

It can highlight the differences (and similarities) in your views of the world and what really matters. How much your goods and bads intersect with each other can be a very enlightening experience! For example, Aditya and I agree that the biggest drawback we find in Indian culture, both broadly considered and in the particular social sphere Aditya grew up in, is the real and persistent gender inequality that exists. The fact that we agree that this is an important issue for Indian culture is reassuring – I know that he’ll always have my back if I refuse to follow Indian cultural customs which promote gender inequality.

It can give you more insight into both your partner’s culture and your own. While I love the fact that Indian culture seem to value education and learning (even if I don’t always agree with what I know of India’s educational methods), Aditya said that the best part of Indian culture (as he’s experienced it) was the deepness and (physical) closeness of friendships, which he doesn’t think exists as often in America. This is certainly not among the top things that would come mind when I try to think of the great things of Indian culture! But, after he said explained what he meant in more detail, it gave me new piece to fit into the jigsaw of my understanding of Indian culture.

It lets each of you experience criticism of your culture (with an equal sharing of praise) within the context of your relationship. Look, no one likes to be criticized.  And no one likes to hear things they identify strongly with (like their culture) criticized either. But part of being in an intercultural relationships is that there is going to be a necessary compare-and-contrast between each other’s cultures – and it’s not always going to be flattering for everyone. Learning how to accept – and give – valid criticism of each other’s cultures without hurting feelings or making the individual feel attacked is a useful skill. Aditya and I, with the number of debates and squabbles we get into, practice this skill nearly every day!

The Bottom Line

Gently critiquing and praising each other cultures, as well as your own, will help each of you become both more aware of  each other as individuals – what things do you think are really great, what things do you detest – and more aware of the differences in your outlooks on the goods & bads of culture. With this question (like most of them in the series), I encourage you to not just jump into this conversation, discuss for ten minutes, then be done. Think about the big goods and bads you see in your own and other cultures over the course of a few days. And come back to the question now and again – Aditya’s and my answers to this one have changed tremendously from when we were first dating in college, for instance.

Photo Credit: lepiaf.geo (better off slipping into blur)

This is the first post from my ten question series on questions and discussion that are particularly important for intercultural or interracial couples to have. All of the posts from this series can be found on the series index, The Ten Questions Every Intercultural Couple Should Discuss.

My husband and I grew up in two different worlds. To some extent, all individuals do – all families are unique, after all, and everyone’s childhood has its own rhythm and rhyme. But intercultural couples, like Aditya and I, face particular difficulties in understanding – or even imagining – the experiences that have shaped each other’s lives. The differences between our childhood experiences are both in the bold, key features of our families – education, home language, family structure – and in the small details that make up everyday life – how we traveled to school, the chores we had as children, the games we played when homework was done.

As an intercultural couple, discussing these aspects of your childhoods with each other is incredibly important – not just so that you learn more about each other (every couple should do that!), but also because storytelling is such an effective way to communicate deeply ingrained cultural assumptions.

• His family didn’t have a car while he was growing up. Mine always had at least two.
• His father traveled for work sometimes, but his mother was always at home. My parents divorced when I was six and I became a latchkey kid fairly early on.
• My public school had no dress code at all, while his private high school required uniforms.
• His family rarely lived in homes with much space, while I almost always had a room of my own.
• I cannot remember not having a computer in our house – my dad’s in the industry so we were early adopters – while Aditya didn’t have much experience with computers until his teens.
• His family sometimes had a maid to do many of the chores. I was responsible for doing my own laundry and figuring out most of my meals by the time I hit high school (lots of dinner of cold cereal!).

“But, wait,” you may be thinking, “these sort of differences can occur among families in the same nation! Why all the emphasis on intercultural couples?” My answer to that, is, well, if you and your partner’s backgrounds differ so much from each other, then I’d probably classify you as an intercultural couple anyways. The point is that this  conversation should be had for any couple who are unlikely to innately “get” the other person’s history like you would with someone who was raised in a similar manner and culture to you.

