Weddingbee Blog

I am exception to the article. I am Filipino and my husband is Hispanic. Both of us celebrate our respective cultures. We made sure to acknowledge both at our wedding. If we have children, we plan to teach them Spanish as well as Tagalog (Native Filipino Language).

I am glad that you have such an open-minded FI and family. Too often you hear about the problems of biracial relationships. Thanks for a great post!

Oh yes, we have encountered the race issue - we’re a black/white interracial couple and that combination (especially white female, black male) seems to be a loaded gun of stereotypes and strong reactions from others who don’t know us. Sometimes to our face, sometimes it’s just something for people to gossip about. On balance, people don’t care one way or another, but we definitely encounter it.

People always make me feel awkward because my parents are not the same religion — my mother is Jewish and my father is Catholic. It was never an issue in my household. I was raised Jewish, and both my parents were content with the decision (my father’s parents, however, were NOT). To me, this is the end of the story. I get a lot of grief from other people though about how growing up in a bi-religious household means I must not know much about my own religion, etc. Frankly, it is crap! My fiance is from an all-Jewish family, and I am significantly more religious than he is (it is actually the subject of the yearly fight when his mother wants me to go to Rosh Hashanah dinner at her house, and I won’t go because I want to go to services and they do not belong to a synagogue).
Growing up, it was nice to know that my parents would never judge anyone I was dating based on race/culture/religion, since they are proof that mixed marriages are perfectly fine!

Great post! I’m Taiwanese but have dated only Caucasian men and I think my parents have come to accept that I won’t be marrying within my race I definitely want to raise my kids with traditional Chinese values and teach them Chinese traditions, and hopefully they’ll want to learn Chinese too.

It’s so great that Mr. Canary shows desire and willingness to not only accept, but understand your culture.

I read an article that explored the theory of biracial relationships, and it concluded that men don’t tend to have racial preferences when it comes to relationships whereas women do. Women date out of their race when it is socially and/or economically advantageous. Asian women are most likely to date out of the Asian race while Black women are least likely to date outside the Black race. Again, this is what the article found.

Having dated men of different races/ethnicities, I think that biracial relationships are great. However, I’m bothered by men or women who flat out refuse to date within their race. To me, it seems like a form of self loathing and/or a dysfunctional form of racial supremacy.

I love the tone of your post on this issue — it’s definitely a topic I had to struggle with during our engagement, wedding and even a bit now (as a very recently married couple). The issue has had several different prongs — one is just working through people’s phobias or misperceptions, another is the process of learning what to react to and what to ignore.

Early in our relationship, we dealt with his family’s fear that we would ignore/abandon his cultural heritage and they objected to me initially because I was of a different background (on several levels). The realty is that we have had to (together) take time to determine how we incorporate things into our life in a genuine way– his cultural experiences are quite a bit different than his parent’s and my experiences are different from his. At the root of things, we share a common sense of morality and we balance each other well.

Also, although my family did not object, we did have to deal with many more subtle misperceptions with them (misunderstanding the importance of his cultural heritage; lumping all Asian cultures into one massive grouping and ignoring the fact that his heritage was actually unique and different from this mass media image they had). We had to learn how to work towards sensitizing them a bit on a few things. We also had to deal with a sudden influx of strange issues where people thought everything we did had to revolve around his culture or my cultural learning opportunities — and in some misdirected ways. And we occasionally encountered situations where one of us felt either subtly excluded or singled out. Our solution has been to communicate honestly when we encounter these situations and although that doesn’t mean they aren’t prickly, it still helps.

At the wedding itself, our families generally got along, so it showed that we made progress with those relationships, but we did have a few people that abruptly felt uncomfortable about us getting married and voiced that. We had to let that go. With time, it seems that quite a lot of the problems subside and we also have learned to grow a thicker skin and pick our battles.

Now, recently married, people single out my married name — and the adjustment to a new name is change enough without people pointing it out all the time. And they still occasionally make strange assumptions or comments, but I try to let it go unless it’s very important. It would be exhausting and not particularly useful to address the issue all the time.

When we have children, we will raise our children with foreign language skills because it provides more opportunities or doors for the future. We will raise our children with knowledge of their heritage(s) — again in the hopes that the more resources they have, the better they will be equipped to navigate their world and make decisions on what that heritage does or does not mean to them.

I am Filipino, while he is Caucasian. Our families never said anything was wrong with our different races, and I’m very happy about that! My Filipino family loves integrating new kinds of people into our group: since we’ve moved to the US 40 years ago, my family has added Koreans, Italians, Germans, and Indians to our clan! I don’t pay attention if anyone stares at me and my fiance because we are interracial- I just think people do that because I’m acting silly in public. We live in the conservative South, so interracial relationships can be touchy at times if you’re around certain people.

The only problem of our relationship, which is similar to one someone here mentioned before me, is of religion. He’s Protestant and I’m Catholic, and that has been the biggest issue between us and among our families. So far, we’ve just decided to have our children grow up general Christian, but I know both of us want them to share our different religions as we did without confusing them.

Well, oddly enough me and my FI are both Mexican but we still find ourselves facing cultural differences. I grew up in a VERY traditional home, family supersedes all, am very religious, and speak spanish whereas although he is fairly close to his family, they are not as close, his faith is nominal and he understand very very little spanish. One thing that is still particularly challenging are our ideas of men and women’s roles in the household. I was raised and strongly believe that it is a woman’s job to cook, clean, do laundry, iron, and not even work (an idea I’ve managed to overcome) and men are to do more physical labor and not have to cook , raise children, etc. He strongly disagrees with this “19th century” idea and was raised in a more modern household. I think the difference comes in because I am the first generation to be born and raised in the states while he is the third or fourth. Anyway, although I do recognize that my beliefs are somewhat dated (and perhaps taboo) it seems *very* wrong that when we get married he’ll want to contribute to running the household…I don’t know if I will feel like a very good wife.

So even though I am marrying someone within my race…other factors clearly come into play and I still get the question why don’t I marry someone more traditional? or Will our children still know Spanish?