Something missing in our marriage: emotional responses to marital conflict in Chinese-American couples

Abstract

There is significant literature regarding marital conflict for couples of the same cultural background, but few studies focus on Chinese-American couples, which are becoming increasingly common. The purpose of this research is twofold. The first goal is to begin to understand the lived experience of marital conflict for Chinese women married to American men. The second goal is to better understand these Chinese women's responses to such conflicts, in particular their emotional responses, and their choices for dealing with these conflicts. Conversational interviewing and narratives analysis were employed in this qualitative research. Six Chinese women who were not raised in the US and who are married to American men participated in this study. Six primary themes emerged from the narratives. The Chinese women: 1) have unique, individual reasons for marrying American men; 2) do not experience language differences as a source of conflict in their intercultural marriages; 3) have difficulty accepting and adjusting to what they see as independence on the part of their American husbands; 4) experience qi liang ... in their intercultural marriages; 5) experience anger in their intercultural marriages; and 6) use emotion-linked strategies to elicit attention from their husbands. It would be interesting to study the perspective of the American men in these intercultural relationships, and to compare and contrast their perceptions of the sources of conflict. Future research should examine other Asian women, for there are significant numbers of women from Korea and Japan now marrying American men.