INTERCULTURAL COUPLES

This competition is based on the fact that more people are dating, living with or marrying someone from a different religion or racial ethnic group.

Has it happened to you or someone you know?

Was it good or bad....examine the pluses and the minuses.

Can be your experience or your opinion or someone in your family or amoung your friends......

3 poems maximum
2 old, 1 new
any genre of poetry is acceptable

IF YOU ARE GAY.....tell us the experience of a gay intercultural couple....I have heard there are problems there...too!

FURTHER REFERENCE MATERIAL BELOW
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In America today, more people are marrying someone from a different religion or racial/ethnic group. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, nearly 37% of Americans are married to someone of a different faith. Additionally, the 2010 U.S. Census reported that 10% of Americans are married to someone of a different race. Researchers have offered several possible explanations for these growing trends.

Couples are more likely to marry outside of their faith when these contributing factors are in play: they are more independent of their family, do not feel a need to be of the same faith as their parents, experience a divorce, or expect a more balanced division of household responsibilities.

Interracial couples are more likely to marry when these contributing factors are in play: they have a common religious orientation, education level, or global perspective.
Racial boundaries weaken, differences narrow, and language and residential barriers diminish, thus making intermarriage more likely to occur. Immigrants of the third generation or later are more comfortable with the local language and culture. Intermarriage can benefit immigrants or ethnic minorities to become part of the dominate culture, though they may lose identification with their own.

In sum, these findings seem to indicate that the greater the similarities in religious beliefs and behaviors, the higher the marital happiness. Further, couples are more satisfied in their marriage when they are similarly religious.

Racial Differences/Similarities and Marital Happiness
Couples of different racial and ethnic backgrounds tended to view their differences primarily as cultural rather than racial, with the exception of when they were initially attracted to their partner, or if they had experienced incidences involving prejudice or discrimination. Being of different races can definitely pose a challenge for intercultural couples. These challenges can definitely be overcome. However, if couples face disapproval and social pressure from families and society, their relationships may become highly stressful as a result.


In sum, intercultural marriages across ethnicities experience different levels of stress and resiliency. The complexities can potentially be overcome successfully with careful negotiation and communication.


Manage Differences
Four primary strategies can be used to manage the differences found in intercultural marriages:
Create a “we” – Reconstruct a shared meaning in your relationship based on friendship, common ground, similar goals, working together, and commitment.
Frame differences – Don’t look at differences as racial or cultural, but with respect and as attractive, worth learning about and celebrating.
Maintain emotions – Communicate and deal with insecurities and emotions, make adjustments around culture, and find support from those who will be positive and helpful.
Foster relationships with your family and community – Establish boundaries with family and community, express the solidarity of your marriage, use humor to decrease the impact of prejudice and discrimination, and give family or community members time and space to accept your partner
Managing Different Belief Systems
The following strategies are recommended to help couples with different belief systems:

Communication skills – This is the most important task in creating a successful marriage for both couples of same and different faiths.41 Research has shown that open communication about one’s culture and faith, as well as partner support for the other’s culture and faith, were related to lower relationship distress.42
A strong, cohesive relationship bond – This is a strong predictor of marital success;43
Respect and tolerance for differences – Love comes first. This strategy is designed to maintain separate and unique beliefs with the understanding that it isn’t acceptable to deny someone’s identity. 44
Flexibly connecting with the two systems while also keeping them separate – Find common elements of belief and practice. This strategy requires that the couple negotiate the meanings of their religious practices to build understanding and connection. They cross religious boundaries and celebrate both faiths.45
Reconstructing new rituals, traditions, and symbols of faith and identity of your blended systems – These couples oblige their families through the disestablishment and often domestication of religion so that their new form of blended faith accommodates their faith needs without offending anyone in the family.46
Managing Conflict and Stress
These strengths-based strategies were found to diminish the intensity of conflict and stress for intercultural couples:

