Relationships Talk

The royal wedding is a story of actress marries prince. But it is also, and perhaps more important, a story of American weds Briton. We asked American readers who are married to a Briton, and vice versa, to describe some of the charms and challenges of having a spouse from another continent.

Here are some of the responses we received, edited for length and clarity.

‘Girl from small town meets and marries sea captain’

I met my British husband in 1985. I was a nurse looking for a break from nursing. I got a job as a purser on a tall sailing ship in the Caribbean. Nigel was the captain. It had a very fairy tale feel: Girl from small town meets and marries sea captain. Wedding on the deck of a tall ship.

The challenges? Not all English is created equal. “No tipping” means no throwing garbage on the street. Aches and pains? Go to the “second hand bits shop” for a new knee, etc. It drives me crazy when he pronounces “aluminum.” He cheats at Scrabble and uses British words and fake words he knows I won’t know. Also: having to listen to Pink Floyd nonstop for 33 years.

The charms? The dry sense of humor. The impeccable manners. The ability to tolerate bad food. The perseverance no matter what the challenge. Before meeting my husband I expected to live my life in a small town in Michigan. Since meeting him I have traveled the world. We live on a 47-foot catamaran currently located in Grenada, West Indies.

— Mary Stuart-Peters

‘The charms? Too many to count’

Jennie had come to New York from London in 1964, when it was fashionable for U.S. firms to have English-accented secretaries. I had crash-landed in New York after abandoning careers as a newspaper reporter, Russian linguist in U.S. Army intelligence and foreign service officer in Moscow. Within a year we were married, within six years we had two dual-citizen children, and after nine years we had emigrated to Britain.

Two years ago we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in an English pub in deepest Wiltshire. I became a British citizen in 1992 and renounced my American citizenship last year — confirming what an American friend had said to me: “You have appeared to be thoroughly British for a very long time — not an American living in Great Britain but truly a Brit with very British children.”

Challenges of being married to someone from a different continent? I can’t think of any. We both came from families with similar value systems and stable marriages and, like the best marriages, ours is founded on give-and-take compromises. The charms? Too many to count here, but my actions tell the story of someone who has fallen for both a lovely lady and her lovely, friendly, funny, self-deprecating, exasperating and charming country.

— Steve Hoffman

‘He grew up with literally three television stations’

We met at a restaurant where he was dining and I was a bartender. We’ve been together for 17 years. Some of the challenges of being with a Brit and also being in an interracial relationship are interesting, to say the least. There’s an awful lot of fundamental things. Like not being able to ever send him to the grocery store because there are too many choices and no brand recognition. There’s also an age difference that makes the Britain of his youth utterly foreign to me. The charms are numerous, from the understanding of what an actual “holiday” is to the intense nostalgia for times gone by. He grew up with literally three television stations?! BBC 1, 2 and 3. I think he remembers the introduction of BBC 4.

— Jordan Tircuit

‘He was straight out of Oxford and looked like Sting’

We met in 1987 during orientation week for Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, on the Staten Island Ferry, while we were looking at the Statue of Liberty (really). I had been at Yale (’83) and then lived in a village in Haiti, doing community work. He was straight out of Oxford and looked like Sting. We married at Trinity College, Oxford, in 1990, and lived many years in London before moving to Belfast, Northern Ireland. We’ve been living in New Zealand since 2015.

There is a line in a Henry James novel that as a foreigner one of the characters knew “both more and less” than everyone around him; I frequently feel that way. I remember, after seven years in London, I realized that I had become more British when an enthusiastic chatty American tourist sat down next to me on the tube and I just sank into my seat and tried to read my book.

— Rebecca Dudley

‘He has kept me entertained through it all’

I met my brilliant Brit, Anthony Giles, in the basement of Balliol College, when we were auditioning actors for the Oxford Theatre Group. I was a Fulbright Fellow at Oxford and he was finishing his undergrad in Romance languages. We were charmed by each other from the first moment. Anthony told me he needed all the funny actors for his comedy revue but that in exchange he’d act in my production, which he did. We took the shows to the Edinburgh Festival together, shared a house, then shared a bed (it’s freezing in Edinburgh in the summer) and when I left for New York in September I thought we might never see each other again.

