Cross-Cultural Marriage

I love that I am in a cross-cultural marriage, with a cross-cultural family. It is also hard to deal with the 5 different cultures that we balance on the daily:

American, American-Brazilian, Jamaican, Jamaican-American, Jamaican-Brazilian-American.

I’ve had quite a few conversations with friends who are also in cross-cultural marriages about things we wished:

• We wish people understood how great…and yet hard it is

• We wish there were more resources about cross-cultural marriages/relationships/families

• We wish we were more prepared beforehand

I do have my own ideas on a book to fix this (called something like “5 cultures, 4 people, 3 languages, 2 continents, 1 family”), but that is still a long time coming, as I am just getting the first 7 years of that under my belt. But I wanted to collect and share, ESPECIALLY FOR PRE-MARITAL COUNSELING, ideas for others who haven’t yet started, or are starting this journey.

My husband and I did not get much marriage counseling at all. We were traveling, away from all our family…we mostly just worked through “The First 90 days of Marriage.” It was a lovely book, and great—but not about anything around cross-cultural issues. We didn’t even realize we were that different when we got married (Thank God for marriage counseling!!!).

God has been doing so much, and while we haven't shared with everyone our big changes, we wanted to document and share personally more of the details of His ...

One of my friends found a couple that was also cross-cultural to counsel them—this, I think, would be optimal. For those of us who don’t have that option, one friend suggested “Things I Wish I’d Known Before I got Married.” Then the missionary ladies from our home church gave me the rest of these ideas, even though I haven’t had a chance to check them out:

What would you add?