Can intercultural relationships survive?
There is a short story by Bernhard Schlink, the same author who also wrote The Reader, called The Circumcision from a collection called Flights of Love. The Circumcision is a study in intercultural relationships and describes the relationship of Andi, a German student on a scholarship in the USA, and Sarah, a Jewish American girl. Andi considers Sarah the love of his life, and she loves him, too. However, they fight a lot. Sarah often mentions that she loves him “despite the fact that he is German.” Andi, on the other hand, doesn’t want to be loved conditionally. He just wants to be loved. In the end, he decides to get circumcised for Sarah’s sake. Unfortunately, she doesn’t appreciate his sacrifice, and so he leaves her.
You may think this a typical story of why intercultural relationships can’t work. You might say: “they’re too different, no wonder it doesn’t work out.” Maybe, maybe not. To my mind, this is exactly the kind of gesture one would make in an intercultural relationship that would create a lasting bond. Perhaps the novelist is one who writes tragic love stories. It is all fiction.
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I call myself European because that’s how I identify. I was raised in a multilingual family: my father was raised in France and is a native French speaker. My mother grew up in the Netherlands, where I now live and raise my own children. I lived in Germany and speak German with a native-speaker fluency but later learned English, French, and Dutch. My grandparents were diplomats and also lived abroad. My maternal grandmother was Ukrainian and my paternal grandfather was from Lviv, which used to be in Poland but is now in Ukraine. My husband is German and we raise our children to speak three languages: Polish, German and Dutch. They’re the fourth generation of children in my family who are raised outside of their parents’ birth country.
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So, what of this giant melting pot? Technically, I am Polish, and my husband is German, and those two countries have a curious relationship that covers everything from hate to respect and admiration. When we first started dating, I was asked what my parents would think of me having a German boyfriend. My parents of course, didn’t mind. They were happy for me.
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I grew up exposed to many cultures. And I learned that we are all just people.
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Should I have behaved more like the Polish princess Wanda who jumped into the Vistula river, as the Vistula is considered the most Polish of all Polish rivers and drowned rather than marry a German man? That would be patriotic, and tragic, and I would have been a hero, and also dead. What good would it have done me? Not much.
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Obviously, intercultural mingling is a part of who I am. I grew up exposed to many cultures. And I learned that we are all just people. My husband is many things: kind, intelligent, hilarious, well-educated, and handsome. He is a fantastic father to our two girls. He is tolerant, open-minded, and he also happens to be German. We don’t really have the “because you are German” discussions, although we might joke about it. With him, I feel at home.
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Intercultural couples are just like any other couple: they go through ups and downs, they argue, and they make up again.
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Somehow so many marriages fail, but if they are intercultural marriages, it is often assumed that it was because of cultural differences. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. There could have been other things at play. I think whenever something is different from the norm, people tend to say that this marriage can’t work. The same things have been said about same-sex marriages, relationships between people of different ages, races, or anything else that is even a little bit out of the ordinary.
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Intercultural couples are just like any other couple: they go through ups and downs, they argue, and they make up again. They just speak different languages, and they have the experience of having lived in different countries. And yes, both of them were shaped by their culture and their home country. However, marriages and relationships require mutual understanding and a big dose of diplomacy, and it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about intercultural couples or couples from the same culture.
When we got married, we picked a wedding verse that we liked: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.” There is no better way to describe an intercultural relationship. In fact, there is no better way to describe any relationship.
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