On Christmas Eve, Anthony arrived at my doorstep with a bottle of Tequila and a cornea cut by a contact lens. After drinking the whole bottle and getting a patch put on his eye, he announced that he was staying forever. And 37 years later, he’s still here. And still utterly charming, brilliant and ridiculously funny. It took him 10 years to hold my hand in public (he’s English) and he still blushes at the drop of a hat. As he’s gone from Soviet foreign policy to a legal career, I’ve remained the demonstrative American Jew and he the litigious, verbally dextrous Brit. Our children epitomize the saying “Look British, think Yiddish.”

He has kept me loved and entertained through it all. When I stepped down as artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater last month, he said in his toast to me that nepotism had no place at A.C.T. because he had slept with the director for 25 years and still never gotten a role. His accent has won him many cases and Wimbledon is still a religious experience for him.

— Carey Perloff

‘We’ve been working together for 33 years and married for 26’

We met at the C.D.C. when she was a visiting scientist to present her work on Legionnaires’ disease and studying the Ebola virus, and I was director of the Hot Lab at the C.D.C. We’ve been working together for 33 years and married for 26. Challenges include language, culture, history, humor and family. Charms include sharing language, culture, history, humor, love and profession.

— Joseph McCormick

‘The definite charm is the melding of two cultures for our daughter’

We met in a cafe. I was doing my Ph.D. and was in the cafe to study. He came in for a coffee on his lunch break. He overheard me trashing the Packers (I’m a Chicago Bears fan) and he openly made fun of the Bears! We’ve been married two years and have a 6-month-old daughter.

It’s hard when it comes to visiting family. He has a small family; mine is large and very tight-knit. He may go weeks without speaking to his, while I speak to mine daily. It’s hard when we don’t recognize certain things from pop culture on either side of the pond But the definite charm is the melding of two cultures for our daughter. I’m African-American and he is white British, so we already stand out when we walk around our city. Once I open my mouth, our differences in upbringing and cultural background become even more obvious. I’m more aware of the struggle immigrants in the United States have — whether it’s staying in touch with their family or dealing with being an expat. It’s completely opened my eyes.

‘It was the Sesame Street of my childhood’

We met at an antinuclear protest in the Czech Republic — she was an American who worked for Greenpeace and carried an alluring satellite phone the size of a suitcase. I had shoulder-length hair and was playing in a band. We traveled together to a youth environmental conference called Ecotopia in Romania. We fell in love in Transylvania. We married 10 months later in Britain and have been together for 24 years. Her sense of bright confidence and optimism has lifted my spirits and showed me a future away from my West London upbringing. When we moved to the United States, it was the Sesame Street of my childhood where magical opportunities awaited for those with spirit to fulfill their dreams.

— Julian Lwin

‘I’m still working on adjusting to life in Britain after nearly 20 years’

We met on a Greyhound bus in upstate New York in 1993, after I totaled my car in a snowstorm on my way to my parents in New Jersey for Thanksgiving. I sat next to a tall, hippy-looking stranger I had seen boarding the bus. Four hours of conversation later, I had fallen in love only to find out that his name was Jonathan Cronin. My dad is John Cronin.

We moved to London in 1998, three days after our Halloween wedding in Manhattan. I continue to adjust to life in Britain after nearly 20 years. There are times when my still-pronounced New York accent makes people feel I’m too straight-shooting, and I do wonder if my brand of communication would be better suited to N.Y.C. … but I love my job. I’ve taught teenagers in Seoul, Harlem and London and would say, unequivocally, kids are the same wherever you go. (It’s the adults who can vary.) When people in the U.S. ask me what the biggest difference between the two places is, I point to our amazing N.H.S. over here. Health security in Britain affords people a sense of freedom and peace that doesn’t seem to exist in the U.S. I think the ripple effects of the lack of security permeate all aspects of American life.

— Maureen Cronin

‘Friends frequently tell me how much they miss him’

I am the American widow of a kind and charming Brit. We met in the Sultanate of Oman, where I was working at the U.S. Embassy and Alan was working as a television engineer for the Omani Ministry of Information. We were married at the British Embassy in Muscat and had almost 15 years together. Alan passed away at age 57 in December 2016 from pancreatic cancer. We lived in Charleston, S.C., for the last five years of our life together; I still live here, close to the many friends Alan and I made.

