What really happens when a British woman marries into a Persian family

There are around 4,000 miles between our families, although some days it feels considerably further. I’m English, born and raised in the North East of England, while my husband, H, grew up in Tehran. Our families are scattered between two countries, two languages and two very different sets of cultural reference points.

There is no popping round to grandma’s for Sunday lunch or casually squeezing everybody around one table for a celebration. Much of our family life happens through screens, photographs, voice messages and stories repeated often enough that Cyrus knows people he can’t see in person. That distance has shaped our marriage, but so has something I hadn’t really considered before marrying H: joining another culture does not mean abandoning your own or adopting somebody else’s wholesale. You work out, often as you go along, what belongs in your family.

Marrying across cultures isn’t about swapping one identity for another. For us, it has meant negotiating, borrowing, adapting and slowly creating family traditions that belong to both of us.

People have occasionally asked whether I celebrate Persian traditions in Britain. Even our health visitor once asked, which amused me because there really is no answer. I didn’t marry H and suddenly acquire a handbook entitled How to Become Persian in 30 Days. He also didn’t move to the UK and discard everything that shaped him growing up in Tehran.

Instead, we negotiate, a lot. Some traditions stick immediately, others take a lot more explanation, and a few provoke the sort of expression across the kitchen table that needs no translation whatsoever. Then there are those that become so familiar I forget there was ever a time when they seemed unusual. That, I think, is what living between two cultures really looks like. It isn’t a display of British things on one shelf and Persian things on another. The boundaries become blurred until you stop thinking about whose tradition something was in the first place.

Our wedding gave me an early indication that life with H might contain a few cultural surprises. Had somebody told younger me that I would one day be dancing at my own wedding while holding a large decorated knife, I would probably have checked whether they had started drinking before the reception. Yet there I was, taking part in the Persian wedding knife dance, or raghs-e chaghoo, in which the cake knife is danced around before eventually being handed over for the cake cutting. It was more entertaining than standing beside a cake waiting for somebody to take a photograph.

Other customs followed when I discovered Chaharshanbe Suri, with its tradition of jumping over fire ahead of Nowruz, and watched sabzeh, the green sprouts grown for the Persian New Year, carried outside for Sizdah Bedar. I also got involved in traditions particular to H’s family, including smashing eggs beneath a car’s tyres to ward off the evil eye. Things that once took an explanation just became part of our family life.

Persian food was an easier cultural negotiation, for the most part. Rice with a golden tahdig crust needed no persuasion whatsoever, neither did the fragrant stews and herbs that began appearing on our table. Kaleh pacheh, however, presented a sterner test. The traditional dish made with sheep’s head and feet is not a breakfast for the faint-hearted, but I tried it because cross-cultural marriage occasionally takes courage, and the ability to control your facial expression before coffee. My face may have failed me on the third point.

We don’t reproduce every Persian tradition exactly as it might happen in Tehran, just as our British family life isn’t frozen in some nostalgic version of my North East childhood. We borrow and adapt things.

When I was pregnant, one decision that could easily have become a cultural tug-of-war was our baby’s name. It didn’t. At the 12-week scan, we had already agreed on Cyrus. It was Persian, but familiar in Britain too, and somehow seemed to belong naturally to both sides of his family. It felt right then, and years later it still does now.

Before children, 4,000 miles is inconvenient. After children, it can feel huge. There are family members who can’t just turn up for birthdays, school events or an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. H’s mother has had to experience parts of her grandson’s childhood through a screen rather than across a kitchen table, and that is one of the harder realities of raising a child in an international family.

Love has to travel further when your family is separated by thousands of miles. It arrives through video calls, Persian words, family stories, recipes and songs. It appears when somebody far away remembers a tiny detail Cyrus mentioned weeks earlier.

I have found myself taking such an active role in teaching Cyrus about the Iranian side of his family. We talk about Persian traditions, cook Persian food, mark celebrations and tell him stories about people and places beyond his everyday life in Britain. I don’t want his childhood divided into “British” and “Persian”, as though he has to decide which box each part of himself belongs in. Both are his, and neither one needs explaining away.

There is a temptation to write about multicultural marriage as though it is a photogenic procession of food, festivals and misunderstandings. Sometimes cultural differences are funny, but they can also be downright irritating. H and I have had moments when we have stared at each other wondering how two intelligent adults could interpret the same situation so differently.

Sometimes your husband is annoying, and I imagine H would make the same observation about his English wife. But living together has forced both of us to examine assumptions we might never have noticed. Why do I consider something polite when he doesn’t? Why does one family discuss something openly while the other wouldn’t dream of it? Why does behaviour that seems so ordinary to one of us take an explanation to the other?

Oddly enough, marrying somebody from another culture has taught me as much about being English as it has about Persian culture. We notice other people’s customs because they are unfamiliar, while treating our own as though they are just how life works.

After years together, I no longer think of our family as half British and half Persian. That sounds far too mathematical. Instead, we have created a home filled with Persian food and British habits, English conversations peppered with Persian words, Nowruz alongside the celebrations I grew up with, and a child who doesn’t need to stand on either side of an imaginary cultural line.

Eventually, you look around your own kitchen, at the food, the family habits, the words borrowed from another language and the child who belongs to both worlds, and realise you haven’t blended two cultures, you have created your own.

If your family spans different countries, cultures or traditions, which customs have you kept, which have you changed, and which ones unexpectedly became your own?

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.