Intercultural Relationships: How to Build a Shared Home When You Come from Different Cultures

Marriage Between Communities, Religions, and Cultures Brings Together Two Systems of Meaning

Culture is found in food, language, and holidays, and also in the way we understand family, partnership, parenting, commitment, privacy, money, respect, and authority. Many of these meanings were learned long before we met the person we chose to live with.

For one partner, a close relationship with parents can include daily conversations and consultation on important decisions. For the other, independence from parents is part of how they understand adult partnership. In one culture, financial support for parents and siblings can be seen as part of family obligation. In another, such a decision is seen first and foremost as a couple decision.

So two partners can look at the same behavior and see something completely different. One sees closeness, the other sees interference. One sees commitment to family, the other sees difficulty setting a boundary.

The gap is in what we do and also in the meaning we give to what is done.

When the Argument About the Holiday Is Also an Argument About Belonging

Say one partner grew up in a family where every holiday was celebrated with the extended family. For him, absence from the holiday meal can be connected to distancing from his parents, his siblings, his tradition, and his sense of belonging. His partner wants to start celebrating some of the holidays at home, with their children, and create traditions that belong to the family they’ve started.

You can divide the calendar between the two families and still be left with the difficulty beneath the division. For him, the choice to stay home can feel like distancing from his family. For her, another holiday at his parents’ can stir a feeling that the family they’ve started still hasn’t been given a place of its own.

In marriage between religions, the holiday adds a layer of religious and cultural identity. The choice of which holidays will be marked at home and how they’ll be marked also touches on the question of what from each tradition will continue to the next generation.

Two people can talk about the same holiday and actually be talking about two very different experiences of home and belonging. This understanding changes the conversation even before a practical decision is found.

The Same Behavior Can Take on a Different Meaning in Each Culture

In one family, a parent who arrives without advance notice can express closeness: “We’re family. We don’t need an invitation.” The partner who grew up in a different culture can experience exactly the same behavior as crossing a boundary: “This is our home. I want them to call before they come.”

Consulting with parents can also take on two different meanings. A person who grew up in a culture where adult children share significant decisions with their parents may see it as respect and connection. His partner can experience the same consultation as bringing the parents into a decision that belongs to the couple.

Each partner’s experience deserves attention. Our interpretation of the intentions or character of the person across from us requires further examination. I can experience your family as intrusive without deciding that you have no boundaries, and you can experience my need for privacy as distance without concluding that I’m rejecting your family.

The distinction between my experience and what I decide about you allows us to talk about the gap without turning it into a definition of the person I’m with.

Which Culture Became the Default in Our Home?

In an intercultural relationship it’s worth checking which culture has been given more room within the shared life. The question is especially prominent when one partner is a new immigrant and the other grew up in Israel, or when one of them moved countries to build the shared life.

One partner’s language can be the language spoken outside the home. His family can live closer. His holidays appear on the official calendar, and he knows the social codes and the systems the family lives within. His culture receives presence even without him needing to act to preserve it.

The other partner may invest more so that the culture they came from remains present at home. They teach the children an additional language, maintain contact with distant family, mark a holiday that isn’t part of the public space, and pass on to the children customs and stories they don’t encounter naturally in the environment.

This situation doesn’t necessarily indicate that someone acted wrongly. It invites checking whether both of us can recognize ourselves in the shared home, and how much adaptation is required from each of us to belong to it.

Two Families and Two Cultures Meet Within the Relationship

Through family constellation I look at partnership also as a meeting between two systems. Each partner arrives with family, history, language, customs, and ways they learned to recognize as home. In an intercultural relationship the difference between the systems sometimes becomes especially visible.

The systemic view reminds us that each partner’s life began long before they met each other. When I encounter your culture, I also encounter something that preceded me and is connected to the people you came from. Recognizing this doesn’t obligate me to adopt your culture or agree with everything accepted in it.

It’s possible to give room to both systems and at the same time choose how we want to live today. I can recognize the family and culture I came from, take with me what I want to continue, and choose differently in places that don’t fit my life. You can also do this with the culture you came from.

From the recognition of the two places we came from, we can turn our gaze to the family we’re creating now.

When My Culture Becomes the Standard by Which I Judge You

The gap becomes more hurtful when the way I grew up becomes the standard by which I evaluate the person I’m with.

• “Your family interferes in everything.”
• “You’re just cold.”
• “You have no boundaries.”
• “How can you raise children without this tradition?”

These sentences turn a cultural difference into a definition of the person or family across from me. My way receives the status of a more natural and correct way, and your way is examined in relation to it.

This tendency can strengthen when my culture is the dominant culture in the place where we live. What’s accepted around me doesn’t require explanation from me. The partner who brings with them a different language, custom, or perspective may find themselves explaining again and again why their family does what it does.

The ability to hold my position and at the same time see the person across from me as a whole person is part of differentiation within a relationship. I expanded on the ability to remain myself within the relationship in The Complete Guide to Differentiation in Relationships. In this article the question is focused on the cultural gap: Can I give your culture room without it having to become my culture?

When the Cultural Gap Reaches the Children

Parenting turns some of the cultural questions into practical decisions. Partners need to choose what language they’ll speak with the children, which holidays they’ll mark, what relationship the children will have with religion and tradition, which rituals they’ll hold, and what they want to pass on to the next generation.

In marriage between religions or between very different cultures, a decision that seems educational or practical to one partner can touch the other on the question of whether the children will carry part of their identity. The desire to teach the children a mother tongue, for example, can be connected to their ability to speak with grandparents, know family stories, and hold a direct connection with the culture one parent came from.

So it’s worth understanding what the choice holds for each partner before trying to reach agreement. “It’s important to me that the children speak my language” takes on a different meaning when you can add: “It’s important to me that they can talk with my mother and feel that the place I came from also belongs to them.”

Understanding the meaning doesn’t guarantee that both of us will want the same thing. It allows making a decision from deeper familiarity with what each of us is asking to preserve.

Creating a Couple Culture That Belongs to Both of Us

John and Julie Gottman use the concept of shared meaning to describe the world partners create through values, rituals, roles, goals, and symbols that take on meaning within the relationship. In an intercultural relationship this idea allows moving from the question of how things were done in each family to the question of how we want to live in our home.

A shared couple culture can include traditions from both homes, choices that come mainly from one of the families, and new customs created within the relationship. Partners from different religions can choose how they’ll mark holidays from both traditions. A couple where one partner immigrated to Israel can choose that both languages will be part of the children’s lives.

The sharing isn’t measured by equal division of every custom. There are topics where the shared way will be closer to one partner’s culture, and in other topics to the other’s culture. What matters is that these choices be visible and that both partners can recognize themselves within the home they’re creating.

Over time, these choices become the culture of the new family.

Some of the Gaps Can Remain Between Us

Even after years of shared life, partners can feel differently toward family, tradition, religion, or community. One can remain more connected to tradition, the other can need more distance from the extended family, and each of them can continue to hold parts of the identity they came to the relationship with.

Some gaps require a joint decision because they affect both our lives. Others can remain different. The ability to distinguish between them is more important than the attempt to reach agreement on every topic.

I expanded on the ability to stay close even when we want different things in the article Gaps in Relationships: Why Couples Who Love Each Other Very Much Start to Feel Alone Side by Side. In an intercultural relationship a layer of identity and belonging is added to the difference, and so some of the choices also touch on each of our connection with the culture we came from.

The shared home is built from the choices we need to make together and from the ability to leave room also for differences that don’t need a solution.