I suppose I'm not the best to give advice, since the cross-cultural spouse and I are now divorced, but it wasn't the cultural stuff that caused the divorce. We're still friends.

Focus on the common denominators. What brought you together in the first place? Then figure out what is really interesting to each of you about the other's culture. Learn those recipes or those traditions and share them together. The puzzling, confusing, or even hurtful stuff needs to be discussed, and you need to decide together if you're going to set that stuff aside, or are going to do some things solo, because they're important to one or the other of you alone.

When they got together his family all spoke Spanish, and occasionally someone would pause and tell me what they were talking about. Usually the brother, not the husband. I enjoyed each of them individually, when they spoke English, but the group meals were quite lonely for me. I didn't learn to speak Spanish because he speaks perfectly good English, though I now recognize quite a few words and know their meanings.

We had a couple of fantastic kids, so whatever the outcome of our relationship, it was worth going into it just for these two children.

SRS