CAPS Blog #6 - Final Blog

My friend and I in Ohio

            An intercultural relationship that I am involved in is a friend. The relationship I am going to be looking at is one between myself and someone I have known since I was five. Yes, five. Her family moved in around the corner of our block when she was six and I was five. I was really shy (well, let’s face it – I still am!) and she had to ask me to play at first. Once I warmed up to her and her sister, we would play together all the time. We were pretty much attached at the hips. We didn’t go to school together, since at the time I went to a Lutheran school & she went to public school, but once we each got home from school, we were outside playing some sort of play together. I can’t remember a summer where we didn’t spend every day together. Eventually we did end up going to middle school together, but she was a year ahead of me, so I barely saw her during the day. When I was a junior and she was a senior in high school, we were in the same music class. It was our music group (Concert Choir) that put on the school musical each year. That year we did “Grease” and during rehearsals we spent a lot of time together.  As we have grown up, neither of us has moved, we go to the same church, and now we even work at the same daycare so we are still pretty close. We aren’t as close as we used to be, but I still know that I can go to her and tell her anything. We’ve just always had that kind of relationship where we can talk about anything and everything.

            One of the benefits I have gotten from this relationship is being able to acquire new knowledge about the world. She has always been older than me, and so has experienced things before I did. I got to learn from her because she would tell me about new things that happened. For example: the experience of high school. I got to learn about this new world before I experienced it. Another good example would be working in a daycare. She has worked at this daycare for about 5-6 years and since I just started last year, she would always talk to me about it, so going in to this job I had some idea of what to expect. Another benefit to our friendship is that I believe we have broken stereotypes. People think that females can’t be friends with other females because of the cat fights, but I don’t believe this to be true. As I said before, we’ve been friends for almost 18 years and have remained really close through that time.

            "Intercultural relationships are unique in several ways, and as such present particular challenges" (Martin & Nakayama, pg. 392). One of the challenges is our communication styles. I’m a quiet, shy person and my friend is not the same way. She’s not afraid to speak her mind while that’s not always the case for me. We’ve had our small disagreements because of this, but we’ve always been able to make up and remain friends.

            A dialectical model that relates to our friendship would be the differences-similarities. We have many similarities – both females, both go to church, both have the same values, both work in a daycare, but what makes us different is the way we grew up and how we were raised. I was raised in the church, but my friend wasn’t. Another difference is our age.

            Another model that I can relate to our relationship is the privilege-disadvantage. I can relate this to our work relationship. She will be taking over in the assistant position come August, and that means she will be higher up than me. I already listen to her since she has been there longer, but she won’t be considered my “supervisor” until she takes the assistant title.

            I think it’s important to have relationships and to examine them once in a while. If we don’t take a look at them, how will we ever better ourselves or our relationships? 

References

Martin, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2012.). Intercultural communications in contexts (6^th ed). Boston, MA: McGraw Hill.