In our recent interview series we asked “Do you have any advice for other cross-cultural couples?”

The answers were so good that they deserve a post of their own. Here they are, with some extra tips from the PocketCultures team and our readers.

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1. Understand, respect and adapt where necessary

“Try to understand and appreciate each other’s cultures as much as possible. Also, adapt to fit into the culture where necessary. You’ll get more respect from people that way.” (Sharell)

“Be patient if your partner doesn’t understand cultural references, he/she grew up in a different country watching different TV shows, listening to different music, reading different books, and so on.” (Ana)

“If you feel yourself getting angry at something your partner has said or done, take a second to think about whether you may be approaching the situation through different cultural filters before you react. Deciding how you are going to work through any differences in viewpoint is a great way to strengthen your relationship.” (Marie)

“Be patient, understanding and respectful of other ways of doing things, the other values people have or different ways of looking at the world. Understanding the different frameworks used to analyze cultures helps offer insight into why your partner does some things certain ways. Communication is crucial, as is compromise! This is true in any relationship, but cross-cultural couples might need to work a little harder at it.” (Liz)

2. Learn your partner’s language

“Learn each other’s languages and, if possible, spend a good amount of time in each other’s countries. This is key to understanding your partner’s perspective and it alleviates a good deal of miscommunication.” (Matthew and Shinichi)

“I agree that both members of the couple need to speak both languages so that both can: laugh at the same jokes; express how they feel more clearly and understand the other’s point of view (it has happened to me that when I’m in distress or really pissed off I revert to Spanish, my first language); visit each other’s families and be able to communicate with the relatives without the need of a translator (otherwise it can be stressful and incredibly boring!)” (Ana)

3. Think about where to live

“Be sure to discuss where you would like to live for the rest of your lives - this could be a tough discussion but you have to have it.” (Anna and Bose)

“Spending time together in a third country is a fantastic way to strengthen your relationship. It puts you in a situation where you are both equally foreign and you learn to work as a couple instead of relying on the one who is in their home country.” (Matthew and Shinichi)

“For the partner who is living in his/her native country, it is essential to be patient with the partner who is living abroad. Living abroad is a constant adjustment and sacrifice, and it doesn’t always get easier with time. My partner and I spend time in Brazil as often as possible so that he feels connected to his native country and family.” (Jenna)

4. Pass on both cultures to your children

“Try to raise your children bilingually. It can be difficult, but there are huge advantages. I know children of multicultural families who regret not speaking the language of both parents.” Liz

“If you have children I think it is crucial they grow up knowing both cultures, it will make them richer human beings.” (Elizabeth)

5. Embrace the differences!

“Cultural differences exist when it comes to relationships and raising children. Try to accept them rather than trying to change the other person.” (Jenna)

“We need to embrace our cultural differences. We’ll never understand our partner 100 percent (anyway, who does?), but knowing what our differences are makes it a little easier.” (Ana)

What advice would you give to cross-cultural couples and multicultural families?

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Growing up in Australia I had very little understanding of my cultural background.

With the knowledge that I had Irish ancestry, I told people I was Australian and one quarter Irish. It didn’t matter that this was wrong - or that my maths was appalling, and I was actually half Irish - because our cultural background was not something my family discussed. And I never gave much thought to it.

On my Mum’s side, my grandparents were born in Australia and my great grandparents were English, with a bit of French thrown in there somewhere. I never knew my Dad’s parents, only that they were Irish, emigrating from Ireland to England and then onto Australia where my Dad was born.

My Mum was raised Protestant and my Dad was raised Catholic; as a consequence I was raised religion-less, with my parents deciding that it was better to leave me with this choice (read: conflict).

So with no religious influence, the only culture I identified with was the Australian culture. As a family we engaged in aspects of the Aussie culture including barbeques, backyard cricket and barracking for our footy team, the mighty Hawks. But as a young Australia struggled to define herself, I struggled too.

The closest I came to any kind of Irish identity was an early high-school project on Ireland, and Cultural Day at work a few years ago. I cringe when I remember the token effort I made, contributing a bag of Tayto crisps I’d found in the specialty Irish shop downstairs. And on employment and ethnicity questionnaires, I’d always mark the box indicating that I was “White Irish”.

It became my identity by default, but one I had little understanding of – until I travelled to Ireland.

After tracing my ancestry and connecting with my family in Dublin, I realised that I not only wanted but I needed, the Irish influences that were missing from my childhood, to now be a part of my adult life. And this is what has shaped my time living abroad in the UK.

