Married to an Alien: Can Love Conquer Culture?
How False Perceptions Can Sour Even the Sweetest Love
“Do you do marriage counseling?”
Her question came out of left field. I had just wrapped up a half-day seminar on cultural differences between Japanese and Americans in the workplace, and now the only Japanese person in the class was asking me privately to offer counsel to her American husband. I laughed, but she was dead serious. “My husband really needs this training.”
I never did pursue a marriage-counseling career, but our brief encounter got me wondering, Could I do it?
At the risk of offending all the officially certified cross-cultural marriage counselors in the world, I think I could, certainly when Japanese and Americans were involved. Add my Japanese wife to the mix and our complementary skills would be ideally suited for such a calling.
Our credentials aren’t from academia, but we don’t play according to Hoyle. We’re both college graduates, albeit with no formal training in psychology or counseling, no Doctorates, don’t even have a wretched Masters degree between us. But here’s what we’ve got: we know each other’s cultures intimately; we’ve been together for 40 years; we’ve lived in each other’s countries; speak each other’s languages; ask good questions, and listen.
All we need are some clients now and we’re good to go!
Cross-Cultural Blues
My make-believe gig aside, it’s not like there isn’t a need to be filled here. Haven’t been able to track down any statistics on cross-cultural divorce rates, but a quick google search shows that cross-cultural marriage counselors actually do exist, evidence the need is there.
And it makes perfect sense. In our interconnected world, more and more people are venturing abroad, leading to more people tying cross-cultural knots, leading to more cross-cultural knots needing to be untangled, sometimes even cut loose.
Let’s face it, marriage between people of the same culture is tough enough. Throw in a language barrier and a muddy cultural minefield littered with hidden value differences, and things get infinitely more complicated.
Sadly, we know of too many broken marriages between Japanese and non-Japanese couples. Just how many could’ve been saved with the right knowledge and guidance is anyone’s guess.
Admittedly, some of these couples should never have gotten together in the first place. Their hearts were no doubt in the right place, but they just didn’t know enough about each other to realize they were incompatible.
Assuming compatibility, armed with the right knowledge, an emotionally mature, open-minded couple from different cultures has a good shot at creating a lasting partnership. But they both have to go into it with open eyes and open hearts. It really helps to have a sense of humor, too.
What Couples Fight About
Amazing the silly stuff married couples fight about. An international couple gets all that and a bag of chips:
She eats stinky fermented beans for breakfast; he wants an Egg McMuffin.
He married for romantic love; she’s in it for a steady homemaking gig.
He’s an old-school disciplinarian; her parents spoil the kids rotten.
English is her second language; he speaks English only and struggles enough with that.
He thinks she understands everything he says; she understands only half.
He loves a feisty debate; she nods her head to keep the peace — especially when she disagrees.
He likes to playfully tease; she thinks he’s being mean.
His parents are loud and judgmental; hers zing you with a passive-aggressive smile.
And this just scratches the surface. Throw in the crazy idiosyncrasies we all have, the potential fallout from religious differences, not to mention the different attitudes toward sex, money and rock-n-roll — and you’re essentially walking through a minefield blindfolded.
Check Your Identity at the Border
On a heavy note, some folks living in their spouse’s homeland report “loss of personal identity.” Defining exactly what this means is a can of worms we won’t open here. For the sake of this discussion, ponder how you might answer these questions:
Do you see yourself as an independent entity or fraction of society?
Are you ranked in a pecking order or is everyone equal?
How does your culture expect you to behave? Is open debate the norm? Or is feigned agreement encouraged in the name of harmony?
Are male and female roles clearly defined in your spouse’s country? Are women expected to show deference? If you are a woman, how would you choose to deal with that reality?
And what about self worth? Is it measured by accumulation of money? Status? Approval by the collective? Motherhood? Fatherhood? Career? Self-actualization? Other?
And finally, how do you tell right from wrong? Is it always good to tell the truth? Are polite lies expected and encouraged in the name of social harmony?
The list goes on but you get the gist. It shouldn’t surprise that lonely spouses living abroad — regardless of gender — might feel a loss of identity. It’s not a stretch to imagine a strong, independent woman from a Western country being thrust into a male-dominated culture and feeling smothered. Or the other way — a traditional Asian woman going West.
I was in a different situation and felt anything but smothered. Japan was liberating for me. And yet, over the years, I wrestled with my own kind of identity issues, specifically the challenge of sorting out which part of me was American, which part had taken on Japanese-like qualities, and which part was just me the individual.
It took an eventual move back to the motherland to rediscover myself. What I learned was that I never lost anything, certainly not my identity. On the contrary — my identity expanded with the infusion of Japanese culture into my worldview. No regrets. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Ignorance, the Quiet Assassin
The most dangerous scenario in the artful dance of communication happens when both partners assume they are communicating when, in fact, they are not. This scenario naturally begets confusion.
