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 the dimensions is what is called a power distance index, a measure of the extent to which a culture respects authority. A high power index means a high dose of respect for authority, to which Korea and Colombia ascribe to.

In Avianca’s case, this index manifested itself in how the notoriously brassy Kennedy Airport controllers unintentionally intimidated the copilot through their communication. In Korean Air’s case, the index reared its head untimely in how unwillingly the Korean Air copilot challenged the pilot’s judgment call.

At this point, Mr. Gladwell has begun to hint on the possible reasons why the communication between my boyfriend and I often malfunctions.

Malcolm then calls into attention six different levels of conversational address that exist in the Korean language. What this means is while it’s boggling enough to the English speaker that chez the French, one would address a superior with vous’ and a peer with a tu’, not so with Korean speakers. They know and use four other expressions that lie between their versions of vous and tu.

Asian languages, Gladwell explains further, are receiver oriented, which means that it is up to the receiver to decipher what the information he receives really mean. Between speakers of Asian languages, this subtlety is understood, even expected. Between them and speakers of non receiver oriented languages, however, the real meaning is simply and literally lost in translation.

Aha! I thought to myself as soon as I read that chapter. My first language is Indonesian, which is receiver oriented. So when I speak, I may say things that allude to what I mean. I don’t always say what I mean. I go through life unconsciously expecting people to understand me and behave accordingly in response. I was taught that in childhood.

My boyfriend’s first language is French. Now, not only does it sound vastly different from Indonesian, it is also a contrast when it comes to being receiver oriented. That means he is used to people telling him exactly what they mean. He has no training in reading the subtleties imbued in other people’s speech, including his girlfriend’s.

No wonder I always think he is insensitive. Because from my linguistic upbringing, he is.

That’s not all, though. Gladwell also brings forward another Hofstede’s dimension, one that explains the difference in how much one culture expects individuals to look after each other. It’s called an individualism index. A country like the USA, for example, has a high individualism index, as evidenced by the absence of public health insurance there. By then already extremely intrigued, I googled the list of countries as ranked by their individualism index. What I found gives me relief, suggesting that I’m not that unreasonable in my inherent expectations of my boyfriend. Indonesia has a low individualism index of 14. The nation’s mentality towards individualism is the antithesis of Americans’, basically. I chuckled, remembering one of the most earnestly taught way of life in schools there is the concept of ‘gotong royong’, which is working together to achieve a common goal. I even grew up seeing that as an exam question. My eyes then glided across the screen to find the individualism index of Belgium, where my boyfriend was raised. What I found was startling, yet expected. It’s 75.

No wonder he is not a team player’ in the way I have been raised to understand it.

Outliers The Story of Success is not a guide book on relationships. But one of Gladwell’s key messages can well be what we need to comprehend our increasingly multicultural society: that cultural legacy explains a lot about what we do and how we do it. And yes, incidentally, that explains why an Asian girl might find it difficult to understand her Caucasian boyfriend, and vice versa.