Course Overview
A note from Drs. Anthony and Tolu
This course is the most personal one we have built. It draws directly from our own experience as a couple who has navigated marriage across cultures, across oceans, and across the particular pressures that migration places on partnership. It also draws from our research, our counselling work with diaspora couples, and the growing body of scholarship on immigrant family life. We wrote this course because no one wrote it for us — and because we believe that diaspora couples deserve more than generic marriage advice with a cultural footnote. This course was built for you.
Why this course exists
Migration changes everything. It changes your address, your social network, your professional identity, your daily routines, your relationship to language and food and community and belonging. It changes your access to the people and places that have always known you. And — often without warning, in ways that neither partner anticipated — it changes the marriage.
The pressures that migration places on a couple are real, documented, and distinct from the challenges faced by couples who have never relocated. The settlement stress of a new country. The grief of what was left behind. The renegotiation of roles when credentials are not recognized. The loneliness of building a social world from scratch. The management of family expectations from across time zones. The raising of children between two cultures. The particular weight of being a visible minority in a new society.
These are not generic marriage challenges with a cultural coating. They are specific, intersecting pressures that require specific, intersecting tools — and that is what this course provides.
This course draws on cross-cultural psychology, migration research, attachment theory, and the expertise of Drs. Anthony and Tolu — OA Dynasty co-founders, trained marriage counsellors, and diaspora couples themselves. Every module is grounded in evidence and every assignment is designed for practical application.
What learners will be able to do by the end
- Name and navigate the unique marriage pressures that migration creates — with clarity rather than isolation
- Understand how cultural identity shifts in the diaspora affect individual expectations and couple dynamics
- Manage extended family obligations and expectations from home with unity and wisdom
- Navigate financial complexity — dual incomes, remittances, wealth-building in a new country
- Protect intimacy and emotional connection when settlement stress crowds out the relationship
- Raise children between two cultures with intention and without sacrificing the marriage in the process
- Build community and belonging in a new place — together
- Hold grief, ambition, and gratitude simultaneously — as individuals and as a couple
- Produce a Diaspora Marriage Vision — a written articulation of the marriage being built in this new chapter
