When I first wrote this a month ago, I took a taxicab home. The driver was a 28 year male Pakistani who had been married for a year. His wife was also from Pakistan. We had a long ride so ended up talking about relationships.
This comes up for me at this time of year because April 16th would have been my 25th wedding anniversary and was also the 30th wedding anniversary of one of my brother's and his wife.
The cab driver and I talked about morals and ethics, about regular people and how many illegitimate births there are and multiple marriages. We both agreed that this used to be millionaire movie star territory, people who could afford financially to support children and get whatever help they needed.
We both felt that many arrangements now were not something we had even heard of perhaps as little as 10 years ago.
Up until at least the late 1980's the much married actresses such as Zsa Zsa Gabor's and Elizabeth Taylor's were rare. Unmarried mothers were not likely to advertise the fact, in Hollywood or anywhere else.
Today the non married middle class mother and/or unmarried couple with children is more common. In Quebec apparently, the common law relationship now predominates, whether a couple has children or not. I think that maybe even 10 years ago, people tended to get married either before they had children or probably when they decided to have children, even sometimes just before the birth. Now it is as likely that if they have decided on a common law relationship they may not change it whether children are planned or born.
I told the driver that my parents, like him and his wife, were both of the same nationality and religion. My own situation and that of some of my siblings was however, varied in nationality and religion in some cases. Though many years have passed, there has never been a major argument about religion or ethnicity in any of our homes.
The driver said he didn't mind the idea of mixed race or religion in marriage. I said that I had read that Hinduism and Judaism were religions that you needed to be born into to understand. I didn't know whether two different religions and/or ethnicities had any more problems than any other couple does today.
I hate to make a generalization about how long modern marriages last, except that the statistics are not very good for the survival of any marriage and a great number of them end in divorce. Perhaps the key is committing to a relationship or a marriage in the first place and deciding to work hard to make it work.
It is also possible that two belief systems coming together might just mean that both belief systems and cultures can be shared and respected by the other partner. It may be that couples who are loving and kind to each other, are also tolerant and cooperative about times of the year where important holy/holidays are taking place. I could easily see a lot of happiness when both parties celebrate important events together and explain things they love to their children and families.
I am beginning to think that in a lot of instances mixing cultures and religions in a loving committed relationship might be an enriching experience for everyone, with much love and spiritual growth as well as tolerance and understanding.
SEE ALSO: OUR CITY - LEARNING ABOUT THE WHOLE WORLD FROM HOME
Note: The Merging Cultures and Religions - Families Today and the other essay I mention just above this note were originally one long essay trying to talk about more than one subject and possibly not doing justice to either. Rewritten today May 21, 2013 and newly published, I hope they do more justice to both subjects as separate essays.
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