Well, in the new book “Marriage of Figaro,” Lisa Lorle, a California-based writer and consultant, addresses the issue of how marriage should function for a marital relationship with so much frequency and importance. The United States, she contends, has grown so quickly through immigration that we are seeing two races living together in most cities. “We are a population of colors and creeds,” she writes, and “race and nationality no longer have to be used as terms of designation.” Race or nationality no longer have to be used as criteria for sorting out the marriages that go together. “iculturalism,” which is the ideology of “diversity” that now pervades our nation’s schools and universities, has made such sorting impossible, she claims.
As a result, our expanding cultural diversity has produced unprecedented levels of interracial love, especially in the United States. In a country where it is not unusual to see Chinese, Japanese, and Korean couples in affluent suburban homes, the number of interracial marriages between whites and people of other races continues to grow. One result has been to create “post-racial” or multi-racial communities, where members of different cultures live together in harmony. If this is true, then marriage within these communities should be no different than the kinds of marriages outside them, and the rules for such relationships should be no different from those that would apply to any other community.
So where do we draw the line, in terms of the proportion of race to the average age of the spouse in a relationship, and how do we know when a marriage is truly a union worthy of the commitment? The book’s co-author, Mark Lowery, an emeritus professor at UCLA, and Lisa Lorle, an experienced mediator, offer insightful insights into the dynamics of marital relationships where there are growing differences along both dimensions. It is important, as these two suggest, to take race and ethnicity into account when considering marriage, since there is often a very large impact on age differences. But equally important is the proportion of age to overall wealth that influences attitudes and behaviors.