Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my marriage and my family. My son just had his first birthday. My son’s important milestone is a great opportunity to reflect on the state of the family. In this article, I reflect on some of the relationship issues facing my family.

First, let me start with what’s been on my mind. I’ve been married for five years, now, and I’ve lived with my wife for seven. We have diverging interests that are not always being met. To make matters more complicated, we have a child together, with interests of his own (even if he doesn’t know it yet). This is the most complex my life has ever been, and the stakes are high.

Through conversations with my wife over the years, she values comfort, emotional support, and financial stability, all valid and valuable. I value these too. There’s also an issue of respect and the freedom to make executive decisions about our lives together. Our needs overlap, but the differences bear pointing out.

For my wife, comfort means three things: environment, language, and convenience. She feels safe in the familiarity of the Chinese lifestyle. For example, she loves that she can take public transportation or hail a cab. She knows how navigate the typical hospital, from finding the right department, to taking a number and knowing what to say to the doctor. Every aspect of life in China fits her like a cozy sweater.

Part of that comfort also comes from the fact that she can use her native language freely. I know from experience after nearly ten years in China just how comforting your native language can be. I’ve spoken almost exclusively Chinese at home with my wife for the entire time I’ve known her. My home life is in Chinese, despite it not being my first language. If she wants to argue, she’s on her home turf in Chinese. If she wants to call someone or answer a phone call, she can do so without even thinking about it.

If you’ve never tried taking a phone call in a foreign language, try it. You’ll quickly understand how big of a challenge that can be.

Her culture is embedded in her native language. The way that she expresses care for others (关心, guānxīn) only works well in Chinese. The way she asks for something to be done is much more direct than it is in English. The fact that she doesn’t need to make small talk with others while she conducts a transaction is culturally specific. Americans often talk to each other like they’re old friends, even if they’ve never met and will only be together for the next ten seconds while the cashier finishes processing an order. All of these Chinese things make up the tightly woven cultural fabric of her language.

Daily life is undeniably convenient in China. Transportation is abundant, fast, and inexpensive. She can have anything delivered to her door within hours from Meituan, Jingdong, or Taobao. WeChat, the instant messaging app, is the absolute center of communications and so much more in China. With WeChat mini-apps, she can order food and drinks, hail a taxi, make a reservation at a restaurant or a hospital, or make an inquiry with the police station or tax bureau. In China, you could get away with almost never leaving your apartment.

These comforts all disappeared when we moved to the United States in late summer 2023. Nothing was familiar—no WeChat, no Meituan, no dense web of subway and bus lines to take her anywhere she wanted. There were very few familiar food options, and the “Chinese” food we could find was largely of the American variety—much closer to the style found in southern China than the calorie-dense northern stews and stir fries. Unable to cope with the stress, she just shut down.

My wife’s emotional needs were sorely unfulfilled at that time. She wanted her husband to show her that he’s thinking about her and what she needs through everyday things. I admit I often don’t think about what my wife might need, like whether she might be hungry, for example. It’s partly because I’m not very emotionally sensitive, and partly because Americans tend to be a lot more direct with other. I tried my best to help her acclimate, but my best wasn’t enough.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t believe the average American woman would expect her husband to know if she wants a glass of water. Instead, she would probably just ask for one. This is only a generalization, of course, but the fact remains that we have different expectations about communication. The language cannot be separated from the culture.

Aside from the emotional support and the comfort of a familiar environment, she also yearns for financial stability. She comes from a family of modest means, and being Chinese, she can’t escape the indelible marks that the horrific instability of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution left on Chinese society. For these reasons, she is incredibly frugal with her spending.

My desire for “nice things” has frequently run up against that frugality. I have a wide variety of hobbies and interests, but convincing her to buy something for those hobbies is always a challenge. For example, I like coffee and I love the process of making it. But when I suggested buying a coffee machine, we ended up compromising for the cheapest possible coffee machine with the cheapest possible coffee grinder. Sometimes compromise happens, but sometimes it breaks down.

The responsibility for maintaining this financial stability has fallen to me as the sole bread winner. Since we got married, my wife has mostly stayed home instead of going to work. I’m not complaining about this. I supported her decision, because at the time, we were planning to move to the US and we thought it would happen much more quickly than it ended up doing. (Ahem, COVID, ahem.) She wanted to focus on learning English, since she knew it would be important for her adjustment. Today, I still think that was a reasonable decision.

By the time she finally got her green card more than four years after we started the process, though, our relationship was already quite stressed by our differences, and she didn’t want to make the move to the US anymore. Her attitude toward her situation made a successful transition all but impossible, and I didn’t know how I could help her. When we finally moved to the US, we lived in my parent’s basement apartment. Our first month there, I decided to finish my MBA to improve my job prospects, but the fact that we were spending money with no income, despite having saved enough for several years of over the years, was psychological torture to her.

When we finally succeeded in getting pregnant with our first child, she had the reason she needed to get back to China and back into her comfort zone. We went back in January 2024, after five months in the US, to live with her parents in her hometown.

