In today’s new marriages, it also takes couples to deal with marital issues of polyamory, open adoption, mixed marriage, house husbandry, single motherhood, and other circumstances known as a case modern love.
A good debate in mixed marriages is the inter-faith and intra-faith type of marriages. To set these two apart, an inter-faith marriage is a union of couples coming from diverse religious traditions, while intra-faith marriage is a union of couples coming from diverse denominations within the same religion.
Examples of Types Of Mixed Marriages
- There are other mixed married couples who believed in very diverse religions like a marriage between a Catholic man and a Buddhist woman, on the other hand quite similar to this case are mixed married couples coming from diverse faith groups that are under one religion like a marriage between a Southern Baptists man and an Assembly of God woman believer.
- There are other mixed married couples who are unique from each other, because one is very active in church and the other is not.
- There are other mixed married couples who believed in other religions aside from the ones they already have like in the extreme cases mixed married couples who allows a faith in groups of Satanism.
Actually, there have been no accounted general rules that will cater to all inter-faith and intra-faith mixed marriages. It’s experienced family problems and extent of differences can be diverging from each other. A mixed married inter-faith or intra-faith couple will start dealing with real life problems subsequent to several years since their marrying date; let’s say 10 years after, or upon having their first child.
Religious groups and communities came up with resolving steps in facing religious differences in mixed marriages. These are results of their hard work in assisting couples and families in life conflicts.
7 Common Techniques In Resolving Religious Differences
- Withdrawal – deviating (but just for some time) from religious activities
- Conversion – giving up a religious faith from one of the couple
- Compromise – converting to a different but one religion
- Multi-faith – joining different religious denominations, but one religion
- Ecumenical – combining the couple’s two religions into one
- Diversity – maintain 2 different religions
- Do nothing – exerting absolute no effort to resolve religious differences
A good book suggested for additional readings on the topic of mixed marriages is the “One Big Happy Family”, which is written by Rebecca Walker. It is a compilation of various essays conversing on smash class, race and gender stereotypes in collectively revealing the flexibility of a contemporary family unit. Walker is also the author of “To Be Real and Black White and Jewish”. She is a co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation.
…unity within diversity adds a richness and beauty to marriage and to life.
– Rev. Tom Chulak Uitarian-Universalist Minister
I have been married for several years in a mixed marriage. However, my marriage is not one that people often think of as a mixed marriage. In my case, my spouse has a different gender than I have. I am male. She is female. This has worked very well for us over the years.
You may wonder why I’m bringing this up. In the State of Connecticut, in the United States, it is no longer a requirement that marriages be mixed-gender marriages. Men can marry men, women can marry women. While it used to be that marriages between people of the same gender were illegal, that is not really different than how it used to be that marriages between people of different races or different religions used to be illegal.
I’ve often found it helpful to remind married couples that they are in a mixed gender marriage as a means of getting them to think more about the similarities and differences they have with their spouses as well as the similarities and differences they have with other couples.
This happens to relate to me very much right now.
My oldest son is planning to marry a very wonderful young woman this coming May; the day after they both graduate from West Point. I like her a lot. He’s Caucasian and she’s Latin, he’s protestant and she’s catholic. The catholic part is becoming somewhat of an issue because he must convert if they are to have a catholic wedding and there are implications for the children they will have some day. He’s doing a lot of soul searching right now to see if he wants to convert and I pray for him to do that which is right for him.
Diversity is always the key.
I’m an agnostic pentacostal, my wife is theradeva buddhist. We’ve had a few discussions of faith and where we stand (and how we will raise children), but we have never encroached on each others lifestyles.
I’m enjoying the blog, keep up the good work!
My wife and I are both Catholics so we do not have any differences both in beliefs and in practice if it concerns us and our family. Religious differences occurred when we joined a community. Not between my wife and I but with the other couples in the community. We had to withdraw from the community and had not come back in a long while.