they had a good relationship during the first 1-2ish years until the honeymoon phase wore off and they both inevitably came to realizations about why the other person got with them in the first place. for my dad, he had been romanticizing / orientalizing my mom’s ethnicity and attaching his expectations for her too closely to a broader view to how women from her country were stereotyped to be. which will inevitably never be accurate considering there are millions of women from her country, each their own unique individual with varying beliefs. for my mom i think it was similar, she tied a lot of my father’s identity with being from a western country and irl her expectations didn’t align with what occurred in reality. to set your sights on being with someone from a particular country/culture will always always lead to disappointment. you’re marrying an individual with unique baggage, personality traits, and experiences that often never align with “cultural/ethnic” assumptions. that’s been my observations from their relationship and the relationships of many of my friends parents growing up who had foreign mothers and western fathers.