Intercultural Relationships: My Father-In-Law

Intercultural relationships are, “relationships that are formed between individuals from different cultures” (Martin & Nakayama, 2013, P. 391).  The most major intercultural relationship I have to this day is with my father-in-law, who was born in Argentina.  He has lived in the United States most of his life, however, his parents lived in Argentina most of their lives.  It is because of this that there is a large amount of cultural differences between my father-in-law and myself.  This relationship has caused me to see differences in age, social class, race, and ethnicity.  On the other hand, this relationship also proved to come with benefits as well as challenges.

First of all, when discussing intercultural relationships, our text says, “the potential rewards and opportunities in these relationships are tremendous” (Martin & Nakayama, 2013, P. 391).  The benefits to obtaining the relationship I have with my father-in-law include acquiring knowledge about the world and acquiring new skills.  In terms of knowledge, my father-in-law has given me a lot of information about the Argentinian culture through direct communication and also interaction.  This has given me the ability to use relational learning, which is defined as “learning that comes from a particular relationship but generalizes to other contexts” (Martin & Nakayama, 2013, P. 392).  The ability to participate in relational learning proved to be extremely beneficial when I met my wife’s large family with strong Argentinian cultural ties.  The intercultural relationship I have with my father-in-law did have its’ hiccups however.

Secondly, there have been some challenges I have discovered throughout the relationship I have with my father in law.  Concerning challenges to an intercultural relationship, our text says, “by definition, they are characterized by cultural differences in communication style, values, and perceptions” (Martin & Nakayama, 2013, P. 392).  I found this to be very true at times with my father-in-law.  When I first met my father-in-law, I knew little about him personally and believed that establishing a relationship with him would be difficult because of our differences in cultural background.  There were little differences in communication style, however, values and perceptions became a focal point for challenges.  I came from a large family, much like my wife’s, however it appeared that family was much more important to my father-in-law than what I expected.  In a short time, this originally awkward, “meeting of the father”, would become a very important and strong relationship in my life. 

Finally, the intercultural relationship I have with my father fits Baxter’s dialectical model in many ways.  I would have to say that the most prominent dialectic in my relationship with my father-in-law would be the differences-similarities dialectic.  When I first spoke to my father-in-law I found very quickly that we have many similarities in political and religious beliefs, among many other beliefs.  This caused our relationship to grow stronger and followed the similarity principle, “a principle of relational attraction suggesting that individuals tend to be attracted to people they perceive to be similar to themselves” (Martin & Nakayama, 2013, P. 398).  Following this, the similarity principle gave me access to understanding cognitive consistency, or “having a logical connection between existing knowledge and a new stimulus” (Martin & Nakayama, 2013, P. 398).  Although we found many similarities with each other there were obvious cultural differences that were overcome by our similarities.  Another dialectic that is prominent in the intercultural relationship with my father-in-law is the static-dynamic dialectic.  This can be best described by getting married to his daughter.  Our relationship remained static for the most part, however, upon marrying my wife, it was clear that our intercultural relationship had changed and this new life would cause a necessity for a dynamic relationship.

References:

Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T.K. (2013). Intercultural Communication in Contexts (6th ed.) New York, NY: McGraw Hill.