“Why do you like it here?” is a question I hear frequently from people I have just met. I don't readily fit into their mental schematics, so they are trying to figure me out. In the minds of many, I am doing life backwards. For the majority of Dominicans, the end goal is to move to the United States, or at least secure a 10 year tourist visa. But here I am, the US citizen who has moved to the Dominican Republic. Because of my age—it's not like I’ve retired here in an Italian-owned penthouse on the beach—it makes me a bit of a curiosity.
My response is always on the tip of my tongue, “I like it here because my husband lives here.” The answer gives people a high, even though now they are doubly astonished. Not only am I choosing to live here, I genuinely love my husband, I am actually married to my husband, and my husband is not using me to immediately gain a green card.
In the Dominican Republic, all of those concepts are uncommon.
First, if two people are going to get together, it is generally not driven by love, but by infatuation and by prospect, i.e., what can this person give me? Within the relationship, the two maintain their independence. He has his life and she has her life. They try not to need each other.
Accordingly, second, legal marriage is also uncommon. People might more or less live together for 20 years, and have children together, but not actually be married.
A few years ago, the Dominican Republic was only on my radar because my sister was working here in a private school. I remember her telling me that occasionally the church she went to held, essentially, mass marriages for all the couples who had been living together for years but had converted to Christianity and realized they should make some vows before God and men. At the time, it seemed like such a foreign concept. “Mass marriages.”
Granted, marriage is becoming less common in the United States, and we all know how most relationships on the mainland end. But, believe it or not, love and fidelity are even more scarce on this island. If one wants to get scientific about it, it is probably influenced by the scarcity of financial resources. Money is arguably the thing that puts the most stress on relationships, and even though the Dominican Republic is more Diestic and Christian than the US, it is poorer, which I believe has resulted in the breakdown of the marital unit. In other words, despite the presence of religion, the values of love and marriage cannot get footholds in this economic climate.
So here, the love my husband and I share is a countercultural oddity. The strangeness of the deal is sealed by the fact that we are choosing to live here. When an American marries a Dominican, the two almost always move directly to the United States since the majority of Dominicans who marry Americans do so to win residency. The stereotype runs deep. Case in point, two days after Victor and I married, he was released from his full-time job. The owner of the company, who had never even met my husband, assumed that Victor would be moving to the US within a year or two, and he did not want to invest in someone who would not be with the company long term. Victor’s coworkers and managers were shocked by the decision and one even tried to get him reinstated, but to no avail. The take-an-american-bride-and-run-off-to-the-States-with-her stereotype is engrained in people’s minds.
(Happy ending to the story: even though the layoff meant 2 months of financial discomfort in our brand spanking new marriage, the free time gave us the space we needed to cultivate our friendship as husband and wife, and the new job that came along has better hours, better pay, uses his giftings, and provided the relationship that lead to a full university scholarship for Victor and a job offer for me, if I can get my Spanish up to a professional level. So the owner’s biased, ruthless decision actually helped us).
Or, take just last week, for instance. One of my husband’s athletes told us that a few of her friends were talking to her about us. These other athletes don’t know us personally, but they are watching us, watching the “odd” life we lead. Her friends were asking her why Victor has not sent me to the States to work, or why I have not gone volitionally. Knowing us well, my husband’s athlete explained to her friends that being together is more important to us than having a lot of money. Because that’s another stereotype: the American wife who lives in the US, working and sending money, while the Dominican husband lives the high life on the island, forsaking sexual fidelity to his bride at the same time.
If it’s not yet apparent, there are many stereotypes and they are all negative. This is not to say that perhaps one day I would not find myself working in the States out of necessity, but our lifestyles
would still break the stereotype.
But what about love in the US? Even if Victor and I both move to the United States in the future, like his former employer thought we would, I think we would still find ourselves living in a countercultural love. That being said, at least in my circles, I wouldn’t say our marriage itself is comparatively that strange. I am blessed to know a remarkable number of couples where the husband and wife are radically in love with one another. It’s true that abuse and unhappiness are easily hidden, but it doesn’t always prevail, despite what cynics (and indeed my former self) might say.
What I do know is that when you are in love, it doesn’t ultimately matter where you live. For this, Victor and I are somewhat ambivalent about which country we call home.
Separation has been, and will continue to be, inevitable in our relationship. We are both citizens of different countries, after all. What’s more, life doesn’t go as planned, and jams happen. However, I am 100% confident that even in separation our love will prevail, and that we will continue to be given the grace (because it is only by God’s grace that it happens) to have a stronger, more pure love than the majority, one that makes people say, “say what?”
PS. The title is a Miracle Max quote from Princess Bride, in case it was lost on you.
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