The question is simple: “what was your childhood like?”, but the answer should not be. Instead, you should see this question as a jumping off point in a conversation about what attitudes, beliefs, and experiences you were exposed to as a child. For Aditya and I, these conversations about our childhoods have branched out into religion (“What holidays did you celebrate? What did you do?”), our conceptions of marriage and divorce and family (Aditya was shocked to learn that my mother’s parents and my father’s parents are great friends still, despite Mom & Dad’s divorce), and what sort of parents we’d like to be someday (“My best memories from when I was six & seven are of biking around town with friends, with only an order to avoid the big streets and be home by sunset”).

Besides filling you in on numerous details of the culture of your spouse or significant other, telling stories from childhood can also prepare you to meet with family members & friends, or to travel to his or her homeland. I felt better prepared for visiting India from Aditya’s stories of bargaining in the market as a 2nd grader for the day’s groceries then I did from reading any guidebook. After hearing how sail boating and playing at the neighborhood swimming pool was such an important part of the time I spent with my father’s family, Aditya knew to expect some ribbing at his non-swimmer status when he (bravely) agreed to join our family reunion on a houseboat on Lake Shasta about a year into dating me.

The Bottom Line

Telling stories from your childhood – and then allowing the discussion to expand from there as points of difference arise – is possibly the best way for intercultural couples to learn about the nitty-gritty details of each other’s cultures and families. These are often the details you’d never think to discuss with each other – because they’re so basic to each one of you – but they’re key to fully understanding and getting each others’ cultures.

Photo Credit: ginnerobot

There are the questions every serious couple – couples with commitment in mind -should discuss. And then there are the questions that I believe every intercultural, interracial, or international couple really must discuss – conversations that may not be as important for monoculture spouses or couples. This is a series for the second sort of questions – for the first, try the lists here, here, or here.

Everyday, for the next ten days, I’ll be posting a question that I think is a key one for all intercultural couples to discuss, along with why I think it’s so important, and how discussing this issue has helped Aditya and I in our intercultural relationship. As the series continues, the list below will be updated with the question of the day and a link to the post – so bookmark this page!

Background Cultural Questions

#1: What was your childhood like?
#2: What do you think are the best and worst features of your own culture? What do you find best and worst in my culture?
#3: Do you fit parts of your culture’s stereotypes?

The Two of Us

#4: What are our biggest communication challenges?
#5: Are you an Asker or a Guesser?
#6: How Do You Picture Our Future “Home Culture”?

Beyond Just the Two of Us

• .
• .
• .

The Bottom Line

• .

This list, obviously, won’t be covering everything that intercultural couples should discuss – but it does represent my personal “top ten”. Nor should you think of the simple question I’ll be posting as something that will just require a few minutes’ talk – these are questions that are meant to spark discussions, questions which are open-ended and have no right answer.

Photo Credit: ianmunroe

Divorce. DIVORCE. It’s one of those things America is known for around the world, along with Hollywood and blue jeans. I’m sure most of you have heard the statistic that “half of all marriages in America end in divorce”. And it’s commonly thought that it’s even worse if you marry outside your race, culture, or religion – if the average American couple has such a difficult time staying married, wouldn’t marriages where the husband and wife seem to have major differences (a built-in area of conflict, if you will) be even more prone to divorce?

With a reputation like that, it’s understandable that a non-American family – one which strongly values familial ties (like many Indian families) – may hear the 50% divorce statistic and be a bit panicked when a son or daughter announces plans to marry an American. The logic, I suspect, goes something like

This American, growing up among divorce – perhaps even having divorced parents or other family members – probably has different expectations about how marriages work and how long marriages last. Thus, if we want our son/daughter to have a good marriage for life, they shouldn’t get married to an American, since that means they’ll have a 50% chance of getting a divorce! Fifty percent!

There’s enough concern about the issue of America’s pesky divorce rate that there’s even a thread in the forum here on family divorces, and how, if, or why they ought or ought not be disclosed to Indian family members.

Truth is, however, the statistics of divorce are rather complicated, and it’s very easy to misinterpret what they mean for individual marriages. And that 50% divorce statistic? Not true .  Especially for interracial, intercultural, or international couples, where things get a bit more complicated.

