When a Southern American man marries an Indian woman, nobody enters the room alone. It is more accepted now than it was in the early 1990’s.
You bring your people with you. Your parents, their expectations, their manners, their fears, their ideas about family, food, money, religion, children, respect, and what a proper marriage is supposed to look like. She brings hers too.
Our parents did not care for each other. They misunderstood each other’s culture and habits. They just didn’t get along.
That is the plain version. I could soften it but there would be no point. They were different people from different worlds with different assumptions about what their children were doing. Cross-cultural marriage sounds romantic when people write about it after everything works out. Living it in the early years can feel like standing between weather systems.
My wife is Indian but she was born in New Jersey. Her parents were from Gujurat in northern India. I am from Savannah. The Deep South in the United States. That combination carries beauty, humour, misunderstanding, stubbornness, and occasional emotional warfare.
People like to talk about diversity in public as if it is automatically easy. It is not. Real diversity is not a corporate poster. It is not a festival once a year. It is not a slogan printed under smiling faces. Real diversity is two families looking at the same event and interpreting it differently.
Marriage forced that translation on us. I had never eaten Indian food before and she had neer shot a firearm before.
There were things I had to learn about Indian family culture that did not come naturally to me. The density of family involvement. The importance of obligation. The way decisions can feel communal even when they are technically personal. The weight of parental expectation. How men controlled the household in a much different way than what I was used to.
There were things my wife had to learn about me, too. The Southern instinct toward independence. The expectation that a man and woman form their own household with their own authority. The directness hidden underneath politeness. The pride. The humour.
Neither side was entirely right. Neither side was entirely wrong.
That is what makes cross-cultural marriage difficult. If one culture were obviously foolish and the other obviously wise the solution would be simple. Most cultures carry both wisdom and blindness.
Our marriage had to become stronger than the disapproval around it. That sounds noble now. At the time, it was exhausting. We decided to slip away on a family trip to Maui and got married quickly by a pastor without having any family present. We didn’t even tell them until more than a year or more afterwards.
I would choose her again. But I would never tell anyone that crossing cultures is always easy.
