Challenges of an intercultural relationship

As you already know, my boyfriend has an Iranian background. On a sunny day I was wearing a new T-shirt and asked him what he thought of it (and i learned to do that never again). After a silence he said: 'yeah its kinda comfy and conservative'.

This brought us to our first heavy, hours-long intercultural relationship fight.

As an emancipated Dutch girl I got the shivers from the word 'conservative'. I don't want to be conservative, that is something for obedient, fundamentalist girls that are not independent. While trying to figure out where his statement came from, I was thinking out loud. I said to him that it perhaps had something to do with his Iranian background. I asked him: Is it in Iran good or positive to say that something looks conservative, because of the more conservative culture. At that moment, he became mad, because he thought that I was classifying him as a conservative. He blamed me for not knowing him better and the worst part, he blamed me for racial stereotyping him. As you may imagine, this conversation took many wrong turns. These wrong turns were actually all caused by our different backgrounds and the cultural contexts we come from.

As a Dutch girl, I don't want my T-Shirt to be conservative, because I totally agree with the Western concepts of freedom and individuality. But I tried to explain the statement in a wrong way, by arguing that the culture of my boyfriend had influenced him in his thinking.

And now my boyfriend thought I was blaming him for being a conservatist. But he forgot that I am an anthropologist. He forgot that when I said that his statement maybe has something to do with his background, I actually meant that his statement is partly produced by cultural classifications. That because he is born and raised in a country like Iran, maybe the classification system is different. That maybe in Iran saying a T-Shirt is conservative can be positive. That 'to be conservative' may not have the negative connotation that it has in my culture.

But it obviously had a negative connotation in his eyes. He was mad. He didn't want to be associated with the conservatists in his country. So in the end, we concluded that we both don't want to be associated with something conservative. And that he obviously didn't like my shirt; D.

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