Author: Sheik Tanveer
Abstract
We present a survey report on intercultural marriage. Intercultural marriage is a growing trend. People have mixed feelings and ideas about it. Based on literature review and discussion in ESL 5315 class, we made some hypotheses on this topic. To verify our hypotheses, we made our questionnaire and conducted our survey from a small number of participants at Texas Tech University. After having our results, we analyzed the survey results and presented them in the result section. We found positive responses as well as cautions from our participants. People are more accepting of it compared to their ancestors. It has challenges and pitfalls and hence we have research opportunities to make the intercultural marriage more acceptable and understandable to general people.
Introduction
By definition, intercultural marriage is a marriage where people from different cultural backgrounds get married. These differences can be race, ethnicity, environment, religion, custom, food and so on. Along with the promises, challenges and pitfalls, the trend of intercultural marriage is increasing day by day.
Intercultural marriages were rare in ancient times. People preferred to marry within their locality and stay near their family. However, keeping pace with world dynamicity, people are resettling from one place to another and thus getting introduced to various types of people. They are making new friends, partners, well-wishers etc. When two people beyond their cultural barrier meet and then are attracted to each other, they tend to bind in a relation. Most often, they want to live under the same roof and get married. Depending on the intercultural differences and degree of sacrifices made by the couple, the marriage lasts for a long time or breaks up within a short time.
The number of intercultural marriages is increasing in those countries where immigrants are pretty high in number and different cultural practices are welcomed. In 2013, statistics showed that 41.3 million immigrants lived in the United States (Zong & Batalova, 2015) . So far, the United States has been liberal to all cultures and is a neutral living place for all races, which makes it prone to intercultural marriage. The possibility of getting higher education, better life, and a decent job brings immigrants to this land. When immigrants get married to native people, cultural diversities arise.
Though intercultural marriage is a growing trend, not much research has been accomplished yet to know the detail of these marriages (Frame, 2004) . As a part of the course ESL 5315 (English Academic Writing), I have the opportunity to learn more on the topic. I want to give general people a fair idea about intercultural marriage: challenges, pitfalls, and advantages associated with the marriage. As our strategy, at first, we made a literature review. Based on the review, we prepared a questionnaire and made a survey among a sizable number of people. As Texas Tech is a renowned school with nearly 36,000 students (Sims, 2015) , my main focus was Texas Tech students. After getting data from the survey, I discussed the ideas in detail with the class. We did some brainstorming and came up with some strategic plans for how to keep intercultural marriages lasting for a long time.
Though intercultural marriage has lots of issues, challenges, and a high break-up rate, it has a number of good aspects as well. Intercultural marriage helps people to explore other languages, customs, and so on. In a way, cross-cultural marriage can bring world peace. In the next part of the essay, the literature review followed by ideas from the survey, pros, and cons of interracial marriage will be discussed in detail.
Literature Review and Hypotheses
Intercultural marriage has lots of advantages and disadvantages. With having its pros and cons, the intermarriage trend is increasing with time. People have mixed opinions and experiences about intermarriages. In this section, we will illustrate some of the aspects of intermarriage based on literature.
Jason and Julie settled in U.S. soil, from South Korea and Australia respectively, and are a happily married couple of more than a decade (Arnold, 2008) . They are a great example of a cross-cultural couple who suffered a lot to maintain their cross-ethnic marriage. They founded a church, The Bridge, devoted to stand for and mentor couples of cross-cultural origin. From their own experience, Jason and Julie try to mentor these couples to fight for their marriage. The mentorship helps each couple to understand three important factors: good and bad in marriage are sometimes not absolute facts but just cultural considerations; rather than considering cross-cultural marriage as a shortcoming it can be counted as an opportunity to learn best practices from each culture; and it is important to solve critical marital issues over getting frustrated on the unachievable matters.
Love is one of the major motivations in intercultural marriage. Intermarriages have also been seen to happen between persons from two hostile countries, or who have been brought up in dissimilar cultural backgrounds. Elizabeth, a 50-year-old American lady, was married to a Lebanese man for 22 years (Kim Lawler Creative, 2013) . They met in Germany and married at a time when both countries had a hostile relationship. They were even raised in two families which followed totally different cultural environments. Elizabeth’s family was individualistic. On the contrary, her husband’s family was collectivistic. After marriage, she gave up American life and started to follow Lebanese culture. They had two kids who also followed the same. Elizabeth believes that couples from cross-cultural environments have to pass their conjugal life through a series of even and odds. The lesser their dissimilarity, the better.
