When "passport" can become a swear-word
Immigration bureaucracy can squeeze the life out of a relationship
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By Ann-Mari Huhtanen
"When Zîlan was three, she thought 'passport' was a swear-word", recalls Sara Tikkanen.
Dealings with the then Directorate of Immigration (nowadays known by the somewhat more friendly title of the Finnish Immigration Service) and the wait for a residence permit have become part of everyday life for Tikkanen.
She was in a common-law marriage with an Iranian man and subsequently married to a Turkish Kurd.
From these two unions she has three children: 18-year-old Milad, 9-year-old Zîlan, and 6-year-old Robin, as well as one-year-old Henrik have grown used to life between three cultures, or rather in the midst of them.
Tikkanen admits that she married in order to secure her then spouse's ability to stay permanently in Finland.
Tikkanen met her former husband in Finland, while he was seeking asylum in this country.
However, the immigration bureaucracy squeezed all the air out of the relationship.
"It is altogether too much of a burden on a relationship that one of the partners has to serve all the time as an interpreter in all manner of administrative matters. On the one hand it destroyed our relationship, and then again in some way it also accelerated our getting together in the first place", says Tikkanen of her most recent union.
As in many other multicultural marriages, the couple did not go steady for very long before they tied the marital knot.
The process of getting to know one another was submerged beneath everything else that was going on.
"There was just this sort of panicky feeling over how we would manage to stay together", recalls Tikkanen.
The process of applying for and receiving a residence permit took eight years and proved to be the final nail in the coffin of the relationship, which ended in divorce after eight years of marriage.
But let's back up a little. There must have been more to the relationship in the first place than simply aspects of immigration policy?
Often in the background to mixed marriages there is an attraction to another culture and to the exotic or the exciting in that culture, and not necessarily to the other person himself or herself.
Tikkanen acknowledges this in her own experiences.
"There can be a huge gulf between one's own projection or image and the everyday reality. When the cultural distance from one patner to another is a long one, then the probability increases that one is getting married to a creature of one's imagination rather than a real-life partner."
According to Sara Tikkanen, this is in some sense what happened to her, but at the same time it was familiarity and shared values and experiences that brought them together.
Both partners had grown up in large families and a sense of communality and a broad understanding of family were shared traits.
The feedback that came from relatives and acquaintances during the relationship rankled with Tikkanen.
"The stock prognosis was that it was 'a stillborn marriage'. Simply on the strength of one of us being a foreigner and a Muslim", says Tikkanen with no shortage of distaste.
"To my mind, cultural differences do not run between different nationalities as such, but between people. For my part, I have encountered the greatest degree of cultural collision and failures of interpretation in a relationship with another Finn", she goes on.
Though the relationships with the two men earlier in her life did not end successfully, Tikkanen respects her former husbands. She does not feel she has been taken advantage of.
The former spouses are still involved in their children's lives. The sense of the importance of family relations that she initially was attracted to in her partners still holds true, even in divorce.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 29.7.2009
More on this subject:
 Study indicates mixed marriages end much more often in divorce
ANN-MARI HUHTANEN / Helsingin Sanomat
ann-mari.huhtanen@hs.fi
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