Not the lure of endless festivals or European travels, but the opportunity to explore Ireland and experience some of what I missed out on. To find out how my ancestors lived and learn who my family are. Who I am or might have been.

It’s now 18 months since I first travelled around Ireland and I’ve been back four times since. These trips have included family reunions and road trips with friends, trad music, set dancing, surfing and mountain hikes. On rural farm-stays I’ve harvested potatoes, milked goats, built stone walls and drank with locals.

My family has shown me around the neighbourhood where my grandparents lived and together we saw U2 in concert. But of all of my experiences, it’s the laughter, singing, and stories of my Irish family that I love. These stories provided a family history I knew nothing about and a context for my own story.

I’m now preparing to return home to Melbourne. And although I grew up as a child from an Australian family, I’ll take these experiences and stories to now live my life as an adult from a multicultural family.

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To be honest, the cultural differences - the immense weight of two separate histories, perspectives, assumptions, myths and surroundings - didn’t strike me as particularly significant at first. I felt surprisingly at home in Spanish, which seemed to express and accentuate my personality like a just-right pair of jeans hugs the hips, and Mexico was a natural fit – the casualness and the intensity, the reckless abandon and the human warmth, the coffee, the food, the mezcal. I’ve never eased into a community as comfortably and naturally as I did in Oaxaca; first I was here, roaming, out of it, the classic bumbling gringa, and then I was suddenly a part of things with a tight-knit group of friends and a serious boyfriend. There was a social revolution when I arrived; the streets were full of burning buses, and I went running on a highway barricaded by scorched tires and heaps of scrap metal. Nearly everyone I knew when I arrived left in a matter of months. I fell in love. I stayed through the months of federal police occupation and the fires in the streets at night, Jorge and I moved in together, and in spring of the following year we suddenly had plans to move to Beijing – I’d gotten a position as an English Composition Instructor for the coming academic year.

Throughout this whirlwind first year and throughout our year in China cultural differences seemed the least prominent factor in our relationship. Our socio-economic differences stood out more. We have different givens – college, for example. He was the first in his family to go – I took college for granted from grade school on, and though I loved it and squeezed every inch of experience out of it, I never thought of it as a particularly extraordinary opportunity, and never would’ve rejected the thought of studying photography as hopelessly impractical, as he did. Our upbringings were diametrically different – he grew up in a small village of five hundred inhabitants in the mountains of Oaxaca, and walked those treacherous three miles old-timers famously like to brag about to school and back every day. He studied agriculture, planting onions and chasing bulls. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, a quintessentially middle-American city of several million people, going to a small well-respected high school, driving around town on the weekends, eating brown rice casseroles and hummus. My family was not rich, but I certainly felt we were the first time I came back from Oaxaca.

There are other differences, too – I love being at the bottom of a learning curve and could switch countries every six months, starting out clueless again and again on a dusty street corner in some distant land where I don’t speak the language or know the customs; he gets a look of immense relief on his face when it’s clear we’ll stick around somewhere for at least a year or two. As in many relationships, in ours there are the myriad differences that smooth the machinery of couplehood or send it coughing to a stop. But I wouldn’t say that culture – his Mexicanness, my Americanness – is among the most important. Perhaps this is because of that year in China, where in the face of Confucianism, Communism, “saving face” and the host of other inscrutable, impossibly foreign ways of thinking, the differences between our countries seemed laughingly miniscule. Perhaps its because there, outside of both of our native countries and cultures (a good friend in Japan once told me that all intercultural couples should live in a third country, a neutral country neither of them are from) we could have a relationship that didn’t conform to particular stereotypes or swing back around to cultural explanations for differences of opinion.

I think perhaps the hardest thing for me has been to assert my own culture while immersed in his; we’ve lived the majority of our time together in Mexico, and this means sometimes I sense my Americanness has been eclipsed. It is an intense pleasure to let loose with a “Dude, WTF?” following an episode of “Lost” with a couple of American friends. I imagine it will be similar for Jorge when we move to Pittsburgh this summer – I’ll be starting an MFA Program in the fall and we’ll have switched roles, with me at home and him fully immersed in U.S culture. I see why my friend made her point about third countries (she is Australian, her partner is British: they live in Japan); it is hard being the one in the privileged role of the native, and it is equally hard being the one in the limited role of foreigner.

But all of this seemed to be part of a distant backstory in our relationship until my friends Susy and Mauricio got married. Their wedding was not simply a union of two people but of two cultures; they are Mexican-American, and the wedding emphasized the otherness and belonging they feel in both cultures. It occurred to me in a rush of emotion that this is the legacy I will leave in the world. My children will be caught up in that otherness and belonging; they will be of two cultures and two languages. They will grow up with Mexico and the United States in their blood, their history, their way of seeing the world.

