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Relationships across cultural differences

If you start a relationship in spite of great differences of culture, you will probably meet people with warnings: "One of you has to give in, it is going to be a problem sooner or later!"

Based on my experience with a Norwegian-Japanese relationship, it seems to me that the problems we encounter actually are one of our most important resources:

• Because we need to explain differences, we learn listening to each other
• Because we misunderstand each other and have to "go back" and sort things out, we learn to be patient
• Because we are different, we can sometimes understand more about ourselves when we compare to what we learn about a different culture.

Skills of listening, patience and self-awareness are necessary to make relationships work, and couples risk taking them so for granted that they fail to work on them. When you have to cope with differences of culture, that risk is considerably smaller - thus those relationships may gain a better fundament because of the challenges.