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Abstract
The recent escalation of anti-Asian racism, combined with historical discrimination against interracial unions and stereotypes against Asians in the U.S., means that Chinese American/White Euro-American couples navigate a complex racialized context with unique stressors and resilience factors related to their racial backgrounds. The existing literature focuses on relationship formation and stability in interracial couples, and the current study expands this knowledge by employing a relational and systematic lens to investigate Chinese American/White Euro-American couples’ stories regarding how they perceive the role of race, stratification in the U.S. and intersectionality in their couple relationship dynamics and well-being. In this study, two dyadic interviews were conducted with eight interracial couples (n=16) over two months. Grounded in narrative inquiry, dyadic interviews allowed for an examination of how couples co-constructed stories and mutually negotiated meanings. This study used composite narratives to represent findings from thematic analysis and structural analysis to analyze one particular couple’s communication process to enrich the understanding of the research topic. The thematic analysis is represented in three “composite narratives” to illustrate these overarching themes. Composite 1: Sarah & James represent a couple who did not perceive race to have an important role in their relationship, nor did they think it necessary to discuss race-related topics. Composite 2: Xiu & David characterize a couple who gradually realized the role of race and racial stratification in their relationships. Finally, Composite 3: Jessica & Rayn illustrates a couple who are quite aware of the impact of race and racial stratification on their relationships and who have developed strategies to navigate the impact as a couple. The results of structural analysis include two parts. The first part of the findings displays conflicting communication processes when talking about race-related topics to further inform couple interventions. The second part of the findings illustrates the ethical challenges of conducting research with marginalized populations and navigating couple dynamics during the dyadic interview. The theoretical, clinical, and methodological implications, limitations and future directions are discussed.