I'm Asian. My wife is Jewish.

There were a lot of hurdles to clear.

As a child, I was told - mostly indirectly - that I should marry a Korean woman when I grew up. I think that, as part of changing times, my parents and other extended family members did not want to come outright and say so. But there were many hints dropped, usually baked within jokes that were half-truths.

All those nudges apparently worked, because I ended up only dating Koreans and eventually married one. I never ever thought I would marry a caucasian, and the concept of marrying someone outside of my family’s faith didn’t even register in mind’s plane of reality.

Now, multiply all that I wrote above by a factor of ten, and that was what my wife’s setup was when she met me as a young Jewish lady. Whereas in my situation faith was a separate “stipulation,” Judaism is deeply intertwined with the Jewish culture.

So how did we end up becoming a couple, getting married, and raising two children together?

For this week’s post, I will let the video do the speaking - check it out to see how we met and overcame numerous obstacles to get to where we are today.

FoFty principles, particularly around expectations and not living other people’s lives played a key role. This is a lesson both of us would like to share with you so that we can emancipate our minds from mental slavery together.