Who Is Likely to Intermarry?

While patterns of marriage have shifted significantly within the past few decades, attitudes toward interfaith unions are slow to follow. Today intermarriage occurs for reasons other than the typical “desire to flee from one’s own community,” as noted by Susan Weidman Schneider in her book “Intermarriage: The Challenge of Living with Differences between Christians & Jews.” Intermarriage has steadily become less deviant and more opportunistic in nature.

“A structuralist approach would predict that greater acceptance of Jews by non-Jews, plus wider exposure to people from other backgrounds and greater mixing with them at school, in the workplace and socially, make intermarriage more common.”

Drawing from the experiences of interfaith couples from across the United States, and the opinions of the clergy and psychologists who counsel them, Schneider also points out that interfaith couples are more likely to be older than those who marry within their faith for two reasons. Older couples have had more time to explore the diversity of other people, and many interfaith couples tend to wait longer before marrying due to uneasiness regarding their different religious or cultural backgrounds.

Schneider also suggests that, for Jews, the struggle between the movement outward and the pull inward affects the decision to intermarry.

“This dynamic – described by sociologists today as a struggle between integrationism (the tropism toward full assimilation into American society) and survivalism (the persistence of the Jews as a unique and distinctive group) is very much present in current interfaith marriages of Jews.”

Keeping in mind that “Intermarriage: The Challenge of Living with Differences between Christians & Jews” was published in 1989, I respectfully believe these claims to be over simplistic. The same is true, in my opinion, with Schneider’s claim that “Christians who marry Jews seem to be generally uncommitted and uninvolved in their own religious background.”

This is not the case in my own relationship, and it does not accurately reflect the experience I have had with other couples that choose to intermarry today. Perhaps times have changed. Our horizons are broader, our minds more open, and I still like to believe in the existence of true love and our ability to choose our mates based on that love and not a set of presupposed cultural rules.

We cannot expect to concretely classify a specific type of person more likely to intermarry than others. Under the right circumstances, almost anyone could be a candidate for an interfaith relationship.

There are many other factors that fit into this equation. For example, couples with the same educational backgrounds are more likely to interact with each in school or work settings, as noted by Schneider earlier, and therefore they may be likely to marry – regardless of different religious backgrounds. In my case, my fiancé and I learned more about our similarities than our differences at first. It is only natural that new couples explore what they have in common prior to analyzing their differences. Religion is not always a prominent subject of conversation among those who have just met. In fact, religion is almost a taboo subject to discuss on a first date. I didn’t learn that Robert was Jewish until our third date, and by then I was already quite interested in getting to know him better. There was no turning back.