Communication and food habits are also found to be challenges in intermarriages. A good example is the cross-cultural relationship between a Taiwanese boy, Lawrence, and a Texan girl, Amanda (Adams, 2010) . In their post-marriage life, the first challenge was communication. They found sharing emotions and decisions with a partner who is a non-native speaker is a challenge. The second challenge was choosing similar food, which they overcame by selecting their own version of American-Taiwanese food.
Mike and Jensie, who are Republican and Democratic respectively, and have several differences from each other, are also a good intermarriage example (Trice, 2012) . Despite their differences in race, political views, skin color, family issues and so on, they are committed to each other.
Intermarriage is not a new idea. In ancient times, intermarriage was seen between families of rulers of countries to make nations united (Kasbow, 2016) . The author mentioned a person named Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon who understood intermarriage as a way of world peace. Rev. Moon invited young people from the rest of the world to work in the U.S. He arranged numerous group intermarriage ceremonies within different races. Most of those families are still stable and united. Rev. Moon managed to get the author to marry a lady from Japan, a country hostile to the U.S. at that time. He dreamt American president from an intermarriage which came true after 30 years with President Obama.
Intermarriage is also common among people of the same town and same religion, but from different races. An author took interviews from several interracial couples, scholars in human resource areas and some others in Lubbock, Texas, who are exposed to intermarriage (Ballinger, 2011) . He interviewed an intermarriage couple, Siu and Lap, who were afraid of their children getting discrimination in school. Scholars had different opinions on the experience of children who come from intermarriage families. The author was optimistic about the fact that intermarriages are increasing and general people are getting feedback from intermarried couples. Intercultural marriages are more acceptable now than in past decades.
Children raised in bi-racial families are open minded about intermarriage (Idmakanti, 2009) . About 1 in 12 marriages in the United States is an intermarriage (Clark, 2014) . The young generation is more open minded to intermarriage compared to their previous generations. It is wise to judge people not based on their race and ethnicity, but their personality and character (Guillen, 2016) . An author mentioned four key matters to follow to sustain the intermarriages: one needs to know one’s beliefs, needs to focus on similarities rather searching for differences, one should not force one’s partner to change and one should keep the family member’s influences out of conjugal life (Hoffman, 2013) .
Based on the literature reviews, we can make hypotheses on intermarriage:
1. Intermarriage is a growing trend. I believe the young are more open to it compared to the old.2. I believe one out of twelve Texas Tech students are exposed to intercultural relationships at least once in their life.
3. Most of the Texas Tech students will say that intercultural marriage is good for society.
4. I believe most of the Texas Tech students will say that they will support their child’s intercultural marriage.
5. I also believe students will agree that children brought up in intercultural marriages have some advantages i.e., they are open minded, learn more about cultures, and can have better education.
6. I believe Texas Tech students will admit that religion and communication are the challenges in intercultural marriages.
Methods
As a part of the English as Second Language (ESL) course 5315, the class was asked to write a survey report on either cell phone usage inside a classroom and during driving, or on intercultural marriage. Half of the students chose cell phones and the rest chose intercultural marriage. Students were asked to review literature on their corresponding topics. Each student reviewed at least 12 articles. I, as a part of the class, chose intercultural marriage as my topic. I summarized the literature that I reviewed and wrote a literature review. Based on the review, I made six hypotheses.
We wanted to know people’s opinion on these two topics. To do so, the best way was to conduct a survey. The class was divided into two groups based on the topics. Each group discussed cell phone and intercultural marriage separately. Each group did some brainstorming and discussed the literature that students had already reviewed. Based on that, each group made preliminary questionnaires. The instructor, with his prudence and experience, finalized the questionnaires and made a single questionnaire for all. For ease of all, the survey was made available on paper and online.
We wanted to cover a variety of people in our survey. As we were studying at Texas Tech University, which has a very large number of students, including Texan, all other Americans and international, we chose Texas Tech students as our participants. We agreed to conduct approximate 240 surveys. Each of us conducted 13 surveys, including six American males and six American females. We asked the students their age, sex, and marital or relationship status. We also asked them their experience with or exposure to intercultural marriage. We asked what their parents thought and what they thought about intercultural marriage and whether there was any difference or not. We asked their opinions on its impact on society, its impact on children raised in intercultural environment and on whether they would allow their children for having an intercultural marriage or not. We wanted to know what people think are the obstacles and challenges in intercultural relationships and sought their opinion on pastoral counseling for intercultural marriage. We also asked them whether they would do it again or not if they had a chance to go back to the past.
