Intercultural relationships are the association between people with different customs and traditions. Geographical, national, and cultural boundaries influence different societies with distinct values, languages, stereotypes, and prejudices. Intercultural communications facilitate relationship building by people with different cultural backgrounds. The reading by Tom Grothe on intercultural relationships gave me a new understanding of the benefits and the process of building intercultural relationships. Chapter nine on intercultural relationships helped me understand the challenges and expectations of intercultural engagements and response strategies to build strong cross-cultural relationships.
First, an intercultural relationship is vital because it can help me learn new skills and gain diversified cultural knowledge. Exploring new sports, music, dialect, cultural beliefs, and history will enhance my intellectual and skill understanding. Additionally, Intercultural relationships will help me rethink and challenge previously held stereotypes about other peoples’ cultures. Overcoming stereotypes enables different people to build healthy relationships by focusing on the similarities of the individuals. To create good cross-cultural relationships, I must understand the potential challenges that may surface when creating intercultural friendships. Perceived differences, negative stereotypes, and lack of motivation are barriers to building cultural diversity (Grothe, 2020). Therefore, I should be aware of my attitudes and, behaviors, and facts and focus on the positive when interacting with people with different cultural identities.
Intercultural friendships differ depending on how the people interact. For instance, friendship relationships differ from romantic or family relationships. Friendship is voluntary in nature and is affected by some social aspects and individual perceptions. Individualism and collectivism are the individual perceptions that affect friendship. Individualistic people take relationships voluntarily and only engage in friendship for individual gains. Unlike the individualistic view of friendship, collectivism perceives friendship as a mutually beneficial long-term obligation. Submission, compromise, obliteration, and consensus are effective ways to resolve conflict in intercultural relationships (Grothe, 2020). Intercultural relationships may be challenging to foster, but I can leverage on collectivist attitude and conflict-solving mechanisms to overcome the obstacles.
Reference
Tom Grothe. (2020). Exploring intercultural communication (grothe). Social Sci LibreTexts.