Conditional Probability and What It Means For Real Life

No, don’t panic. I’m not going to start throwing mathematical equations up onto the page. But to understand how to correctly interpret divorce statistics (or any statistics, really), it’s important to understand the concept of conditional probability. In simple terms, conditional probability is about how the likelihood of an event occurring changes depending on what subgroup of the larger population you fall into.

As an example, let’s consider the unemployment rate for people in the US. Perhaps some of you have heard that there’s this recession thing going on? Looking at this nifty graph from the New York Times, we can see that the average unemployment rate for all people in the US from September ’08 to September ’09 was 8.6%. However, this does not mean that everyone has an 8.6 out of 100 chance of being unemployed. Playing with the graph, you can see that for the group of Americans with college degrees, the average unemployment rate was only 4.5%, which is not much higher than you’d expect to see from the usual frictional unemployment that all economies, good and bad, have. If I add in my race, sex, and age into the calculator, I can see that for the group that best fits me the average unemployment rate is a mere 3.6%! And that’s without factoring in the geographical area I live in, which has extremely low unemployment rates generally (ah, the life of a government contractor!).

This is what conditional probability is all about. Yes, the average unemployment rate (for the time period we’re considering) is 8.6%, which is pretty worrying. But, once we take into account my specific characteristics – i.e. calculate the probability of unemployment conditional on the fact that I’m a mid-twenties, college-educated, white woman – we can see that, all other things being equal, it’s not really that likely that I’ll end up unemployed.

Divorce in the US and You

As you can see from the example in the previous section, employing conditional probability to figure out the likelihood of something occurring for people similar to you can really change how bad (or good) a situation looks. This is why I’m typically very skeptical about applying general statistics to myself, or most of the people I know – it’s just unlikely that any individual is “average enough” for a statistic to be very meaningful. (Of course, this also goes for most generalizations – as I wrote in my post on categories, generalizations, and stereotypes, they’re only useful in extremely limited circumstances.)

The situation is no different with divorce in America – the divorce rate for different sorts of people varies dramatically. Luckily for us,  a “probability of divorce” calculator for Americans (similar to the New York Times’ unemployment graph) has been developed by a very cool economist. Strangely, it’s called a marriage calculator, but, well, whatever. If you enter in your details (don’t worry, I don’t see them), you can find out the divorce rate statistics for Americans much more similar to you than the “average” American population. Play around with it a bit – the numbers can really vary dramatically depending on what subgroup you target.

Pretty neat, huh?

Interracial Divorce Statistics

Of course, the widget above doesn’t take into account whether you’re in an intercultural or interracial or international marriage  – which, theoretically, should matter quite a bit. Unfortunately, the United States hasn’t been keeping great statistics on interracial related things (it was only in the last census that choosing mixed race was even an ethnicity option!). However, there is some data that has become available, and I recently found an article (spurred on by a post over at My Life in Brown (and White)) that discusses divorce probabilities -  “But Will It Last?”: Marital Instability Among Interracial and Same-Race Couples (pdf) by Jenifer Bratter and Rosalind King, published in 2008. I highly encourage you to read the article yourself if you’re interested in this topic, but I’ll give you guys a basic summary (with a few simplifications for clarity) of it’s findings:

1. Historically, the research regarding interracial divorce rates has been mixed, and has only dealt with all types of interracial marriage (white-black, white-Asian, black-Hispanic, etc, etc). This is problematic because, theoretically, you’d expect different sorts of pairings to have different divorce statistics, just as different sorts of same-race couples (white-white, Asian-Asian, etc) have different rates of divorce. What little data there is suggests that interracial marriages are more likely to end in divorce (13% more likely, according to one study) compared to same-race marriages. However, the interracial factor did not seem to have as much of an effect as things like age when married and education level.
2. It does seem like interracial couples, taken as a whole, are more “mixed” in regard to other socio-economic factors, such as class, education level, age, etc, than same-race couples. Since these other factors are also correlated with divorce, there’s a bit of chicken-and-egg problem in the correlation versus causation area: do interracial couples end up divorcing because they’re too different, or are people more prone to divorce to begin with also more likely to marry interracially? Right now we just don’t have the data to tell.
3. Overall, interracial marriages account for about5% of marriages in the United States - but this statistic doesn’t include some marriages that most people would think interracial, such as a marriage between a Korean and an Indian (since they’d both fall into the category of Asian) or the marriage of a person identifying as Hispanic white with a person identifying as a European white (since they’d both fall into the category of white). Here’s a breakdown of the percentage of various interracial marriages in the study:
   
