The pleasure and pain of mixed marriages

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): If it works it is like a house on fire. However if it does not work then the fire is for real and soon there is nothing left to call a house. The reference here is to mixed marriages between Indonesians and people from other parts of the world. Some are found to work and some others seem not to. And the reasons why that happens are a million and one.

Boris, 41 and Frida, 32, are lucky that even after five years of knowing each other they still get along like the proverbial house on fire.

"Most of my relatives and friends tell me that ours is a unique relationship," said Frida, a marketing and communications consultant.

She met Boris, her Yugoslav husband at work when she was 26 years old. Eventually she decided to marry him simply because she discovered that she could talk to him so easily.

Frida even has a great relationship with her mother-in-law, who lives with them here in Jakarta, and they too have a lot to say to each other.

"We even argue, but we never get personal," said Frida, as she fed her six-month-old daughter Ena, who at the moment is the center of attraction of the entire household.

Although film-maker Boris misses most of all the mountains and skiing, and all the friends he has left behind in Belgrade, home for him at the moment is Jakarta. Frida adds that even in the future she can't imagine staying away from Asia for any great length of time.

Many modern day Indonesian women complain that men from their own country are difficult to talk to; that men here prefer to see their women, but do not bother to listen to them, often turning matrimony into a union of meanness and martyrdom. It is felt that menfolk from western cultures treat women with far more respect and seriousness. They are also more willing to make an effort to communicate.

However many men from abroad, especially middle-aged ones with high dollar salaries, are also responsible for having brought ill-repute to their kind by their numerous dalliances with local women who are often very young and in dire economic need. Some people spoken to feel that it is a chicken-and-egg situation, where it is difficult to say who is the real culprit in this mockery of the man-woman relationship: the aging but affluent expatriate men, or the youthful, ever-willing native women, often from a depressed economic background.

"In the end, marriages like my own work only if each side is respectful of the other," said Ries, who married an Englishman 27 years ago.

When she first met him as a young receptionist at Hotel Indonesia, her first thought was not what nationality he was. Instead she recalls going through that unbearable lightness of being feeling, perhaps known as love.

Her very conservative Muslim family from Minangkabau in west Sumatra was totally against the match. But when Ries refused to see reason where love was concerned, and it was discovered that Stephen had already converted to Islam, the wedding took place in all its regalia.

As a mother of three daughters and a son, Ries recalls that the most trying times were those spent in the U.S. She had to make sure that the children kept in touch with their religion and culture. She was relieved when a few years ago the family returned to Jakarta. On the other hand, she does credit her stay in America for bringing out the best in her own, once very timid personality. America taught her that it is not chains that hold a home, but hundreds of little threads that sew people together through the years and make a marriage last.

As a United Nations family member she has lived in different corners of the world, and today feels happy at the thought that her grownup children have seen the best of both worlds in the east and the west. While England will always be a second home for her, it is in the hills of Bukittinggi in Minangkabau where both she and her husband plan to spend most of their time.

It is not always easy indeed for parents to see their son or daughter marry foreigners. And things must be more difficult if this mixed marriage involves not only one, but two members of the family. But a Central Javanese man, asked what it felt like to have given away both his daughters in marriage to foreigners, joked that at least his daughters were married. He did add that his dislike for foreigners dated back to the time when as a young freedom fighter he was fighting the Dutch who had colonized his country.

With two white men in the family now he can't afford to be prejudiced anymore, he said with a smile.

Thomas, 49, has another story. He felt that he would not be a thinking person today if his father had not brought home an Australian wife. He said it is because of his stepmother, Joan, that he is able to speak English fluently, and has also inherited her love for books. His own mother he remembers as being kind and loving but incapable of providing guidance to her children, or talking to them about what life is all about.

But for Monika from Switzerland and her husband, the dream lasted only during the courtship period. When the two woke up to wedlock, life was not so easy.

He is with Garuda airlines and she was a tour guide. They met in Bali, and the rest as they say is history. Seventeen years and two children later, there is little communication between the two. Monika feels that she was never made to feel part of her husband's close-knit Javanese family, although she speaks fluent bahasa Indonesia and was found participating in a group that meets periodically to study Koranic verses.

This group has certainly helped Angela, originally from England, to get to know what Islam is all about. Her husband comes from an Indonesian family with Arab origins. "We are very conservative," said Angela, who keeps her head covered and gives religious lessons to anybody who is interested.

That perhaps is the best part of mixed marriages, to get to know new people, different cultures and countries notwithstanding all those cynics of course who continue to wonder whether it's worthwhile going through so much to learn so little.