this is dr lisa murray bobby and you're listening to the love happiness and success podcast

oh how are we going to?

Bridget May Power, everyone.

That song is The Two Worlds, and she's singing so beautifully about

a worlds kind of colliding and how people are finding their way through it together.

And I thought that was a great intro for our topic today because we are talking about

how to navigate cultural differences in a relationship and in a family. I will say that every couple

has things to work through when it comes to having differences and perspectives and expectations and learning how to work together, communicate with each other.

That's just the work of becoming a couple.

And it's also true that couples who come from very different backgrounds have a further distance to go sometimes to create that compromise and unity.

And there can also be other variables, particularly couples of different ethnicities,

different racial backgrounds.

And it can be a real challenge sometimes to create genuine understanding so that both people feel

loved and respect and supported and prized and that differences become something to celebrate and

appreciate instead of fight over. The battlegrounds are numerous in cross-cultural cultural relationships and they can be quite fierce touching everything from

how do we handle in-laws and extended family to money and communication

and who does what around the house and the conflict can go much deeper too when it bumps into feeling valued and supported in the context of a society that can sometimes feel very unjust.

So that is where we're going today on this podcast.

And I am so excited to have this conversation with a few of my colleagues,

Dr. Georgiana Spradling, who hails from Argentina and she also works with us in the States.

Tani Shikani, who as we are recording this, is in Dubai, who has lived all over the world, but

primarily resides in New York when she's here,

...