4. The study did show elevated levels of divorce among interracial couples (taken as a whole) compared to same-race couples, just as previous studies have reported. The authors only considered marriages as “intact” if the couples made it to 10 years of marriage – this is because, if a marriage ends in divorce in the US, on average it ends by the eighth year. So if a couple makes it to ten years, it’s reasonable to say that they’re unlikely to divorce. If a couple was still married at the time the data was collected (2004), but hadn’t been married for ten years their information “censored” in the study in order to not bias the results (there are statistical techniques available to account for this).
   
   Marriages were also censored if they ended in the death of the partner.
5. The likelihood of divorce for intermarriages is greatly affected by the type of interracial marriage.
   • Marriages that do not cross a race barrier, but do have different ethnicities (i.e. white/Hispanic white) have a rate of divorce just a little higher than white/white marriages.
   • Interracial marriages that have one white person and one person of another race mostly only show higher divorce rates when the white spouse is a female (i.e. white guy + other race girl don’t show particularly high divorce rates compared to same-race couples).
   • Black husband/white wife marriages are twice as likely to divorce as white/white marriages, and Asian husband/white wife marriages are about 60% more likely to divorce as white/white marriages. Which, I suppose is an unfortunate statistic for Aditya and me (and one I didn’t expect at all)!
   • White husband/black wife were nearly 50% less likely to divorce than white/white couples, and white husband/Asian wife couples had pretty much the same divorce rate as white/white couples
   • Compared to Hispanic/Hispanic couples, Hispanic white/white couples showed a higher likelihood of divorce (not surprising). Likewise, Asian/white couples were more likely to divorce than Asian/Asian couples. However, black/white couples only show a higher rate of divorce compared to black/black couples if the white person in the relationship is a woman.
   • The researchers were unable to evaluate other sorts of interracial marriages, such as black/Asian, because of the low number of such couples in the sample data.

The Bottom Line

So, by looking through these various statistics,  you can probably get a better idea of the likelihood of divorce for people more similar to you than the general American population. In the case of my marriage, for example, I get bonus points for the generation I belong to (the Baby Boomers were the big divorcers in America), for being pretty well educated, and for making it (so far) to three years of marriage. On the negative side of the ledger, Aditya and I seem to belong to some riskier groups, since we married relatively young (for Americans) and are an Asian male/white female couple. But how much should we care for these more accurate statistics? The bottom line is that these statistics are meaningful and important, but not the end all & be all.

It’s a very common impulse to dismiss these statistics by saying that your marriage is above-average, and the statistics just don’t hold for your individual case. Frankly, while that may be true, it’s more likely that, like the 93% of American drivers who think they’re above-average drivers, you’re overestimating yourself. These statistics do matter. If you seem to have ended up in a particularly high-risk group, I think it’d be valuable to think about ways you can work to strengthen your relationship. The point here is not to think that you’re doomed to divorce because you fall into a high-risk group – but that you can learn from the (sad) examples of others similar to you, and do your best to avoid their fate.

That being said, do note that there are a lot of factors being left out of these statistics. While the marriage divorce calculator above and the study on interracial couples do hit on many of the key characteristics that have been shown to predict divorce, there are other variables in play. For example, researchers think that interracial couples (as a whole) are more prone to divorce largely because they often lack support from their families, friends, and local community. So if you’ve got a great group of supportive friends, or your families are welcoming of your marriage, or you live in an area where there are lots of interracial marriages, you may be better off than other interracial couples that lack those things. (And if you don’t have those things, well, no one’s stopping you from moving or developing a better support network of friends.)

In the end, I firmly believe that we’re all in control of our own destinies. If you and your spouse are a great fit for one another, then there’s no reason why your marriage can’t last. If you’re looking forward to an interracial marriage, you certainly shouldn’t change your mind because of these statistics. Yes, we shouldn’t leap before looking – but, once you’ve looked and become mindful of the risks, don’t let fear keep you from taking a plunge.