Of Matters Marriage and Culture...

Someone recently had the cultural shock of her life when she was expected to perform certain rituals following an event in the family she was married into. You see this person is from a different tribe so her husband’s culture is more or less foreign to her. She didn’t understand why she was expected to perform these rituals because according to her it was not her culture, to which she was told that as a wife married into the tribe this was expected of her. These events brought up a heated discussion among my networks regarding intertribal, interracial basically intercultural marriages. Some of the comments below...

 

“People should just marry their own to avoid such issues”

 

“If I am expected to perform rituals foreign to me then my husband should also perform my tribe’s rituals”

 

“I now understand why certain cultures are homogenous and enforce who their children marry”

 

“Did she not research the culture into which she was marrying, I mean all this could have been avoided with a bit of research”

 

This is an issue that is becoming more and more prevalent thanks to globalisation which means people are living far away from home and the likelihood of marrying outside of one’s culture is very high, however the majority of the population still marry within their own cultures. You can’t help who you fall in love with but then again marrying for love is a very recent concept and love alone is not enough to hold a marriage together. Differences in culture can make or break a marriage.

 

In my opinion if you are a person for whom upholding your language, your culture and your traditions is of upmost importance then please marry somebody you are culturally aligned to. If these don’t matter to you then by all means marry whoever you want to, but please do due diligence and thoroughly research the culture into which you are marrying understand it, weigh if you can live with or compromise on their traditions and so on and so forth.

 

Research and knowing the traditions of the culture you are marrying into is very important (especially  for my African people) . The story goes about a person from a different tribe who rushed into marriage with a person from a particular region of a certain tribe without doing due diligence. Now the people from this tribe themselves typically do not marry into/from this particular region because their traditions are considered extreme in relation to the other regions of the same tribe. In fact the saying goes among this tribe that “people from that region should just marry each other because they understand their traditions better than the rest of us” in other words let them deal with each other and leave the rest of us alone. Needless to say the marriage did not last very long thanks to the extreme culture shock experienced by the outsider.

 

Link to my E-Book below

 

As an Amazon Affiliate I may earn a commission from qualifying purchases.