One danger is the tendency of one or both parties to assign bad intentions to the other party, even when everyone’s heart is in the right place. It happens more than you think.
A great example is how Japanese, who haven’t mastered the finer nuances of English, might respond to a negatively stated question such as, “Don’t you love me?”
The Japanese partner, intending to say “Yes I love you,” might respond with “no,” meaning, “No, it is not true that I do not love you.”
Conversely, a Japanese partner, intending to say “No, I do not love you,” might respond with “yes,” meaning, “Yes that’s correct, I do not love you.”
How‘s that for getting your signals crossed?
Now imagine all the drama such a misunderstanding could create, and multiply it by all the other unforeseen language and culture gaps that too often camouflage our good intentions.
Such misunderstandings quickly escalate and before you know it, spouses are sparring over something they may actually agree on. False perceptions define their reality, and love gets lost in the confusion.
And this underscores the importance of cross-cultural knowledge in any international marriage. Only by bringing hidden differences to the surface can they be acknowledged, reflected on, and worked out. Without awareness of these differences, problems not only don’t get resolved, they proliferate and fester.
Can Love Conquer Culture?
It might get you through the honeymoon stage, I’ll grant you that. But over time misunderstandings and false perceptions can sour even the sweetest love.
When the honeymoon’s over, you either roll up your sleeves and start working on your marriage, or get pulled into a downward spiral fueled by mutual ignorance. We all know where that ends up.
To our credit and good fortune, my wife and I spent a lot of time communicating in the courting stage. It helps that I had already lived in my wife’s country for seven years so had a good grasp of her language and culture. In this sense, relative to most international couples, we had a head-start in identifying key culture gaps. But like everyone else on the planet, we had our blind spots and still do. For the past 40 years we’ve been chipping away at those blind spots. And the road goes on forever.
With that backdrop, here’s what was rolling around in my head before I popped the question.
What does “marriage” really mean in Japan versus my culture? Is love part of the deal?
What roles would we assume? Would she be willing to marry me as an equal partner?
What are the positives of our respective cultures? What’s important to her? What’s important to me? Could I learn to eat smelly fermented beans for breakfast? Could she learn to love oatmeal?
Where would we live? Do we both want kids? How many? How would we raise them? Would they speak one language or both? Would we indulge them or use tough-love? Or something in-between?
What do we expect of ourselves and each other as a married couple? What are the boundaries of trust?
How to show respect? How to show affection? How to disagree? How to resolve disputes? Would I have to sleep on the couch sometimes? If so, will the couch be comfortable?
It all looks so neat and tidy when it’s written down like that. The reality is our conversations were unstructured, messy, a lot messier when we were drinking wine. But we made the time to talk, to share with each other how we had been raised, nurtured, disciplined, how our parents related to each other, and how it turned us into the confused young adults that we were…okay, that I was.
But even with thirty-eight years of marital bliss under my belt, I can’t help but think that some guidance and structured conversations would’ve prevented a couple of wheels from being reinvented. If I could go back in time and counsel my young bachelor self, here’s what I’d say to clueless me:
- When you tease her she thinks you’re being mean. She’ll never get your American-guy sarcastic sense of humor so back off on the teasing.
2. Don’t let her do the dishes, she hates it and isn’t very good at it.
About ten years ago I finally came to my senses, fired my wife from the dish-washing duties, and reassigned them to yours truly. How could I be so oblivious to her utter disdain for washing dirty dishes? Aside from me being a clueless dolt, my dear wife hid it well; she just assumed from the start that her role was to clean up so she quietly endured. I have since repented and, as penance, will be doing the dishes for eternity. (I have actually come to enjoy doing this task…it’s a Zen thing.) Had I known how happy it would make my dear wife, I’d have started doing the dishes thirty-eight years ago.
3. Read “The Anatomy of Peace” by Arbinger Group! The book wasn’t published until 2006 so I’d have to smuggle it into the time machine. But had I read it back then, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’d have been a much better husband and father.
And if my Japanese wife could go back in time and counsel her young single self on marrying this clueless foreign barbarian, what advice would she give?
Pretty sure she’d put me to work doing the dishes from the start.
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I’m a semi-retired cross-cultural curmudgeon with just enough spare time on my hands to publish weekly articles on Japonica. I write mostly about my (mis)adventures in the intercultural twilight zone, but I’m a chronic rule-breaker so don’t hold me to it. Articles to date include stories and observations as a gaijin in a Japanese family; a life-changing epiphany 44 years ago in a funky bar in sleepy Yamato; heroic deeds during Japan’s 3.11 disaster; cross-cultural management gaps, gaffs, and opportunities; plus lots of insider counterintuitive insights on Japanese customer service. If tales about my cross-cultural triumphs and failures sound like fun, you can read all about ’em here.
If you are on LinkedIn and interested in connecting, please reach out, preferably with a brief note introducing yourself. Here’s a link to my profile.
© Tim Sullivan 2022
