When I started seeing my therapist I gave her the back-of-the-DVD-summary of me and based on that she proposed the areas to explore/work on. Nothing really surprised me: sure, my existential mind (her words, not mine), our many and drastic moves, the trauma my body suffered given birth due to medical negligence, my miscarriage and infertility. But then she proposed something unexpected: my interracial, international, intercultural marriage.
"Mixed marriages have a higher percentage of conflict incidence" she said.
But it wasn't an area of concern for me. We've had, in ten years of this relationship, had rough patches but parting ways has never been an option.
Hearing from a third party that we have more of an uphill battle is not new to me. Catholicism, while not discouraging it, is really not too keen about it. They say it's more difficult to make a marriage work, especially if it is an interfaith marriage as well... Which we are...
The therapist said that the added problems come because "there's always a gap in communication, a clash that cannot be avoided."
Now, I have, quite literally written a book about it (not THE book, and it happens to be a poetry book, but a book nonetheless). My book explored the inability of man and a woman to communicate while they speak different languages, right after the fragmentation after the tower of Babel.
Years before I worried about the negative forecast.
Not anymore.
But I have learned that the biggest differences between us are not those based on our races or cultures. Not even our differences based on faith and belief. There is, indeed, an unbridgeable gap of understanding between us. A gap that has worried and made me sad before: a difference born of my metaphorical and word-based mind against his logical one; my weariness that keeps me up at night and his ability for happiness and calmness.
We are not unique. In fact, among our close friends there are many mixed marriages. Some have fared well, others, not so much. Even ones that seemed doomed from the beginning have flourished.
When we lived in the Bay Area it seemed we had arrived to the proverbial melting pot, a Shangri-La for interculture.
Even more so, in the recent weeks CNN published a study about interracial marriages being in an all-time high.
I write poetry in Spanish and even though he reads me I always had the nagging thought that he would never truly understand me. He does, in his way, without getting some obscure terms or a hidden image, but I have made my peace with it.
After all, just as my poems came to conclude, our biggest differences are not born of our nationalities or races.
It's because of that deep and unsurpassable gap between a woman and a man.
I agree with these last two sentences. I am an American married to and Englishman. While we are a nearly identical shade of pasty white, I often wonder if we experience challenges that non international couples do not. he hides at my family gatherings because we are loud, and opinionated and many of us are often drunk, and its a huge family. I shrink with discomfort at how quiet, victorian, and stoic his small English family is, they just seem emotionally constipated to me. at the end of the day, the real difference has to be the man and woman thing. we have processed my infertility and multiple pregnancy losses much differently, according to our backgrounds, but some of that has to be according to our sex as well.
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