I yesterday explained that there are cultural differences that don’t allow everybody to change himself in every way – it may just not possible for a person of one culture to do something a person of another culture finds easy. I can tell you from my own experience that the best place to get to know this first-hand is to marry someone from another culture. You will, at some point, find out what you can and what you cannot do and you will also realize that your partner has very different limits. The solution is to meet in the middle!
To give you an example, I would like to talk about the question of planning ahead. In the west it is commonly spread advice that you should ‘go with the flow’ instead of planning too much. In the east, or at least in India, something that people should learn is to plan a bit more. The question is however whether people can really implement this advice?
My wife and I face this question as well. She, a German, is used to plan everything ahead. It is her German upbringing, her culture and her background. I, however, don’t usually plan at all. I live and go along with whatever happens next. I am not talking about big questions like holiday planning now but rather about every day’s life.
Let’s take the question when we should take a shower. My wife wakes up in the morning and would normally make a plan for the day before she even gets one foot out of the bed. It is the German in her that plans a rough outline for the day and makes a more exact schedule for the coming hours. The next half an hour we will spend getting up, from seven to eight I will do yoga, I need half an hour for relaxing and then I take a look at the computer for about half an hour. At nine o’clock we will take a shower, do some more work and have our lunch at eleven o’clock. That’s how she would plan.
I would wake up and not think any further than until the bathroom for that moment. I don’t know how I will feel like in three hours – what work will be there, will I feel like taking a shower at all? Maybe I would rather like to take one in the afternoon…
So you already see, if we both were determined to keep our cultural habits intact, we would never get to shower together and would get into a fight whenever we tried. We thus need to find an agreement: Ramona takes care not to ask me five times when we would take a shower and does not tell me again and again that she is planning to shower at nine o’clock. She tells me about an approximate idea what she would like to do but is ready to adjust her time plan slightly.
I, in turn, tell her clearly if I absolutely don’t want to shower in the morning, so that she can make other plans for the morning and have an idea for the afternoon already. Otherwise I will try to get ready with everything I was doing until around nine o’clock.
We meet in the middle. It would not be possible at all for me to plan the day the way Ramona does. It would create a lot of stress for me, making it impossible to concentrate on anything else than the time. In the same way, she needs this structure in order to do anything. If she didn’t have a plan, at least a rough one, she would go through the day with the feeling that she was actually supposed to do something else and that her time was not used properly.
In a relationship and even in other interactions with people of other countries and cultures, you often have to find a compromise, an acceptable solution for both of you. We have both adopted a little part of the other culture inside ourselves – staying flexible in this way makes many things much easier!
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