Her idea was that she would have her mother prepare food for her. Chinese people have strong culinary traditions surrounding pregnancy, and her mother prepared many strange and interesting dishes for her on a regular basis. Living in her hometown, she had successfully put a stop to the flowing river of expenses from out time in the US, but it still bothered her that we were living without an income. I didn’t want to continue working in China, so I had originally planned not to work until we had raised the child to a year old and we could take him back to the US.

I was naïve to think that she would accept that. To assuage her anxieties, I agreed to return to work. I ended up working back at the school I’d left in 2023, but I don’t regret coming back—I feel extremely lucky to have gotten to know my students this past year, as I wrote in my reflection on their graduation a few weeks ago.

However, continuing our life in China is contrary to our son’s interests.

I don’t share them with most people anymore, but I have strong opinions about education. I have seen how education works here, and for that reason, I know that my son needs an American education, or at least a western one. The brutal and inhumane exam-oriented education system leaves little time and space for a student to know himself. It also leaves his life regimented in such a way that he has no opportunity to develop the sort of self-discipline and critical thinking that comes with handling your own schedule and solving problems with others, both in school and during extracurricular activities like sports.

Having grown up in the US but also having seen the way school works during my time in China, I know what is most appropriate for our son. But to receive an American education, he must live in the US. My wife, not knowing, believes there are no insurmountable issues for his schooling in China. Too much homework? We can just tell him and his teachers that he doesn’t have to do it. Then he’ll have the free time to do what he wants. It’s not that simple, unfortunately.

I’ll come back to my son’s interests. But first, I need to discuss my own needs and how they diverge from my wife’s. Like her, I also want an emotional connection, but that looks different for me. I don’t really care if someone anticipates my thirst, or asks me if I’m tired. It’s not that I mind, of course, but what matters more to me is physical affection. Aside from holding hands, displays of physical affection are much less common in China. But for my wife, she’s not interested in any form of affection, much less in public. This isn’t just a cultural issue. To me, it reflects the state of my marriage, and it stresses me out.

Like anyone, I also want to be respected. I feel that I don’t have enough respect in my relationship. I may not be the quickest thinker or the best conversation partner, but I know how to do research. I greatly value knowledge and learning, and I expect that this be recognized by my partner. It may be my lack of romantic experience, but in the past, I often approached discussions about problems as if they were debates. Put frankly, I always believed my knowledge and experience meant that I knew best.

Rhetorically speaking, this is a terrible strategy to get what you want. It doesn’t respect the fact that my partner also has knowledge and ideas about how to do things. I have since learned not to die on every hill. In a relationship you have to work together, and sometimes that means forgoing one goal to achieve a greater common one. From my perspective, though, the compromise usually happens on my end.

Another part of respect is understanding your partner’s needs, desires, and interests. In general, I feel I know my wife much better than she knows me. While she does understand my personality fairly well, she knows very little about my interests.

There are different levels to understanding your partner’s interests. The most basic level is to acknowledge them and give your partner time and space to pursue them. Beyond that, she could show an interest in learning more about them, even if she doesn’t actively pursue them herself. The highest level of understanding is to join your partner in pursuing those interests. For example, if that interest is coffee, the basic level of understanding is to let me at least buy some equipment for making it at home.

My longest-running and deepest interest is music. I have tons of useless knowledge about music. I can write it and transcribe it, and I play the guitar and the euphonium with a passion. (Well, mostly guitar.) I have listened to certain albums so many times that I can practically hear them from start to finish, all from memory. I constantly hear melodies and rhythms everywhere I go.

My wife, though, doesn’t know this. She couldn’t tell you my favorite band, or even one of my favorites, aside from the Beatles, since everyone knows the Beatles. Admittedly, she doesn’t like heavy metal—few Chinese people do—but I love a great variety of music, from orchestral music to wind bands, or from jazz to K-pop. Since her musical tastes are so narrow, she also doesn’t like listening to me play guitar. That’s the main reason why I play guitar so much less than I used to. Here in China, I don’t even have a guitar anymore.

Next, I have financial and lifestyle goals that I want to meet. Like my wife, I want financial stability. But we have different ideas about how to achieve it. My long-term financial goal is to be financially independent, which means having enough money to afford the lifestyle I want without having to work if I don’t want to. The way to do that is through investing. The US has a well-developed system for investing, from stock markets to privileged investment accounts such as a Roth IRA.

Respect applies here, too. To really make a secure financial foundation for our family, we need to do much more than simply reducing our spending. My wife doesn’t seem to recognize its importance to me and to our family’s future. This is another pain point.

Speaking of the family’s future, my son needs a loving, nurturing environment that will help him grow up happy and healthy. It is my hope that I can provide this to him. Right now, that means working out the problems between me and my wife.

I’ve got a lot to think about. Maintaining a relationship is hard work! Since I’ve just finished reading the Baghavad Gita, I’m curious about how Krishna’s discussion with Arjuna might help me with my situation. In my next article, I plan to discuss this important Hindu scripture as it applies to my personal relationships.