Can love really cross the cultural divide?
Young people always think love is high than everything and it can cross everything, like culture and long-distance. Love is always romantic. Romance is a feeling. However, that feeling not only included the positive side, sometime we have to sacrifice yourself and faced on the reality about other side.
Let me tell a real story about Sarah Zhou at first. “I had no expectations now, after my first also last boyfriend. Everything looked so realistic to me. Everything for me used to be work for a better future, work to improve myself and try my best to get not distracted by useless stuff such as love.
But who could believe that I fell in love with someone so easily? I was born here in Italy and I still live here, people called us IBCs (Italian Born Chinese). We need to work hard and are destined to get married with someone who can give to you and your family “the best” wealthy return. “Yes, that’s how our community tradition is, old fashioned and superficial.
“But he who I loved is a foreign student, he came here to study and he will go back one day with a piece of paper.” she said. That boy as same as every single oversea student, he is not here to find a stable girlfriend or a wife. He doesn’t have a car or a house here. He has nothing except the monthly support from his parents. That’s natural he’s just an “oversea student” who stay in here for study and he will leave in one day.
Also Sarah thinking that: “none of this was important for me when I meet him and all the times that I dumped into him seemed to be fate. Just staring at him from faraway can make me feel happiness. If he decides to go back to china I could even left everything to be with him if he accepts my love. But that not is the case. It wasn’t meant to be. It was just a dream.”
This girl is just 20 years old and born in Milano, one of the most romantic cities around world. I know her for a long time, and I can feel she is a pure Italian. She has the Weston romanticism DNA in her blood. But now, she always says that: “for me loves become just a privilege for few, something only for the one who has time to waste.”
“For me loves become just a privilege for few, something only for the one who has time to waste.”
Although we can find the word “romance” explanation in dictionary, but after all, it has different definitions of different people. Like the girl in this story. Her selfless dedication and tolerance in love is what she thinks of romance. More and more young people like her, start to face on the reality of romance. Most of people had more than twice close relationship with someone else.
Even though we still have since of romantic but we all know that there are many different forms of romantic to existence. We will begin to think about the transformation of the next phase of this relationship. Like marriage. We use our own methods to interpret different romances. For another one, every single relationship are need romantic, and the existence of each section of the relationship itself is accompanied by a romantic factor.
Too many realistic and irresistible factors are blocking some people to love each other. In addition to the problems caused by identity shows above, the other issue that cannot be ignored in the Western world is the religion. There has another love story about Melissa Kelly Sillah Nilsen who is half Norwegian half Gambian and her boyfriend Momodou Lamin Saidykhan who from Gambian. She told me: “ We met on holiday in Gambia by coincidence. We’re from the same country but I lived in Norway and he lived in England so it wasn’t something we planned to get into, it sort of just happened.
“We spent about two weeks together on holiday and already after that I knew it was worth it no matter how far we lived from each other. So, one visit after another became into a two-year long-distance relationship. After I become a student here (UK), we are a lot closer than before but still long distance.” That story is more beautiful than the last one, but it not means they do not have problem. The fact is their different religions may make their romances divisive.
“We want gave each other the best romantic thing we believe.”
Momodou is a Muslim and Melissa is a Christian. Therefore, they will inevitably be divided on some points of view. The most typical problem is about their future, like how they going to held the wedding. They all want to abide by their own beliefs to each other’s most romantic and beautiful things, but different beliefs make their romance not go well. Melissa said: “We come from two different cultures where the cognition settings are completely different. But whatever, we love each other and understand what just want gave each other the best romantic thing we believe, so we think that is enough.”
