by Karina Widyani

Created on: January 28, 2009

Interracial relationships are hardly a novelty anymore. Anywhere you look these days, a variety of racial combos are bound to cross your path. One of the most popular, though, is definitely that of Caucasian men with Asian women. At my workplace alone, which has less than one hundred employees, there are three Asian women and as per last year's company Christmas party, all three belonged to this category. And those are in addition to myself.

They seem to be happy with their partners. As so am I. No doubt we all have our own difficulties in our relationships, but I wonder, are we thrown a handful of additional difficulties on top of those caused by the universal fact that men are from Mars and women are from Venus?

Because now and then, I stumble upon road blocks that I have never experienced in my previous relationships with men who had similar cultural backgrounds to mine. For example, I'd come home after work, usually one hour after him, and find that he has already had dinner. "Why didn't you wait for me so we can have dinner together?" I've found myself asking many times. Other occasions have been equally trivial, but nevertheless they have compelled me to say, "You're selfish!" or "You're insensitive!" or even at one point "You're not a team player!" He, on the other hand, have found himself puzzled over my accusations and asked, "What do you really want?"

I seem to have found a clue in what Malcolm Gladwell, a Canadian journalist of English and Jamaican descent, wrote in his recent book Outliers The Story of Success.'

There is a chapter where he tells a story of Korean Air's high rate of crashes in the ten years between 1988 and 1998. In it, he also recounts piece by suspenseful piece what investigators of the famous crash of a Colombian airliner Avianca in 1990 found and analyzed from the cockpit's last conversation captured in the black box. Readers learn that the key factor that decided the fate of the 158 passengers aboard was the lack of communication between the copilot, the pilot and the air traffic controller. Though the weather that night awful and the autopilot malfunctioned, these two factors alone are not enough to bring down a plane. Readers also learn that this same reason also explained Korean Air's notorious safety record in the past.

Gladwell then brings into his story what is known in psychology as Hofstede's Dimensions, the results of Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede's analysis of ways in which one culture differs from the other. One of

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