Can the twain meet between two cultural opposites?

Can the twain meet between two cultural opposites?

Let me say that I love my wife very much. She is sweet, kind,
beautiful and I can't imagine my life without her. That's without
question.

It is true, however, that we are different in many ways. For
example, she is a woman and I am a man. In addition, she is
Indonesian and I am Canadian. We haven't been married all that
long, but I know we'll be able to rise above our differences.
After all, men have married women before and the marriages have
survived. And people from different races and cultures have been
known to get along. Haven't they?

Women differ from men, you know. Not in everything perhaps,
but certainly in some pretty fundamental ways. Men and women both
enjoy sports. In that, they are similar. Women though, consider
shopping to be a sport. Big difference, there.

There are also some differences between men's and women's
senses of humor. I say with the greatest of respect however, that
a man's sense of humor is generally subtler and more refined than
that of a woman. Women, for example, don't think The Three
Stooges are funny. Really.

Most women, I am afraid, would fail to find an in-depth
conversation contrasting the relative merits of Shemp versus
Curly to be less than edifying. I know it's hard to believe and I
hesitate to make that observation, but I have actually seen women
leave the room after less than an hour of debate on that very
subject.

I have a suspicion that the logic circuits in our brains are
wired differently. Here's what I mean. Suppose a man goes into
the office on Saturday to catch up on some work. On the way home,
he picks up a romantic movie that he couldn't care less about,
but he knows his wife wants to see.

When he gets home in the early afternoon, tired but looking
forward to spending the rest of his truncated weekend with the
love of his life, his beloved is sitting on the couch staring at
a magazine. She refuses to acknowledge his presence or even his
existence.

For the rest of the day he begs her to talk to him; he
suggests they watch the romantic (shudder) movie, she sniffs
contemptuously; he apologies for being away; she glares with
disgust; miserable, he sleeps on his lonely side of the bed, she
on hers.

Eventually, perhaps the next day, she explains. It seems that
she loves him very much; in fact, the entire performance was
intended to communicate that fact. The cold, silent treatment
apparently was her way of making him want to spend more time with
her. To a woman, this actually makes sense.

The cultural differences are something else again. There are
pieces of esoteric knowledge that one is expected to be familiar
with and not knowing them is seen as a deliberate attempt to
infuriate one's Indonesian family. Here's another hypothetical
scenario. The bule husband is at home on a weekend. He's watching
TV and having a beer and a snack. The beautiful Indonesian wife
and her mother walk in the door, fresh from an afternoon of
sports.

They see the poor man and start shrieking. "Oh God!" they
scream, "What are you doing?"

Shaken, the bewildered husband looks around desperately for a
cobra or a tiger. The mother in-law leaps toward the husband,
wrestles the durian from his hand and hurls it into the waste
bin. "Do you try to make my daughter a widow?" she demands.

"But, but, but..." he replies eloquently. It seems that durian
may be delicious, it may smell like a dead rat, but apparently it
has one other unique quality that everyone knows about: it will
kill you if consumed with beer...even Indonesian beer.

Or how about this? A fever resulting from a bout of influenza
or a bad cold raises a nagging thirst. The poor patient naturally
drinks several glasses of fruit juice. Vitamin C content for the
virus, liquid to cope with the dehydration and cool to bring the
temperature down.

Makes sense, right? Wrong! It is apparently another suicide
attempt. More secret knowledge: to drink anything at less than
about 30 degrees temperature when you have a cold is to make it
worse.

It's fine to go surfing and then lie on the beach to dry. But
taking three steps from the car to the house in a light rain is
to be avoided like an insurance salesman. You're supposed to
cover up and sprint like drain cleaner is falling from the sky.
If you don't, you'll catch something that will only permit you
drink 30 degree liquids for the next week.

I have swum in a piranha-infested river and bumped up against
a seven-metre anaconda in Venezuela. I have a scar under my left
eye from shrapnel I caught in Beirut; I have base jumped, bungee
jumped and rappelled, snowboarded in the Andes, SCUBA dived under
the Arctic ice-pack, eaten tarantulas with Amazon headhunters and
stepped on a rattlesnake.

But for sheer adrenaline-pumping, bowel-churning, white-
knuckle terror, I have never encountered anything that compares
with a casual drive in downtown Jakarta. My Indonesian wife
thinks I'm a big baby. Do you think there's any hope for us?

-- Patrick Guntensperger