How Bicultural Couples Make Difference Work: Everyday Negotiation, Conflict, and “Couple Culture”

Xiaoyi Li

doi:10.53941/ics.2026.100003

Abstract

In an increasingly globalised world, bicultural intimate relationships have become a common feature of contemporary social life. While research has extensively documented challenges associated with cultural difference, much of this work treats culture as a stable background variable and frames conflict primarily as relational strain. Less attention has been paid to how bicultural couples make difference workable through everyday interaction, and how such interactional work sustains intimacy. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with three bicultural couples residing in France, this qualitative study examines how partners interpret, manage, and integrate difference based on their narrated accounts of everyday interaction. Using an interactional, process-oriented view of culture and inductive thematic analysis, the study foregrounds negotiation practices rather than cultural comparison. Findings identify three interrelated patterns. First, language-related misunderstanding is a recurring site where difference becomes visible, but it is often addressed through communicative repair rather than avoidance. Second, conflict is experienced less as cultural clash than as everyday relational work through which expectations and norms are negotiated. Third, across partners’ accounts of their relationship trajectories, repeated negotiation contributes to the emergence of a shared “couple culture” that can reduce the everyday salience of cultural difference. By treating communication as a relational and interactional process, this study advances a nuanced understanding of intercultural intimacy and shows how difference can be rendered workable through everyday communicative practices.

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