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