We have considered ourselves married by common law for quite some time now, but with the pressing need for a fiancé visa for Jorge to immigrate to the states, we’ve decided to go through with an actual wedding. We’ll have a ceremony in English and Spanish, we’ll play the The Magnetic Fields and Celso Pina, we’ll dance with a turkey and give Polaroids as gifts. We will blend our families, our stories, and our cultures. This, as I’ve come to see, is an extraordinary thing. But it’s not everything – it’s one part of us, and one part of the commitment we’ve made to say, “Hey, let’s make this journey together.”

Sarah Menkedick is editor in chief of Glimpse.org and contributing editor at the Matador Network. She’s currently based in Oaxaca, Mexico. If you liked this, head over to Sarah’s blog Posa Tigres for more exploration of life in Mexico, travel, identity and culture.

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It was recently Sant Jordi in Catalunya. The day of lovers and literature, tradition holds that the man gives the woman a rose in return for a book. Not a public holiday, it seems to be as the streets come alive with people strolling amid the colorful book and flower stands.

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Watching the day unfold over a coffee and cigarette, I recalled past girlfriends I’d had in the states and some flames from my first year in Barcelona, but mostly I thought about my Spanish wife. Love and relationships are complex topics, which like dark matter, I only vaguely understand. I will say, though, being with a person from a foreign country definitely adds an element of unpredictability to the equation.

First, there’s the question of which language to communicate in. When we met I spoke no Spanish while she spoke English like an Essex girl. We lived in Spain, so the decision was Spanish. My wife, being the native, had the upper hand in terms of command and linguistic dexterity. I, however, always had the ready excuse of, “I didn’t understand,” which was used frequently, especially during the first months. This required a patience at which I still marvel.

But even when we reached near equality with the language, the way it’s spoken can bring about all types of problems. My wife, like many Spaniards I’ve found, likes to explain everything, at times to the minutest detail, before beginning. I, on the other hand, tend to subscribe to the American belief of keeping it brief, answering questions as they pop up but first let’s get started. This can still sometimes be a source of consternation, but that isn’t always the case. At first her Spanish directness offended my polite sensibilities, but now she’s the one reminding me to say please and thank you.

Then there’s the question of her fiery Latin temper and my disposition mellowed by too much sun and Hollywood in my twenties. So like any couple, we squabble from time to time. How much is due to personality differences and how much is cultural, I don’t know. I have, however, discovered a side benefit to being admonished in a language that isn’t mine: the intended impact of the words is dulled by the time my brain translates them and registers an emotional response. At the same time, it’s also a great way to learn some Spanish expressions like me cago en la leche.

Jeremy Holland is an American expat in Barcelona and author of “From Barcelona Vol. 1″. He writes about the city, the life and the people in his blog From Barcelona. Adapted from a post originally published on Jeremy’s blog. Read the original here.

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When my husband Sean lived in Buenos Aires – before we got married-, he used to bring back goodies from his native UK that weren’t available in Argentina. Every time I opened that special kitchen cabinet, wonderful aromas of faraway places wafted out.

Sean introduced me to things like Heinz baked beans, Marmite, Bovril, mango chutney and Indian curry. It was love at first bite with Branston pickles! He would cook his childhood staples for me: cottage pie, beans on toast (oh happiness!), cauliflower cheese or toad in the hole, as well as the curries he is famous for. I think knowing what he ate as a boy helped me know the man a little better.

I didn’t really have to cook typical Argentinean food for Sean since he had already adopted it. He became adept at manning the parrilla (grill,) probably by channelling his inner gaucho. Every year, my family looks forward to Christmas because they know my hubby will produce yummy baby back ribs, grilled flank steak or sirloin, or whatever takes his fancy at the time. Last year he cooked a whole suckling pig for the first time!

One of Sean’s favourite snacks is empanadas: sweet corn, ham and cheese, beef, cheese and onion… and the mouth-watering list goes on. Not long ago, he came up with a new idea for a filling, one which perfectly combines both of our cultures: chicken curry empanadas. How’s that for multiculturalism? By the way, these curry empanadas were a huge hit with some our British friends too.

Although we can get some British and Argentinean food in Dallas, Texas, where we’re living now, we still like to bring some stuff back with us whenever we visit either Argentina or the UK and have a little taste of home.

This is what our pantry looks like now:

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