Adult children dating - different faiths and races

Parent Cafe
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It must be very hard to have your kids so far away! I am lucky that this one is close.

Future SIL’s family is very close - the cousins, aunts and uncles are involved in a daily basis and they have welcomed my daughter like nobody’s business, even though they won’t be married in a Catholic church! But I suspect that the compromise for holidays will be getting together to celebrate the birthday and anniversary in December, rather than Christmas, doing a leftover feast on Thanksgiving Friday, and celebrating Palm Sunday instead of Easter. All of which are completely fine and I am grateful, but there is and will be a sense (from this and some other things about the wedding) that future SIL will compromise only so much as he gets exactly what he wants with his family. The positive aspect is that for the first time in her life, my D has a big, loving, fun extended family which we could never give her. They are all very good to her and I love to see that.

282

Maybe they will invite you to join them at his family’s events, or maybe they will host them and invite everyone to their place.

283

There is a real possibility that my D will want to host and we would be all up for that. But their family will not invite us, although we would come sometimes. They aren’t particularly friendly to us, not unfriendly, just not interested. I actually didn’t even meet some of his immediate family at the engagement party because they are that disinterested.

284

Both of my parents were divorced and remarried, and DH’s were also divorced and re-married, though they divorced again after that. So FOUR sets of grandparents. Holidays were always very very very stressful, having to divide our time between the four of them. There were times we just wanted to escape. We finally did that last Christmas, when we took our girls to Germany.

285

I know where you’re coming from.

My (non-Jewish) parents were divorced when I was a child. My husband’s (Jewish) parents divorced at around the time when we got engaged, and very quickly after that, each of them married non-Jews.

So all of a sudden, my then-fiance, who had never in his life celebrated Christmas, was expected to participate in the Christmas celebrations of four families.

286

How did that go, Marian?

287

I will love and accept whomever my son chooses simply because she loves him. How can I not love someone who sees what I do in my amazing son? Her good taste is enough for me.

I came to this conclusion after years of being told in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways that I was not “good enough” for my husband whose mother thought me weak-minded because of my belief in God and because I once went to beauty school. Never mind my subsequent achievements or the fact that her son has loved me for almost 40 years. He almost never talks to or sees her. She has lost so much.

288

I think people who want their children to marry only within the religion in which they were raised, whose desire for that is so strong that they would be extremely hurt if they did not, are in essence saying they want their children to “stick to their own kind.” That’s different than saying that if you marry someone with vastly different views you may find it difficult to find a common ground; my understanding of what OP is saying is that she doesn’t want a common ground because that may dilute her beliefs. While I agree wholeheartedly that it’s reasonable to want posters to understand the history of your ancestors to put your opinions into perspective, it’s only fair if we do that for other posters as well.

It wasn’t so long ago that, in this country, the intent behind phrases like “stick to your own kind,” and all its euphemisms, was to keep blacks from “mixing” with whites. I can see why Calicash would find the concept objectionable and even hurtful. It was used between the Irish and the Italians and between different socioeconomic classes as well, and probably other groups that I’ve either forgotten about or was never fully aware of, and it’s been a long road to where we are now. Even if you’re not voicing the opinion in those words and believe that your desire is for the purist of reasons, it’s an emotionally charged concept.

I think that when we encourage our children to only marry within a specific category, it’s just a small step away from excluding based on those categories. What’s the difference between saying, “I don’t want you to marry him because he’s not Catholic,” and “I don’t want you to marry him because he is Catholic,” and not Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox or whatever? If you can tell your children you don’t want them to marry someone who’s not Jewish, can a Catholic family tell their children they don’t want them to marry someone who is? Both are speaking with the intent of preserving their religious heritage. I suspect OP would find the second phrase hurtful. Other posters are just saying they find the first hurtful as well.

289

And, from a slightly different viewpoint, how could you not accept the person that your son has chosen to spend his life with? How could you reject the person whom he loves? His good taste is a factor, too.

290

The son who just got married had a gf in college who was seriously high maintenance. She was sweet and we were of course kind to her and very welcoming, but we were not disappointed when he broke up with her. All I said once, when asked, was that the need to be needed felt nice, but it got old. He ultimately learned that. Oh, and her mother was horrid. Not only ridiculously over controlling but at times mean. Glad he didn’t get her for a MIL

291

<<<
DH’s brother also married a catholic. They raised their kids jewish. Their oldest is 9 mos older than my oldest. However, she said to me once, a long time ago, that our late MIL said, when coming to our older s’s bris, that now she was going to see her first “real” grandson. Gosh, I really HOPE our MIL did not say that, or that my SIL misheard that.


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@jym626 I think someone else here had a somewhat similar experience. Was it @zoosermom ? There are some people who might say something like that.

I agree with you with the SMH !!

(God please give me grandkids!! any which way they come!)

292

…changing the heart is a whole other matter.

