Love across cultures

Dear Readers!

Welcome to the second issue of the SIETAR Europe E-Magazine.

The second issue is dedicated to love, dating and marriage across cultures.

Personal intercultural relationships are as old as the world itself. Already in the ancient times the queens, kings, pharaohs, and Caesars chose their spouses from other countries and several languages have been a part of many royal families’ everyday life. History is rich with examples of when the intercultural marriages have saved countries from war and destruction. Both classic and modern world literature portrays endless variations of intercultural and interfaith unions.

In the era of Globalization personal relationships across cultures are becoming a part of our daily life. And where a few decades ago personal intercultural relationships were not as common as today among ordinary people, nowadays mixed matches represent a rich ethnic and cultural diversity.

The desire for love and intimacy is a natural wish of every human being. One can say that a need to share a life with a close person is a universal need of all people. However, the expression of love, the understanding what family and marriage mean, the attitude to health, work, for example, as well as different religious affiliations, etc. make our word so culturally diverse. It is particularly the things that people often take for granted in monocultural unions make intercultural relationship more complex.

When we talk about intercultural marriages we cannot limit this concept purely to love and romantic relationships, as odd as it might sound. It’s not a secret that the amount of crime connected with the Mail-Order Bride business has also increased in the recent years. And while information about some cases is brought to us by media, many traumatic and sad stories have not found a voice yet. I would like to encourage all interculturalists to stretch their helping hand to those who due to different reasons find themselves in a miserable situation in a foreign country.

When we planned this issue we thought that the reader would be interested to read stories told by intercultural couples and the works of the scholars doing research in this field. After all of the contributions arrived, it became clear that many scholars also have also a personal story to tell.

Apart from their articles, the intercultural couples who contributed to this Magazine were asked to name the biggest challenge and their most enriching experience of their mixed pairing. Each author had to state the main interest in the field of intercultural communication.

We would like to promote an open dialogue between the authors and the readers, please have your say in the forums. We will also be happy to hear your comments and suggestions for future issues. In this issue we have also a competition. Each reader can vote which article deserves to win a prize. The winner will be announced in the next issue.

And last, but not least, I would like to thank all authors of this issue for sharing their work and stories with us. I also would like to express my gratitude to the editorial board Maria Jicheva, Anja Krüger and George Simons and to Robert Johnson for reading the issue.

We have enjoyed putting the issue together. I hope you will enjoy reading it and that you will come back to us in autumn for the third issue of SIETAR Europe E-Magazine.

		Karina Holm Gabrielyan Editor September 2006