Intercultural Relationships
Intercultural Relationships
For most of my adult life, my intimate relationships have been intercultural – most specifically with men from Latin America. My former husband and the father of my children is Nicaraguan; I have also been involved in serious long-term relationships with a man from Chile and another from Puerto Rico. (There’s more – but I am NOT going to tell you everything here, let’s just say I am going to stay within the realm of that first circle of information exchange – perhaps a dip into the second, but no more! My intimate intercultural relationships were in part a result of proximity. I went to live and work in Puerto Rico in my 20’s, a decision that set me on path that took me to various locations in Latin America throughout my adult life. Because I was quite interested in “blending” into the cultural milieu in which I was living, I suspect that in terms of my intimate personal relationships, I was probably most engaged in relationships that were a mix of submission and consensus styles. However, even though I have been living in the United States again for more than ten years, it has been here that I have encountered more difficulties in terms of mastering intercultural relationships. Although this is the country in which I born and lived through my teen-age years, I never really experienced adulthood here until I returned from Latin America. It hasn’t been easy. In terms of personal relationships, it’s only been in the last few years that I have found myself engaged with men from my own cultural background – Jewish-Americans, which frankly has been mystifying and frustrating. Perhaps because I have lived so long and so intensely outside of the United States and outside of the Jewish culture (not religion, but culture and there is a distinction) – I have encountered many difficulties in getting along with men who share my cultural roots. I have not encountered these difficulties in regards to friendships with women – and have many cross-cultural and intercultural friendships with women as well as with women with whom I share my roots. Perhaps my best experience in intercultural, interethnic and even interracial living was during my years in Puerto Rico. In my experience, most of the people I developed friendships and other intimate relationships with were a little of this and a little of that – and their skin colors ran the gamut from the blackest of black to the whitest of white – and everything in between. My epiphany in Puerto Rico was at a party where many of us were engaged in an intense conversation about something – I can’t recall what, but given the passions of the moment, it was probably politics. Puerto Rico was my first stop after living in the United States and as I looked around the circle, I realized that I wasn’t thinking of Cari as White, or Ana as Black or Carlos with his café con leche skin tones. I was simply thinking of them as Cari or Ana or Carlos. Perhaps this may sound simplistic, but that sense of multi-hued friendships where not only was skin color not a consideration – but not even noticed was something quite special for me and something that I did not get to duplicate in other Latin American contexts – or for that matter here. In any case that is my “romance” with Puerto Rico and one of the reasons I still think of the island with such nostalgia. Here in the United States, I am still struggling to overcome the hurdles of “intercultural communication” even with “my own kind.” Confusing, isn’t it?
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