Moglie e buoi dei paesi tuoi

And this is another common say that we use in Italy...literally it reads : wife and beefs of your country.
More in general it means that it is wiser to chose someone with the same background for a long-term commitment, being this getting married or something else.

I thought that this say wouldn't make too much sense today and that it would be totally outdated....I recently discovered than instead different backgrounds and cultures are not always easy to melt....especially over serious matters.

Traveling as much as I do and living and moving from one country to another, my two last relationships have been with non-Italian people. Not a big deal I thought. As long as we are all open-minded we can overcome any issue....I still stand by this thought, but I have to add that overcoming cultural difference, which most of the times one doesn't even know to have, requires a lot of work and a lot of patience, from both sides when the people involved are in a relationship.

Things that for me are completely obvious for the other person may not be at all. I remember when during my first relationship with a non-Italian person, the olandesino, he always freaked out when my family would scream and yell at each other in the middle of a "normal" conversation....before being able to understand Italian, he always thought that they would end up killing each others...considering that for my family this is the normal way to communicate and to talk and that discussing with animosity can happen even for small things like where to have dinner, without anyone actually being angry at someone else, you can understand how many times he had to experience this kind of situation before realizing that it was not the end of the world and it was just a cultural difference from his own (Dutch).

Now that I am in a very committed relationship to my ex-now-new-again-boyfriend I am facing cultural differences on a regular basis......it can be quite frustrating and it requires a lot of communication, patience and compromise from both of us. It is worth it. But it is also quite some work......

We may be all connected by internet, facebook, and whatever else, but cultural differences are still there....and despite the work and the stress that the may cause in a relationship between two people with a different background, I am happy that they still exist and globalization didn't wipe them out yet!

Let's preserve differences and work to learn about them and understand what it is unfamiliar to us!