Building bridges through love

Very recently I saw on LinkedIn a post from a UK couple, she is white and he is black. She writes: “This man is the love of my life…I am so pleased we didn’t listen to the people who tried to tell us that our relationship wasn't right. We chose instead to follow our hearts.”

Their picture and story really touched me. As it is close to our Colombian-German love-story.

2004: Being at student at the university of Stuttgart my flatmates and I invited for a party at our home. As the door rang I opened the door and 14 students stood in front of me. Clearly international as they didn’t understand me welcoming them in German, but were very eager to join our party :D

My now husband stood in the third row, left side (yes, I still remember that). He told me later that at first he didn’t want to go to that party as he wasn’t really invited … but then he thought that he doesn’t want to miss this chance to meet people form the country he just moved to.

It seems I made an impression on him opening the door… and he gathered all his courage and his Colombian charm and approached me at the party….and one year later I took all of my courage to really open my heart to this young determined man from Bogota.

2020: We had last month our 10th wedding anniversary and it makes me really happy and really proud of what we build up together. We have a wonderful son who got the great Colombian hair from his father and my German nose. We lived in Germany, Hungary and now China, going through these experiences together and growing, individually, as a family and as a couple. The picture you see in this post was taken on our wedding. Our friends prepared this wonderful photowall using in a playful way the Colombian and German stereotypes.

So our story is a story about courage and love.

And while thinking about it I screened in my mind our friends and the people around us in Hungary and here in China….to realize how many intercultural couples we have around us.

Couples from: China - Germany, Romania - Philipines, Korea - Germany, Slovenia - France, France - Colombia, Germany - Turkey, Argentina - France, Mexico - Germany, Mexico - China, Germany - Hungary, Hungarian - American, Spain - Germany, Italy - Greece, Puerto Rico - Canada, Spain - China, Latvia - China, China - Pakistan ….

This made me think: What can we learn for life out of intercultural relationships?

Believe, so much! :D When I am thinking back about the start of our relationship I remember how much we were in love and how exciting it was to explore another world through the other. Colombia was a country I simply had no clue about. Our first trip together to Colombia, getting to know his really big family welcoming me with a lot of curiosity and heart! Listening to the fascinating stories he told about his country, the people and his life. Getting to know such a brave man who left his country to study in Germany with only 300 Euros in his pocket, who lived in Bogota during conflicting times and who learned to live with a feeling of danger.

On the other hand we realized quite often that we seem to somehow tick differently. An example: One of our first weekends together. We woke up Saturday morning and I was all excited about what we will be doing on the weekend. So I sat up in bed and asked him: '“What are our plans for the weekend?”. He looked at me puzzled, thinking to himself: “OMG, what is happening with her? It’s weekend, the whole idea is NOT to have any plans.” It wasn’t easy for us to really understand these situations, because we weren't even aware that they were caused in a big part by our very different cultural backgrounds. Also planing a holiday was quite as task for us :D….

Step by step we understood the influence of culture better. But looking back it would have helped us a lot having more knowledge. Mainly not to take these things too personal, but rather as an expression of our different backgrounds.

After looking at this country comparison between Germany and Colombia in the great Hofstede insights free online tool you don’t need any further hints, right? Long Term Orientation?!?

So what we learned (and we are still learning that :D) is how much we take the way we see the world as the “right” basis without even noticing it. Being aware of this we did develop a sense for those intercultural differences and the ability to change more easily the perspective.

For me it’s almost like a intuition - I have these moments where I feel a slight irritation about the behavior of the other, this makes me screen more consciously the possibility that we have different cultural settings here.

Jaime Dixon, a coach here in Shanghai working a lot on intercultural challenges, puts this very nicely: “Embrace the chance that you are wrong.” And this awareness we created through our relationship helps us definitely living in working in other countries, such as Hungary and China now.

Such a relationship pushes you out of your box and triggers an intensive learning process as you are not only getting to know the world of another person but also a new culture. Based on this study this sparks creativity, workplace innovation and entrepreneurship. “Going out with a close friend or romantic partner from a foreign culture can help people “go out” of the box and into a creative frame of mind.” Well, isn’t that nice? :D. Maybe you should date someone from another country to boost your career ;)?

There are so many other fascinating factors about intercultural relationships (and we have a lot more stories to tell :D), so this blog post is scratching only the surface…

I hope anyhow that it triggered some thoughts about the value of opening up to other cultures. For those amongst you living in an intercultural relationship. What are your learnings? How did this relationship prepare you better for this diverse, complex and colorful world we live in? How are you building bridges through love?

And for those wanting to explore a little more here is a wonderful video with interracial couples.