Gender role flexibility – Couples talk about cultural expectations regarding household duties and are able to negotiate how the responsibilities will be assigned for their relationship.
Humor about differences – Laughter lightens potentially stressful situations.
Cultural deference or a tendency to defer to the partner’s cultural preferences – One partner purposely chooses to assume the other’s culture to a large degree to accommodate their differences.
Recognition of similarities in beliefs, values, traditions, etc. – Couples emphasize sameness or common threads in their relationship.47
Cultural reframing – Couples redefine their couple identity with a new framework or set of values.
General appreciation for other cultures – Couples notice, value, and respect advantages of each other’s cultures.48
Conclusion
While marrying someone from a different culture or religion can provide some unique challenges, it can also provide some beautiful and enriching growing opportunities. If you are considering an intercultural marriage, you might find it helpful to use a chart to monitor your use of some specific strategies that can strengthen your marriage. Put this on your refrigerator or another prominent spot where each of you will see it regularly. Mark a “+” if you practice this strategy, and a “−” if you don’t. If you find that doing this isn’t enough, you may want to find a trusted therapist in your area for more assistance (see http://www.therapistlocator.net/).




SOURCE: http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fy1337

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Othellopainting.jpg/220px-Othellopainting.jpg


MY STORY:


SPENCER

When I was young and fair

There was a young man

Who  would have been perfect for me

Unfortunately we were Romeo and Juliet

From two countries at war with each other

Furthermore we were of different race and religion

My Romeo and I met on campus

Where nobody would look for us

We planned to run away

To another country

Where we could live in peace

Instead of this insanity

We planned and plotted and waited

Until we graduated

Tragedy struck - he got multiple sclerosis

Was paralyzed from the waist down

Spent six months in the hospital

Meanwhile I met a young man

Of my own kind

Was pressured into marrying

He did not mind

And I never knew, and do not know until this day

What happened to my Romeo

Who disappeared from my life in every way.

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DIFFERENT COLOUR, DIFFERENT RELIGION = NO MARRIAGE

Raj, you came to me
in a dream
You were tall and thin and young
barely 21
Alone
many miles from home
but the home was not India
it was Port of Spain

We were a melange
of Trinidad and Tobago
in the lab
at McGill
Raunchy, rowdy, laughing
All different, yet the same
Colonized by Britain
English our common tongue

Do you remember
How cold you were
in December
and how we huddled
together
With my warmth
and my northern roots
heating you
with your equatorial blood

I met your parents
You met mine
Your father-tall and dignified
Your mother in a sari
Five thousand years of civilization
could not be erased
You met my mother
Who thought you ideal
if not in the right package

So there was to be
no Hindu marriage ceremony for me
Years later
The invitation to yours was in my mail
But I had also married what
My parents wanted

We had much in common
Despite the differences
An Indian Diaspora
Leaving a caste-ridden country
One ruled by the great colonizers
Who still colonized us

I still see your black eyes and hair
The sheen of your chocolate skin
The way you held me
The goals we had

I wonder how you are
and if life treated you fairly
You wanted to be a physician
So did I
But I failed
Did you?

What becomes of the ones we love
Who we never see again
They haunt our hearts
They haunt our dreams
And leave us feeling ashamed
For wanting you 40 years later
I feel disloyal to my current love
Who has been so good to me
But way back then
I could not forsee
The good I was going to get
I only saw
What I had lost
And lived for years
In regret....

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Tender Blossom

Delicate, demur, subdued, beauty  
Oh, how you rise in me the softest of desires  
Fragile and captivating    
You sway and flutter to gentle, rhythmic notes  
Dancing before me,    
Yet miles away from my reality  
   
You are the epitome of feminine  
Alluring and majestic  
In a very coy and tranquil way  
Filling me with a burning fascination  
Yearning to graze my fingers across your silken skin    
Though touching you would be a sin  
   
Your name alone means "Artist"  
And you are finer than any lovely painting    
Free from blemish and defilement    
Painted as white as innocence  
Yet with lips as red as my desire    
You mesmerize me    
   
You're part of a world that is swiftly fading  
A culture on its deathbed  
Brought to its knees by evolution of society    
Subtlety is an extinct breed  
Though your muted ease seduces me  
they don't know what they're missing    
   
Tender Blossom, more graceful then falling flowers  
Caught in a lackadaisical breeze    
My heart will not be complete without you  
With your shimmering charm and alluring mystique  
Honor me by taking me as your Danna    
And I shall take you as my Geisha

AlwaysCaliban - thank you for starting this competition.....

