This week, on the 24th, is my 9th wedding anniversary. We`ll finally be hopping into our 10th year of marriage. It`s already been 10 years since we first met.
I have to smile a bit, as everyone was quite certain that it wouldn`t last at all. No one opposed our marriage, and family was supportive, but…
When we filed the papers, my husband was still in school – and on top of that, I am not Japanese. He insisted that if we were old enough to get married that we should no longer remain in debt to his parents for schooling and housing – so I worked full time paying the rent and his university fees.
Despite his parents being supportive, I think that they doubted us deep down. It took until I got pregnant for mother-in-law to want to announce that we`d gotten married, and she then pushed us into a huge way too elaborate and expensive wedding… (Father-in-law runs a company that employs a fair sized chunk of the town they live in so it was a big show for business benefit, really.)
And then, the baby that came along had medical issue after medical issue. Apparently that destroys marriages.
I sort of feel like we`re beating the odds by still being happy.
Congratulations!
I kind of know how you feel in a way because I’ve been with my partner for 6 years as of this month (not married but engaged) and are completely different races, though from the same country. Since I’ve been with him I’ve had some bad experiences here and there concerning racism and anti-interracial “opinions.” I’m currently pregnant with what will be our first child and now I start to worry about things I never really thought of in depth before, like how my son will be treated or looked at for being a mixed race, and that his parents are of different race. It really scares me sometimes but so far we’ve worked through all of the bad that’s been given to us before, so we’ll work through this too. So it’s nice to hear that you’ve been successful and happy with all of what you’ve been through.
I don`t know where you`re from, but I feel for you. I don`t really experience any sort of racism – the huge expectation of our marriage failing was about 75% because of age (he was 21, me 20) with the interracial bits but being icing on top. Early marriages (or at least responsible ones) are not the norm here at all. In that area we are certainly exceptions.
The worst experiences I`ve had were visiting the US with my husband, where people actually stopped me and asked me why I was with an Asian guy… And an older woman told me she pitied me that he was making me speak his language instead of English. Outside of the US too, it has almost always been with other foreigners… I can`t even begin to tell how many times I`ve heard jokes about the “size” of Asian guys, etc. I`ve even been told that Motoki`s early birth was surely because I mated with a monkey, or that it was god telling me I shouldn`t be with someone not white.
On the Japanese side, it`s a bit silly sometimes – but never anything like that. More “I`m so jealous! Foreigners are so cool! I wish I were bilingual! Wow!!”
Good for both of you. For a while I wondered whether my wife and I were the only International Couple ™ in the entire country who were actually happy with our situation and with each other. Seeing you guys gives me hope
I think the key difference is whether the marriage was because of the “international”-ism, or in spite of it. Way way way too many couples are married because, well, one of them has some sort of fetish for the “exotic”… It`s the marriages that actually fell in love as people that seem to last.
Or maybe it`s that huge “screw the other person, I wanna live in MY country!!!” thing that seems to happen all the time.
But then again, I can`t say I have a huge pool of successful marriages to pull that info from (umm, me and you?). Just tons of unhappy and failed ones to look at.
Yeah. I only know of one other couple in the pool (my friend Mark).
I wonder if everyone else looks at M and me, and imagines a countdown clock over our heads…
Congratulations on your anniversary — I have to say my Japanese husband and I are overall very happy, too. We met in Kyoto in 1985 and were married in 1991.
Both of us had fetishes for the “exotic,” we both have huge “screw the other person, I wanna live in MY country” attitudes, and I admit, I married him mostly to get a spouse visa, and he married me to have kids. Recipe for disaster….two people so wrong for each other, together for all the wrong reasons, and yet….I love the guy, and he loves me, and….three kids and way too many trans-Pacific moves, we are still together, and like spending time together.
kekkon kinenbi omedetou gozaimasu
I’m happy to see you again, I was worried without news from you and Motoki-kun for so long (I even thought bad things happened).
I see everybody is fine, and Motoki-kun even started speaking ! yokata
I feel happy for you.
Happy wedding anniversary.
(sorry, I’m not a native english speaker, and don’t talk a lot)
A much belated おめでと！Congratulations! I can’t believe what I was reading about your experiences in the US. Perhaps you ran into the wrong kind of people, you know, the ones with no intelligence. I am blessed to have been born and raised in Spain and was able to see things from their point of view, with an open mind.