By Guest Blogger, Wendy Williams
When Dangerous Lee invited me to write a guest post, the thing that attracted me most to the opportunity was the demographic group who read her blog, namely young professional women who are well educated. It’s the same demographic that I write about in my book on multicultural romance and marriage titled The Globalisation of Love. You see, well educated females are more likely to seek out a partner who is different either in culture, religion, or race. I guess the curiosity that leads you to higher education and helps you slog through all those text books also leads you to consider looking over the cultural fence to see what romantic opportunities are available. It’s a hotly debated topic within the Black community too. Black women who ‘marry out’ and find true love with a pasty White boy, a Latin lover, or other sexy foreigner are often criticized within the Black community for ‘betraying their own kind’. So I thought I would share the following story.
When I first started researching for The Globalisation of Love, I interviewed multicultural, interfaith and biracial partners from all over the world. One young couple in particular, well educated professionals of course, taught me about looking over the cultural fence and ‘marrying out’.
Sheida was a Black American woman from Chicago. Tamàs was a Romanian man from Transylvania, the Hungarian-speaking part of the country. They are multicultural, biracial, interfaith, multilingual and intercontinental. I sat with my pen posed and ready to capture their cultural clashes in the prose of a best-selling exposé. Then they started to tell me how much alike they are and how they have not really even noticed cultural differences. The interview continued for almost three hours and there was not a cultural conflict to be heard. (Visions of my best-selling book fizzled before me.)
The common thing that defined Sheida and Tamàs, and where they found a strong personal connection with each other, was their experience as a member of a minority group within their own country. Sheida’s cultural experience is as a Black woman in a predominantly White society with a brutal history of slavery and continued oppression toward Blacks. Tamàs’ experience is as a Hungarian member in a Romanian speaking country and from a region which historically did not belong to today’s Romania.
Sheida and Tamàs have their respective patchworks of cultural norms and values, practices and beliefs, traditions, customs, language, and religion which is part of their national cultural profile, but what defined them most as individuals with respect to their native culture was a feeling of ‘not belonging’ and even of discrimination. Neither Sheida nor Tamàs felt that they had ‘married out’. They had found in each other a place where they both belonged and felt comfortable and understood. They had found their cultural homeland together. Regardless of culture, religion, or race, it’s the globalisation of love, isn’t it?
Love & peace & globalisation,
Wendy