Delacroix

You are in the arms of God
lips stroked over delicately
whispering His words and
resting on His oaken pews
head bowed in prayer

I am in the arms of nothing
A representative of eight candles
with nothing to show for it
Cross-legged on the ground
head raised in meditation

Be it a sin
but I know it's possible
for our fingertips to connect
and combine

for our bodies to weave into one
an perfect fit that sheds so imperfect

You're sheltered by God
I can't say the same

I can't boast
clean hands or a cross around my neck

but religion
is not the dam that blocks love

if you dig deep enough.

Sublime - thank you for your poem.

Coffee and cream

At the park, brown and white
Holding hands o’ so tight
You smile at me
Blue eyes twinkling
A lady asked
‘are you his tour guide?’

At the shops, you held the basket
I walked behind
Admiring the sales
I held your hands
A girl asked
‘how much are you paid as housekeeper?’

At the beach waiting for you
As you snorkelled in the water
Sitting on the beach towel
Admiring your moves
Another asked
‘is your employer with his wife’

At the entrance of a museum
The caretaker looked at you
‘welcome sir
Do you like our country so far
When did you arrive?
At me, ‘are you hosting him?’

The shallow mind
I get tired of it
White overlords
Always the master
Brown little coolies
Always the servants!

Know you, world
Love goes beyond colours
Togetherness goes beyond ethnicities
Laughter goes beyond languages
Union goes beyond countries
We are all red blooded humans

Grace - thank you for participating.

@Idryad

Very REAL .... !!!

As one whose mostly had GF's from diff backgrounds to me, never had it said to me blatantly, but, the bullchit your poem exhibits is evident in peoples attitudes, as well as their words ...

Nice verse !!!!!

Yes BigVirge, personal experience...

Miss Crescendo del Blendo

http://8020.photos.jpgmag.com/727515_107302_caa4fb376d_l.jpg


She was that dream; I was green
Not from envy or any of my red faced Irish ancestry
It was just from being green
Naïve…easily deceived. Yet easily pleased
I was green like go; you know I was that green
She was barely in green. Dressed barely almost scary
Enough for me to see not-too clearly
She had that for real chocolate brown
What I peeped so deep I couldn’t sleep sound
Had me wanting to creep that melody of melanin
Imagining what she’d do to men. Humming her sensuous song
What if anything could go wrong?
Me thinking who’d be the first to get gone?

She passed the bong as we swung in that key of mahogany
Hardened highs, soft thighs low slow notes without any agony
The kind of pleasure measured by them old school bank notes
Them suits in overcoats; the kind of men with them sparkling rings
But it was no thing; she said she wasn’t about them or their bling
This too, all this was pleasing. I didn’t take time to reason
Because she was in season and for sure
I was that naïve G. Mr. Green
Thinking she thinking all about me
Believe me she’d land; I’d lock...We’d stop the clock  
Time stood still…a more than decent thrill
More about the pleasure than the pasture

T'was a tight small land mass and it was set for capture
My growth; her grasp it sprouted the rapture
Miss Crescendo del Blendo..
This lady wasn’t green...not at all
But alas, she could be about the green
The tax free kind; bestowed upon her from you or me
Now let’s see...she
This lady draped in a mint julep mix
Just the right amount and all of it my fix
My fixation...it couldn’t be undone
If we were at war she had already won.






..
photo: Vincent Christie

"Global Surfing Rocks"
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Potpourri friends I do have,
they professed true love and tied their knots,
then put up with the daily melee of hurts,
being put down as less-than-human,
these united couples pray for deliverance,
just want to live in peace and harmony,
commingle in this modern society.
Some believe the mixing of the races,
the marrying of national identities, and
the morphing of religious beliefs is counter
to maintaining cultural purity, say its
unsustainable human behavior,
something we should end.
Strange, these mini-minds
cannot even find the time
to get their own
narrow lives in line.
If they only knew,
got out of their own way,
they might just say,
“Blending enriches
our very existence,
the epitome of tolerance,
far superior to
ingrained bigotry,
stark ignorance, and
dangerous hatreds
that perpetuate the ill-wills
of this beautiful world.”
We must remember
to strive to be kind,
to practice what we preach,
to be a pillar of strength
for all humanity to see, and
to forget the pundits,
who need our help.