After getting all the paper surveys, we put them online. We categorized all the answers based on male and female participants. For better illustration, we made some statistical analysis and created some graphs.
Results
After conducting the survey, our results were compiled. We used Survey Planet for data entry. From that software, we exported our data to excel and conducted the detailed comparisons. In the next part, I will illustrate our survey results and will make a comment on that.
We conducted our survey on 229 people. 124 of them were female and the other 124 were male. Most of them were young. We found 1 student aged below 18 years, 121 students aged within 18-22, 62 students in the 23-27 range, 32 students in the 28-35 range, and the other 13 were above 35 years old. As intended, most of them were American. 114 were from Texas, 63 were from the United States but outside Texas and the other 36 were international students.
In the first hypothesis, I assumed that the young were more open to intercultural marriage compared to the old. We asked Texas Tech students whether they felt more supportive of it than their parents or not. I found that they were positive about intercultural marriage. Around half of the students said they felt more supportive than their parents, a few said they were not, and the rest said they felt about the same. Both the male and female participants responded the same way; based on responses regarding this question, we could not distinguish them. So the survey results supported the hypothesis. The comparison is shown in the figure presented below. Precisely, 50.2% students felt more supportive, 46.7% students felt about the same and only 3.1% felt less supportive to intercultural marriage than their parents.
My second hypothesis was that one-twelfth of Texas Tech students would be exposed to an intercultural relationship at least once in their life. But our survey results showed that the portion was more than I anticipated.
From the figure shown below, we can see that around one-third of the Texas Tech students are exposed to it. Within the one-third who were experienced, 46 persons were involved in intercultural relationship once, 10 of them said they grew up in one, and the others said they are in one now. So the intercultural trend is greater in Texas Tech students than I expected.
I also hypothesized that intercultural marriage would be welcomed by most Texas Tech students. They would say that it is good for society. 54.1% participants believed it is good for society, only 2.2% said it is not and the remaining 43.7% were neutral about the fact.
That remaining 43.7% of participants believed that it does not make any difference in society. We also tried to categorize the minority of participants who believed intercultural marriage was not good for society, but we could not characterize them based on gender, experience, or family. So we can say that people are accepting of intercultural marriage, but still some of them have doubts about its beneficial aspects in society.
I believed most of the Texas Tech students would say that they would support their child’s intercultural marriage. The survey outcome is presented below.
Irrespective of whether exposed to intercultural relationship or not, most Texas Tech students said that they would support their child’s intercultural marriage. 72.9% of students supported if without any condition, and 21% supported if with the condition that they would like to warn or advise their children who would be involved in intercultural relations. Only 6.1% of the students said they do not want their children involved in intercultural marriage.
I believed the Texas Tech students would agree that children raised in intercultural environment would be advantaged by being bilingual and by being adaptive to change and cultures. We asked the students several questions on how they would like to characterize children of intercultural marriage. A complete pictorial view of the characterization is shown below.
In general, females are more positive about the children raised in intercultural marriage than the males. 6 participants agreed with all the aspects. 49.8% people admitted that children of intercultural marriage are advantaged by being bilingual, are open-minded and more adaptive to change and cultures. 45 of them were males and the remaining 69 were females. Some of the people also pictured some negative sides of being children of intercultural marriage. 16.5% of people though the children may be teased by other kids, and 17.9% thought they would be either confused about or less interested in religion.
My last hypothesis was that Texas Tech students would admit religion and communication were the challenges in intercultural marriage. We asked them what they thought are the most difficult aspects of intercultural marriages. Results are shown below in a bar chart.
As expected, most of them said religion and communication were the two greatest challenges in intercultural marriages. 140 people chose religion, 86 chose language differences, 15 thought food was the most challenging fact, and the other 49 people made a different comment on that. We found some interesting responses that we did not consider before. A bunch of people mentioned that cultural difference is the most difficult aspect for people in intercultural marriage. Celebration of traditional holidays, rituals, and family beliefs are some of them. Two participants mentioned racism from society might be the most difficult aspect. From my own survey experience, I found one participant who mentioned lack of sense of humor is an important challenge in the intercultural marriages. She found people have various ways to express their feelings in different cultures.
