About DoubleDutch

Status:

Considering a Move Abroad 

Gender:

Male

Currently Lives:

Citizen Of:

Netherlands

Some Forum Posts:

Netherlands: The 'Dark Side' to Integration:

Interesting topic, which actually made me register on this site. Just to give you some background: I am Dutch as well, and my partner has the American nationality, even though she is originally Asian. She has lived most of her life in the US and Europe (France and UK) though. We both have children from our past relationships, who are all grown up and live by themselves already. Apart from her US passport she holds permanent citizenship of France, and since a couple of years she spends a good part of her time here with me in the Netherlands, even though she still kept her house, and business in France. Because of her business she travels a lot within Europe as well as to the Far East, and we often do that together. Having read the original post, I recognized some of this in our relationship too. In the beginning of our relationship I had a tendency to "defend" certain aspects of our society, and to criticize some aspects of the American society (especially politics and "commercialized religion", as I sometimes called it). She made clear to me that, no matter how much she started to love the Netherlands, this sometimes annoyed her. We talked about this often and I came to realize that we Dutch like to see ourselves as internationally oriented people, but that we see and judge the World very much through our own orange glasses. Maybe this is also embedded in our culture and history. As a post stamp sized country we sometimes seem to feel the urge to justify ourselves in the big wide world, especially towards the big guys of this world. We tend to express a sort of self-righteousness. I think this is because somewhere in the back of our mind we know that life in our country is not as perfect as we would like it to be. Our so-called open-mindedness is sometimes little more than a facade, and a good part of our countrymen and -women are not the global villagers that we like to pretend to be, I often hear that for foreign visitors he Netherlands is a very easy country to visit, with the majority of people speaking English to some extent, but thanks to our relkationship and our talks, I also have come to realize that this does not automatically mean that it is an easy society to live in for someone from abroad. Of course, there are many countries where people are much more reserved and closed to foreigners who live there, but our "open society" is only open to a certain extent. Especially where it comes to really integrating in the society, like becoming part of social life. It is only in the recent year or so, that my partner has started to feel like part of my family, even though I can say nobody really excluded her (quite the contrary actually), but yes of course there is the language, there is the different cultural network and there is the totally different way she grew up and lived her life before she ended up in "my network". And vice-versa. She from her side has done a lot to make herself feel at home here, and that helps too, but it is a slow process that will never be 100% complete. In the same way, I will also never feel completely part of her family in Asia, her past life in the States, or the social circle that she built up after having lived 10+ years in France. In the meantime, she does have her friends here, she does have her own social life too, and feels perfectly comfortable to go anywhere with public transportation or talk with anyone around here. We have been talking a lot about this and we both know that this process is a natural part of living together with each of us having our own backgrounds and history for 50 years or so, before we came to live together. And accepting this, seems to make things a lot easier for both of us. In our case I believe it has taken away the feeling of "exclusion", and instead it has made us both feel that this is somehow a journey together, making life only more interesting. Not only for her, for me too. And admittedly, we are lucky. There is her place in France where we spend time, and there is the travel for her business quite often, together or she alone, so there is a lot of variation in our life. So by the time that any negative feelings or frustration might start to kick in, we almost always know that in a couple of weeks or months we will be somewhere else for a while. The original poster used the word "otherized", and I believe that word is spot on. But I guess this is almost inevitable everywhere, if you are new to a society, and you never could be catching up completely because everyone brings his or her own background, history and perceptions along. You can just do whatever you can and are willing to do, to learn, immerse and build your own life in the new environment, and the new environment can be more or less open to make you feel part of it, but of course your past life is part of you both sides and I do not think that anyone should try to deny or ignore that part of oneself. When you accept and enjoy these differences, things get a lot easier, and it will make both feel more comfortable to keep learning new things about each other, not because it is so necessary to integrate but because it makes life of both, and the relationship, richer and more interesting, with all the ups and downs that come with it. But that's life, not only for expats but for everyone, don't you think so?

Date Joined:

5/8/2014

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