Why do small things turn into fights between our cultures?

Why does something so small become a fight between us?

The row is rarely about the thing in front of you; underneath it sits a rule one of you never knew was a rule. Both of you are following instructions that neither of you wrote, and each assumes the other has read them too. You find out your own rule exists at the precise moment your partner does something else. What rises in you then is less a difference of opinion than a sense of offence: a tightening in the chest, the feeling of being treated carelessly by someone who ought to know you. Your partner feels the same jolt at the same time. By the standard each of you grew up with, you both behaved decently, which is why being asked to say sorry feels so unfair.

Research on couples from different cultures finds that the sticking points are fairly predictable: raising children, gender roles and power, faith, how feelings are shown, language, and disapproval from relatives¹. That body of work is written in English, drawn mostly from Western countries and built largely on small qualitative studies, so I treat it as a map of where couples tend to snag rather than a measurement. Where someone grew up tells you where a rule came from and little more. Why your partner acted as they did last Tuesday owes more to their own family and their week than to any passport.

What does each of your families take for granted?

Some families run on planning, and to someone raised differently, planning can feel like being kept out. Your partner declines a spontaneous visit because the evening was already promised, and what reaches you is the sound of a door shutting.

• Some families book their visits. Diaries are honoured, and turning up unannounced breaks a rule nobody mentioned to you.
• Some families let go of adult children early. Close and affectionate with their parents, and clearly separate from them.
• Care has two definitions. In an open-house family, love means showing up. In a planning family, love means checking first.
• Each looks wrong from the other side. Calling your mother every day can look like you never left home, and arranging a visit weeks in advance can look like you would rather not go.
• Holidays carry the most weight. Birthdays, religious festivals and the long summer break are where both families feel entitled to you, and whose table you sit at becomes the entire argument.

Find out what a plan is guarding. Sometimes it is the evening; sometimes it is the calm your partner needs before company feels possible.

Why is money so much harder than it looks?

You each learned what a fair arrangement around money is, and your partner’s version can land as an insult. For a partner raised on separate accounts and split bills, keeping money apart means nobody owes anybody, and merging everything feels like giving away part of yourself. For a partner raised on pooling, a joint account is simply what commitment looks like, and a separate one feels like being kept at a distance by the person you share a bed with. Neither of you is being petty.

Below the accounts sits something harder to put into words. If you live in your partner’s country, they earn inside a system they understand, with a pension that makes sense to them. You may have arrived with qualifications that count for less here. Quietly, that makes one of you the host and the other the guest, and guests tend to argue more carefully than hosts do. Nobody names it, so it leaks out as a quarrel over a restaurant bill.

What happens when we deal with conflict in opposite ways?

One of you falls silent while the other raises the volume, and both take the other’s move as an attack.

• Silence can be a sentence. In families where conflict is handled indirectly, going quiet or letting a topic drop is how someone says no.
• Volume can sound like losing control. You meant that you cared enough to engage, and your partner heard shouting.
• Quiet can feel like being left. In families where arguing is how you show you are still invested, being left alone in a silent room is the wound.
• The pattern feeds itself. The quieter partner retreats further, the louder one pushes harder, and the original subject disappears.
• Each move may be protecting something. Perhaps one of you withdraws to stop things getting worse, and the other presses to avoid being brushed aside. These are possibilities to explore, not explanations to assume.

Measured against how each of you was raised, nobody has misbehaved. That is why insisting on an apology tends to end the evening badly, while describing the rule you were following tends to move things on.

Which language are we really arguing in?

Usually the one that suits the partner who grew up in the country, or a shared English that neither of you fully owns. Anger tends to feel most at home in the language of your childhood, and in a language you learned later the same words can carry their meaning without their heat. In experiments, people answered the same moral dilemma differently in a foreign language than in their native one, probably because a learned language stirs less feeling². A dilemma in a laboratory is very far from a tense kitchen late at night, so I would not push that finding any further than it goes.

What I notice in sessions is the version that counts. One partner fights in a tongue with its full emotional charge intact, the other in one that blunts it, so one comes across as too intense and the other as too cool, and each reads that as a sign of how much the other cares. Saying out loud which language each of you can actually feel in is often more useful than agreeing to use one language for good.

How do we stop having the same fight?

Name the hidden rule as information rather than as an accusation, and do it at a moment when neither of you is caught up in the row.

• Start with your own assumption. Tell your partner what you took for granted, and admit you only realised you took it for granted when they did something different.
• Ask two questions about something small. What does lunch at your parents’ place mean for you, and how would it feel to miss one.
• Each finish one sentence. Growing up, when somebody at home got upset, the next thing that happened was. Then listen without correcting.
• Settle how you take a break. Pick a signal and a time to come back, so stepping away is said aloud rather than acted out.
• Create a shared culture. Choose as a couple what to carry on, what to drop and what to invent, rather than letting one family win by default.
• Share out the work of settling in. When one of you is rebuilding a language and a social circle and the other becomes interpreter and fixer, resentment builds unless some of that load goes elsewhere.

My view that couples who invent their own traditions tend to fare better comes from clinical experience, not from a measured result.

None of this is enough when a rule runs so deep that neither of you can hear it as a rule, and naming it simply becomes the next argument. It is not the right approach at all if one of you is afraid of the other, or if the imbalance between host and guest is now being used to control the other person. What often stays unclear is whether you want different things or are describing the same thing in different words, and that is worth exploring with someone outside the relationship. A session, or a free 30-minute call, is a sensible place to begin.

Questions people ask

Is it worth seeing a therapist about cultural differences if nothing is badly wrong?

Yes, and cultural friction is often some of the most workable material a couple can bring. Starting before resentment has settled in tends to make the work simpler.

Can we do sessions together if we live in different time zones?

Yes: sessions are by video, and we find a regular time in Copenhagen time that works where you live. You can join from the same room or from two different places.

Should we start together, or should I come on my own first?

If you are both willing, come together; if your partner is not ready, begin alone. Changing your side of the pattern still changes the pattern, and some partners join later once therapy no longer sounds like a trial.

Which language should our sessions be in?

Choose whichever language lets the partner who struggles more with words feel what they say, even if it is not their strongest. Either of you can switch mid-sentence, because a switch often shows me where the feeling sits.

How do I know a therapist will not simply side with one culture?

Ask how they work with couples from different backgrounds, and listen for whether both sets of habits are treated as rules rather than as good or bad manners. A therapist who explains either of you by nationality alone will not help much.

When small cultural differences keep turning into fights, I can help you both translate what each of you means in online couples therapy, by video, wherever you live.

Sources

1. Yurtaeva and Charura. Comprehensive scoping review of research on intercultural love and romantic relationships. 46 studies. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2024.
2. Costa, Foucart, Hayakawa, Aparici, Apesteguia, Heafner and Keysar. Your morals depend on language. PLOS ONE, 2014.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.