Yet Rav Avigdor Miller (himself part of a successful intercultural marriage with an excellent Lithuanian-Jewish wife) quotes the Gemara as discouraging intercultural marriages.
A man and a woman are two different nationalities. נשים עם בפני עצמן הן - "Women are a nation of their own" (Shabbos 62a).
And that means men are their own separate nation too.
When you get married and soon after the chuppah you realize that you are very different from your spouse, don't think that it's a mistake.
Hashem made you different on purpose.
That's why you got married; so that you should have to learn how to get along with your wife. And a wife must learn how to get along with her husband.
And they perfect themselves as the years go by; they become better and better.
https://torasavigdor.org/qa/
(They're still in the process of reposting articles to their newly renovated site, so I don't have direct link to the original post at this point.)
So why complicate things even further by adding actual cultural differences to the existent gender differences?
What is an Intercultural Marriage?
But even within a country, culture clash exists.
For example, the culture, mentality, and communication style of a Brooklynite is not at all compatible with that of a Mississipian.
Growing up, I saw several marriages between guys from Brooklyn and ladies from the Deep South. Mostly they got along, but friction sometimes erupted solely due to cultural differences.
For example, the Southern woman sometimes find her New York husband's behavior embarrassing & over-the-top while the New Yorker felt impatient & annoyed with certain female behaviors considered completely normal & acceptable in the Deep South.
And before you say, "Well, that happens with lots of couples!" — please note these incidents occurred solely because of cultural differences.
It just exacerbates issues that already exist.
Another cultural clash results from wide age differences. (Over 15 years, and you nowadays face a generational rift.)
Baalei teshuvah, gerim, and FFBs also come from different cultures.
Meaning, a baal teshuvah from Chicago and an FFB from Chicago will still face cultural differences and adjustments to each other's families of origin.
Within ethnic groups, cultural differences also exist.
For example, Moroccan-Israelis and Persian-Israelis are very different culturally, even though many Ashkenazim automatically lump them together as "Sephardim."
Well-to-do, middle-class, and poor also differ culturally.
So that's what this series addresses: ALL the different kinds cultural mixing.
When Do Intercultural Marriages Work?
For example:
If you know British culture and Israeli culture, then you know they are exceptionally incompatible with each other.
Even if you personally (as do I) like each one separately, they do not mesh well together.
In fact, I often feel special admiration for British olim to Eretz Yisrael because I believe they face the greatest cultural adjustment out of all the olim from different countries. And they complain less than everyone else!
(A British friend once confided that Brits actually do find Israeli cultural very difficult to adjust to, but they usually don't complain because their British conditioning doesn't allow much for it.)
Yet I once met a British woman married to an Israeli man in Eretz Yisrael for 30 years — and she still glowed with contentment.
They lived happily together and raised their children in a harmonious, loving home.
She described how on their first date, they each took Hebrew-English dictionaries with them because neither spoke the other's language well enough to communicate without looking up tons of words.
They had a blast using their dictionaries on their dates.
That kind of communication difficulty does not sound like the recipe for a successful marriage, right?
To compound the cultural differences, she grew up in the more upper-class British society while he came from middle-class Israel (which at that time, more closely resembled the lower-income class of Western countries).
Even more, her home followed certain Jewish traditions without being traditionally Orthodox while his school, society, and family firmly followed the religious Zionist stream.
(She ended up frum and willing ran their home according to what were originally her husband's principles — principles that became hers too.)
So despite all their incompatible differences, why did their marriage succeed so beautifully?
Answer: Their basic personalities were compatible.
In fact, they met after mutual friends pressured them to go out together on a blind date (FYI: She was visiting or studying in Eretz Yisrael at that time.)
Meaning, people who knew them both observed tremendous compatibility between them.
So they fell in love and married solely because of compatibility.
And that innate compatibility enabled their marriage to overcome the cultural obstacles.