Friends were attracted by Alan’s Southend-on-Sea Essex accent, and stayed to enjoy his sunny personality and the joy he took in the everyday pleasures of life. We drank craft beer, ate pub food, loved our pets, rode vintage trains, hiked the Lake District and took the Harry Potter rides at Universal Orlando over and over. He was good company, and friends frequently tell me how much they miss him, almost as much as I do.

— Lois Ascroft

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Good morning.

Europe raises the ante with Trump, Britain’s royal wedding fever and Estonia’s high internet hopes. Here’s the latest:

• “We will not negotiate with the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.”

That was the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, above center, venting his anger at President Trump. European Union leaders announced they would seek to prohibit companies based in the bloc from complying with newly reimposed American sanctions on Iran.

The move marks the latest rift in the trans-Atlantic alliance, with the Europeans united in preventing the United States from determining the continent’s economic interests.

And perhaps no European leader is more bruised than President Emmanuel Macron of France, whose fruitless embrace of Mr. Trump, replete with hand holding, hugs and dandruff dusting, has come back to haunt him domestically.

• Across Britain, Meghan and Harry are everywhere.

Royal wedding fever has gripped Britain, where Prince Harry, sixth in line to the throne, and Meghan Markle, an American actress, will be married tomorrow. To capitalize on this singular moment, companies are rolling out all manner of commemorative items.

In anticipation of the big day, we asked readers for their best advice for a happy marriage.

One gave this sage counsel: “Never take anyone else’s side against your spouse, even if it’s the queen of England.”

And after weeks of media speculation, Meghan Markle confirmed that her father would not be walking her down the aisle. (Here’s a closer look at previous British royal weddings that drove international interest, even if the participants were never going to rule.)

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• “A betrayal and a whitewash.”

A British inquiry into the deadly fire at London’s Grenfell public housing complex recommended a radical overhaul of building rules, but did not call for banning all flammable facades, a critical factor in the inferno that killed 71 people last June.

Survivors of the fire and Labour members of Parliament condemned the report, and demanded a ban on the cladding used on Grenfell Tower, above. Still, the report amounts to a striking indictment of property developers and the officials who police them.

• This much ought to be clear by now: If you ask the internet to settle anything, you do so at your own peril.

An Estonian town called Kanepi recently asked internet users what its emblem should be. Their answer: the cannabis leaf.

Kanep means cannabis in Estonian, and the leaf has been used as a symbol of the area for years, referring to the hemp traditionally grown there and made into cloth, oil and rope.

Local officials followed through on their promise and adopted the symbol, above, this week.

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Business

• The Kushner real estate company, controlled by the family of President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, is close to getting a bailout of its financially troubled flagship property, above, in New York City, by a company tied to Qatar’s government.

• PayPal reached a deal to buy the iZettle, Europe’s answer to the mobile payments company Square, for about $2.2 billion. The deal will expand PayPal’s global reach and highlights the arms race in the world of payments.

• A crude bargain: President Trump’s efforts to pressure the oil-producing giants Venezuela and Iran could increase demand for Russian petroleum and offer China and Russia a chance to deepen their ties to the Iranians.

• Fashion companies everywhere are at risk of boycott for political missteps, but the provocative Chanel and Fendi designer, Karl Lagerfeld, seems immune. Our chief fashion critic finds out what makes him so special.

• Here’s a snapshot of global markets.

• Libya’s denuclearization 15 years ago is playing a key role in North Korea’s hesitations over upcoming talks with the United States. The fate of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, above, who was toppled and killed in 2011, looms large for Pyongyang. [The New York Times]

• The E.U.’s top court ruled in favor of a near-total ban on three insecticides that studies have linked to declining bee populations. [BBC]

• Poland plans to expel one Russian and banned four others over allegations of trying to fuel animosity between Poles and Ukrainians. [Associated Press]

• “Thank the party!” Tens of thousands of Chinese Muslims are being held in internment camps where they are being forced to disavow their faith. [Associated Press]

• An Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has spread to a major port city, raising alarm among health officials. [The New York Times]

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