Thinking Dialectically about Intercultural Relationships

Intercultural relationships include friends, family members, and romantic partners who have differences based on age, physical ability, gender/sex, sexual orientation, social class, ethnicity, race, nationality, or region just to name a few. Martin and Nakayama (2013) advocate for a dialectical approach to examining intercultural relationships. By examining these relationships as a dialectics, individual styles and preference are taken into account along with the contextual influences that facilitate intercultural communication. According to Martin and Nakayama (2013), "who we choose to befriend is determined by both our individual preferences and by social, religious, and political contexts" (p. 382).

One major dialectic of intercultural relationships is the tension between the important benefits that these relationships provide and also there unique challenges. The benefits of intercultural relationships include: a) acquiring knowledge about the world; b) breaking stereotypes; and c) acquiring new skills. Conversely, the challenges to intercultural relationships include: a) discover and build on the similarities such as common interests, activities, beliefs, and goals; b) negative stereotyping; c) anxiety; d) can require more "care and feeding" (Pogrebin, 1987); e) community pressure and lack of understanding particularly from majority communities, and d) The recognition and respect of difference. The key to maintaining an intercultural relationship, however, is to balance the trade offs between differences and similarities.

For this final blog post, I would like you to discuss one intercultural relationship that you are involved in. This relationship can be a friend, family member, romantic partner, neighbor, co-worker, etc. You can explore your intercultural differences through age, gender/sex, social class, religion, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, nationality, region, and physical (dis)ability. Begin your blog by briefly discussing your intercultural relationship and then discuss some of the benefits and challenges that you have experienced. Next, discuss how your relationship fits in with Baxter's (1993) dialectical model that explains the dynamics of relationships (see pages 388-392). Describe two to three relational dialectics and explain how you see these dialectics operating in your own intercultural relationship.