Discussion
Our survey results were very informative. We found some valuable responses on the intercultural marriage. We have some research opportunity as well as some survey improvement opportunity that we need to discuss.
We thought one out of twelve Texas Tech students would be engaged in intercultural marriage at least once in their life. From the survey, we found that around one-third of the Texas Tech students were exposed to it. That indicates that the intercultural relationship is a growing trend and exists on a larger scale than we anticipated.
As expected, most of the participants felt that intercultural marriage was good for society. A good portion of the participants also thought that the intercultural marriage (ICM) does not make any difference in society. We could extend our research by asking the participants what motivated them to give these opinions. Some of the participants might be motivated by their friends or family, whereas some might feel that way from social media. We also found a minority of participants who thought ICM was not good for society. We need to investigate what motivated them to say so. It could be from personal or family experience. It was also possible that those minority participants were raised in a conservative family where ICM was strictly prohibited.
We asked the participants about the beneficial facts of ICM as well as its impact on children who were raised in them. Some beneficial facts that the participants mentioned: children can get better education, can learn more about cultures and travel, children are advantaged by being bilingual, and being adaptive to change and cultures, and ICM people and their children are more open-minded. These are some of the reasons people think ICM is good for society. People are also concerned about some facts of ICM. Some participants believed that the children raised in ICM might be teased or ridiculed by other kids. Some were concerned about racism. We need to come out with some prospective solutions to alleviate these problems.
Another challenge we found was that children raised in ICM could be less interested or confused about religion. If a child is raised in a family where parents followed two different religions or cultures, it would be hard for the child to choose one from those two. It is also possible that the parents sacrificed their religion or tradition to maintain their marriage. To me, all these challenges can be considered as research opportunities. We can learn how a child is impacted by his family, whether the child is more self-sufficient than other children or not.
We asked the participants whether they would do intercultural marriage again or not if they could go to past. We expected a simple yes or no answer from them. But the majority of them were not exposed to ICM. Some of the experienced people were also unwilling to answer it. We have a research opportunity to learn why people are unwilling to answer the question.
We had limited people to conduct the survey. We managed to complete only 229 surveys. It would be better if we could cover the whole of Lubbock city’s people in our survey. Our participants were mostly young people within age ranges 18-22. One-third of the participants have experience in intercultural relationship, while the remaining were inexperienced. It would be better if we could cover more people aged above 23 in our survey. For our next survey, we can ask Texas Tech University for a handsome amount of funding. We will need some volunteers as well to cover a vast population in our survey.
Conclusion
We presented a survey report on intercultural marriage. From our literature review, we got some preliminary idea about intercultural marriage. Then we made some hypotheses and wanted to see whether our hypotheses were correct or not. So we made a survey questionnaire, conducted our survey on intercultural marriage, and analyzed the results. We found that intercultural marriage is an increasing and accepted trend. The young are more accepting of it compared to their parents. People involved in intermarriage and their children get advantageous from it. Still the marriage is challenging and a lot of issues need to be resolved to make it more accessible to general people. Hence, we can see many research opportunities on this topic.
References
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Arnold, H. L. (2008). Cross-Cultural marriage mentoring. Retrieved February 10, 2016, from Focus on the family: http://www.focusonthefamily.com/marriage/marriage-challenges/marriage-in-the-melting-pot/cross-cultural-marriage-mentoring
Ballinger, C. (2011, February 23). Interracial couples face discrimination from others. Retrieved March 10, 2016, from Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: http://lubbockonline.com/stories/022310/loc_566396711#.VuK8r_krLIU
Clark, K. (2014, September 27). Interracial marriages on the rise, but social stigmas persist. Retrieved March 10, 2016, from Deseret News: http://national.deseretnews.com/article/2430/interracial-marriages-on-the-rise-but-social-stigmas-persist.html
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Kasbow, D. (2016). World peace through marriage and family. Retrieved May 2, 2016, from Family federation: http://familyfed.org/world-peace-through-marriage-and-family/
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Sims, K. (2015, September 11). Texas Tech breaks enrollment record for seventh-straight year. Retrieved May 1, 2016, from Texas Tech University: http://today.ttu.edu/posts/2015/09/texas-tech-breaks-enrollment-record-for-seventh-straight-year
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Zong, J., & Batalova, J. (2015, February 26). Frequently requested statistics on immigrants and immigration in the United States. Retrieved March 3, 2016, from Migration information source: http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-immigrants-and-immigration-united-states
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