293

@jym626, I once worked with someone who told me that at her Conservative synagogue there was some kind of little ritual celebration of the birth of a member’s grandchild…if the child was Jewish according to their rules. (In other words, if the mother was not born Jewish, a conversion did not necessarily count.) If the child’s mother was not Jewish, the birth of the child was not recognized. At all. (I’m sure you know what this ceremony is called, I’ve forgotten.)

This struck me as mind-bogglingly cruel and small-minded, but clearly in the eyes of my coworker it was justified and the grandparent should just accept it.

Given that, I don’t find it even faintly surprising that your MIL would make such a remark, and I think you should do your SIL the favor of believing her. (And good for her for managing to rise above it! I’m glad that the rest of your family is welcoming to her.)

294

“If you can tell your children you don’t want them to marry someone who’s not Jewish, can a Catholic family tell their children they don’t want them to marry someone who is? Both are speaking with the intent of preserving their religious heritage. I suspect OP would find the second phrase hurtful.”

I would appreciate the honesty actually. I would rather my son know upfront that the non-Jewish family was not feeling welcoming towards him or that they had concerns based on his Jewish religion. Prefer the honesty to whispers behind his back and a cold reception. That is information that should be disclosed upfront.

295

But it’s all so frickin’ arbitrary. That’s what gets me. It’s just the random luck of the draw that your son was born to a Jewish household (or whatever). It’s the random luck of the draw that I happened to be born to a Catholic mother and Jewish father. It’s not a reflection on me.

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@Pizzagirl, many religious people would disagree with idea of “random luck of the draw” ruling such things, since they believe that a Supreme Being is in charge.

Not me, obviously. :smiley:

297

Consolation, is that ceremony to welcome the child into the community or just to congratulate the member on becoming a grandparent? My denomination officially acknowledges the birth of a child into the congregation. My kids, who were born in to the congregation, had them. My sister’s children, who were raised Catholic did not.

298

Actually I’ve no idea what that grandchild ceremony is, consolation. I have never heard of it. And ironically my pre MIL was married previously, to someone who wasn’t Jewish. So that was a particularly unkind thing to say, if she really said it. There is a chance she did not, as SIL has a tendency to embellish.

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A child born to a congregant is born into the congregational community. A Jewish grandchild born across the country, or equally a non-Jewish child grandchild born across the country, is not born into the congregation.

300

It is very easy with religion to wonder what the big fuss is about with marrying outside the faith, and as someone who grew up without a religion in the house, who experienced it as an adult and then have migrated into having faith and spiritual beliefs but no particular religion, it can be alien to me people would care. With Jews, maybe because I have been around a lot of Jewish people in my life and I see the way things play out, to me it is a lot more than religion it is also the culture, and if you look at the Jews and their history, all the struggles to maintain their identity in foreign places, the holocaust and its aftermath that wiped out a significant percent of Jews in the world, even pretty liberal Jews, or humanistic or cultural ones, have the preference that who there kids find are within the faith/culture,to try and keep it alive. To be honest, I can also understand the fear because sadly, there is enough anti semitism out there, whether overt or subsconcious, where there can be this wall that happens to somehow block out the Jewish side of the family (to be fair, I also have seen where a person of faith, any kind, marries an atheist, where the religious aspects are shut out, though a bit less common).

With Christians who care, it often boils down IME to the idea that their faith is somehow ‘the only one’, for example, among Catholics that I have seen, the more liberal, ‘cafeteria catholics’ are generally a lot less upset if their kids marry a non catholic than those who consider themselves more traditional. With Muslims and evangelical Christians IME, there are very strong prohibitions against marrying outside not only the faith (IE Islam or Christianity) but their particular version of it (ie Sunni/Shia/Sufti), so it gets complicated (same way that IME orthodox Jews and some conservatives would want the potential in law to be of the same).

I think with religion the part I would struggle with is if the person he felt attracted to had views widely divergent from mine, not about the beliefs themselves, but for example, if they were openly bigoted against people of other faiths, or were very anti semitic or homophobic, it would be hard. I don’t think I would have much problem with people of other races, my son has dated women pretty much exclusively outside our race, and that wasn’t a factor with my wife or I at all, all we cared about was who they were as a person and how they treated our son (we actually are secretly hoping that whoever he finds, keeps him on his toes, think someone like Maureen O’Hara at her best lol).

What I don’t understand is when it leads to total rejection, where they for example ignore grandchildren or treat the grandchildren of the ‘suspect’ relationship badly or worse than their other grandchildren, to be that is an abomination, and if it is over religion that is really pathetic, because children are not responsible for who their parents are, are innocent, and every religion I know of treats them as something special (or should, if they followed their own teachings…). A grandchild to me would be a precious thing, and whether he was part X and part Y, part this and part that, wouldn’t matter, would still be a precious thing, and those who would reject a grandchild based on race or religion has to be pretty stone hearted IMO.