ABSTRACT
The United States includes individuals drawn from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds.1 Most of us face diversity in school, at work, and in our neighborhoods, but there are an increasing number of individuals who choose to cross cultural boundaries in that most intimate of relationships-marriage.2 These are not people who face cultural differences briefly when in the public realm or for a week when on vacation to an exotic location.3 They have committed toing with difference in their own homes, for their entire lives “until death do us part” as many wedding ceremonies still state. A wedding marks the beginning of a marriage. As Mayer (1985) argued:
The issue of the wedding and the marriage ceremony itself is frequently the first and most significant test of how a young couple will deal with the twin tugs of their love for each other and their dual heritage. Often that issue will affect all subsequent marital negotiations: questions concerning each spouse’s familiarity with his and her respective traditions, emotional attachments thereto, attachments to parents, and varying degrees of embeddedness on the part of each in his or her community of origin, (pp. 191-192)
Other resolutions are less public, thus both more flexible and more negotiable.4
