Next, a man describes how he and his Japanese wife were married at a young age, which led to a conflict of interests as they grew older: Apart from that, everything in our marriage was going well…” My wife seems to have lost all of her sex drive, although I still have mine. If we split, the reason will be due to the absence of sex in our marriage. Things have spiraled down to the point where my wife and I are discussing whether or not she will take the children back with her to Japan. “I’m currently on the verge of getting divorced. Here’s from a man whose marriage appears to be in a critical condition: Many men listed issues of love, sex, and compatibility as being big factors in their divorces. We really do love each other, but I guess in reality love alone isn’t enough. They like him as a person, but they don’t believe that he can make me happy. “My family is very opposed to this relationship. However, after a period of 12 years, they have started dating again, only to be met with opposition from both families: They had once dated in the past, but the relationship eventually became strained due to their different ways of thinking and separate values, especially regarding work. The next anecdote is a bit different, as the writer happens to be a foreign woman in a relationship with a Japanese man. I ended up remarrying a woman who like me also doesn’t want children but would rather focus her energy on work.”
I’m not saying that the divorce wasn’t painful, but we could split fairly amicably.
My wife wanted to have kids, and I didn’t. “In my case, the reason for our divorce was simple. Here’s what one man had to say about his experience: Like any other couple in the world, issues surrounding children can either make or break a relationship. The man remarks that he and his ex-wife still love each other, but cannot be together due to the circumstances. Either I would have to bring my parents to Japan or my wife would have to bring her parents to Virginia.” “Because there was no one but me to take care of my aging parents, I would have had to leave Japan. Instead, it all boiled down to logistics: According to him, although cultural misunderstandings were present in his marriage, they were not the root cause for divorce because he and his wife were both aware of and accepted the differences.
Ultimately, I couldn’t live up to those expectations.”Īnother man was placed in a different terrible situation. “I think the reason for my divorce what that I mistakenly thought I could make everyone happy because I had a well-paying job. But such an extravagant lifestyle on top of paying off expensive school fees, child support from a previous marriage, and helping his wife’s parents financially proved to be too much: He tried to please his wife by buying a nice house, car, and going on overseas vacations. One man mentions how he couldn’t afford to keep up with payments month after month. Let’s take a look at some of those reasons.įirst, practical issues concerning family and money played a large role in their decisions. Japanese blogger Madame Riri recently posted an article exploring this issue by sharing the stories of men who were asked to described the reasons they divorced their Japanese wives. While there is a certain allure to the thought of having a spouse from another country, such marriages also comes with their own hardships, and it is said that as many as 40% of international marriages end in divorce. Instead, it seems that a combination of other factors played the decisive role. You might be surprised to learn that the main catalyst for divorce in each of their scenarios was rarely related directly to cultural differences.
While some of their complaints were understandable and others were just downright silly (you can’t deal with tofu? C’mon!), international relationships in real life don’t always end as happily as in the movie "My Darling is a Foreigner."Ĭontinuing the international marriage theme in a more unfortunate direction, we now bring you the voices of some foreign men who have gone through the experience of divorcing Japanese women. Earlier this month, we brought you an article about foreign men sounding off on the difficulties of having a Japanese wife.