They said it wouldn’t last...
As Britain prepares to celebrate the festival of love, four couples explain how they managed to transcend fundamental differences of culture and lifestyle and build happy lives together. By Marina Gask
Unconditional love overcame immense differences for Mia and Rob
The flight of Cupid’s arrow is notoriously unpredictable. Sometimes people fall in love with the boy (or girl) next door. Sometimes mutual friends set us up, with varying degrees of subtlety and success. But sometimes people fall for another human being who seems to be not only not their “type”, but from a different planet altogether. The eyes meet, the arrow hits home. It will never last, friends say. But sometimes it does…
So what if they happen to be from a different background or your polar opposite? “My only love”, as Shakespeare’s Juliet lamented, “sprung from my only hate”? Too late, your romantic fate is sealed. Love has no boundaries, even when you don’t, on paper, seem like a good fit. Extroverts pair with introverts; golf fans fall for die-hard Gooners.
Clearly, fundamental differences in personality, lifestyle or upbringing don’t need to stand in the way of happiness, even if dating algorithms would never match you. One in every 10 UK couples identifies as intercultural and, according to the 2001-11 Census, one to two per cent of all UK marriages are interfaith.
“We’re drawn towards certain individuals, almost as if we’ve known them our whole lives,” says psychotherapist Malcolm Stern, author of Slay Your Dragons with Compassion. “It’s that easy dialogue that happens between you the second you meet that creates an instant connection. Somehow you just click.”
Of course, where there are profound cultural and religious differences, or a large age gap, opposition from family members, or society in general can give a certain “us against the world” feeling. Research shows that the average age difference for UK couples is between three and five years. But there are long-term marriages where the divide is greater. Somehow these marriages do work.
If you make each other happy, who’s to say what’s right or wrong in love?
“When others don’t approve, it can bond you if you see the lunacy of their disapproval,” says Stern. “If you’re willing to meet people for who they are, not for what they look like, and other people challenge you on that, you will feel a sense of rebellion. At a deep level, we are much more similar as human beings than we are different. It’s society that’s created all these differences.”
Finding out that you were born in different decades or come from a totally different background, or opposite sides of the political spectrum, like Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway and her Trump critic husband George, can certainly lead to some interesting discussions, but does it have to drive you apart? Not necessarily.
“Sometimes there are different undercurrents going on,” says Stern. “We could say that a relationship between opposites doesn’t look like it will work, but there’ll be some deep soul connection where you really ‘get’ the other person. It doesn’t matter that you’re different if you feel they get you in ways that other people don’t.”
If you have a similar outlook, there’s a good chance your love will endure. But if you have markedly different personalities, a recent study found that while opposites may attract at first, after a while they may well start attacking each other, with differences leading to frustration and animosity.
Psychologist Edward Waring found that self-disclosure is the way to build intimacy between couples who seem incompatible, in order to discover what values, beliefs, and personality traits they share and to reveal what really matters to them. According to the Association for Psychological Science, chemistry emerges from interactions and encompasses the feeling that a relationship is special and different from other ones.
Not that we have a choice in the matter when Cupid comes knocking – as these four couples can attest.
When Lee and I first got together in the mid-1990s at law school, no one thought we’d last. Our backgrounds were just so different, religiously, culturally and socio-economically. But we now have three wonderful children, 18, 16 and 14, and share a business together. In June we will celebrate our 22nd wedding anniversary.
The day I was introduced to Lee by a friend, out of 150-odd students in the lecture theatre, he was the one I’d noticed. He was funny, a great conversationalist and we had similar interests – reading, music and bands. We both liked U2, who he’d seen live. And on that first night we both kind of knew. He said: “this feels like the one” and we were together from then onwards. Our lecturers and fellow students said: “You’re the one couple on the course who’ll get married – but then split up.” But so far so good.
Our backgrounds were different in pretty much every way: my parents are both doctors who immigrated from Pakistan in the 1960s, whereas my husband grew up in a working-class, almost exclusively white town and his parents worked for a local factory. My family have a solid sense of pride in our culture, heritage and Muslim religion, and Lee’s family were likewise conscious of their own culture and traditions and never assumed anyone would “marry out”. Both families were shocked when we introduced the other to them. My parents worried that it was too big a mismatch and that it wouldn’t last. They both adore him now. His family has been very welcoming but they found it awkward to start with, too.
The only time the class difference was an issue was when discussing whether the children should go to private or state school, like he did. In the end we had to choose private as, having just moved back from abroad, our choice of state schools wasn’t great.
Without telling me he was planning it, Lee became a Muslim in 1997. Friends said: “He did that because of you,” but it’s more than that. He loves the food, has stopped drinking and celebrates Eid – and we’ve been to Pakistan together.
We’re quite different people but have complementary traits and skills. We give each other space to pursue our own interests, pick our battles and don’t sweat the small stuff. Ultimately when we need to, we step up for each other.
Lee says When I met Safoora, knowing we came from such different backgrounds did give me pause, but my horizons had been expanded by being at uni, and anyway Safoora is amazing and I was smitten. Of course, it took a while for the two families to get used to each other, especially with different expectations of what big family occasions like birthdays and weddings would involve. When I wouldn’t toast my brother with champagne at his wedding, my mum worried that my new journey might be a rejection of my upbringing rather than a progression, that they were losing me – but they can now see that’s not the case and we all get along pretty well.