Multi Cultural Adaptation

I was reading a marriage problem column and started to think.

Problems occured in the cause of cultural differences do exist. But what I am thinking is if the term is the real cause of the break down of a marriage or if it is just an excuse when a not-clicking-anymore period emerges between the two.

My mother is a mix of Ambonese, Kalimantans and Javanese with open, liberal, loud characteristics while my father was a total Javanese who was most of the time quiet, but when he started to speak, he gave this shuddering charism for others to obey him. The condition when they met for the first time was: my mother, a widow with a daughter and was my father's fourth wife. I don't even know how many half sisters and brothers I've got from my father. The bitter thing was, when I was bigger, every after my mother walked my father out to our house's gate for work, she jumped like a happy little rabbit whilst saying: "Yesss.. the devil's gone." Being a 15 with so many idealistic ideas in my head, I was thinking like: "What kind of a family is this?"

Later I knew that both my mother and father felt that they were actually not meant for each other. The unfortunate thing was that they found it out when they had already had these three children, including me. Openness was their greatest problem, for although my mother is very open, she'd learnt long enough not to discuss fragile topics with my father when his mood was not extra good.

In my opinion, Communication, original self ethics and compromises should be the keys to overcome the problem inspite of the most important thing of all - Love. But these are not easy to apply when the couple have brought their natural characteristics, either from their culture and/or employed-by-self-experience beliefs, without ever learning and trying to self-recognise and introspect.

Back to the cultural accusation. It might be one of the causes of a marriage failure, but I strongly think that it always goes back to each individual, feelings for the partner, and a willingness to improve oneself before trying to improve the partner or the relationship concerned.

My present theories.

My untouched unexperienced ideals.

I just wish I'll remember to re-read this when I'm facing the real marriage life's problem. :P