Differences in the socio-cultural baggage of partners can affect their relationship. True, even just understanding that we are all different and have the right to differ from each other will smooth out the brewing conflict.
Next to me is the life of several young families. All between twenty and thirty-five.
Creating a family is difficult, I would say, orchestral. Although it is something at first as if only two participants. But no, the most active participants are at least four more people — parents on both sides. And also friends, and also from both sides. Then the children, their friends and girlfriends. Colleagues, neighbors, life raging around, which sometimes reveals a sharp difference in interests, passions and preferences. But the main thing, of course, is the premarital experience with which everyone comes to a new family. And then I noticed a problem that was previously unknown to me. Or rather, like this: in our generation, such a problem practically did not exist.
The totalitarian society was based on a fairly homogeneous environment. Material wealth, education, magnets of names and phenomena that culture offered, were approximately the same for everyone. We read the same books and magazines, listened to the same music, responded to the same ideas. One, by the way, for all pioneer childhood and one Komsomol youth.
Of course, there was a difference here too. Between visitors to the operetta and the Philharmonic, for example, readers of Novy Mir and Nashe Sovremennik, a resident of a provincial town and the capital. But either this was not so significant, or all these people lived peacefully in their horizontal layers and did not intersect with each other much. And one more thing: lovers of classical music, as a rule, did not neglect the operetta, and readers of Novy Mir always looked into Nash Sovremennik.
Political differences divided for the most part fathers and children. Yes, and they were not in an acute, but in a passive stage of rare conversations, since they did not have an effective way out, as well as forms of their social manifestation.
Then another time came. From a counted number of socio-cultural strata, thousands of reference communities were formed, sometimes socially shaped, sometimes volatile and spontaneous. No longer physicists and lyricists, for example, between which, by the way, there was not much difference (again, one stage, two television channels, exhibitions, for which everyone stood in one line). Today, Tolkienists and theatre.doc fans, football fans and the creators of the Andrei Bely Prize not only have little understanding of each other, but do not want to have one at all.
Previously, hobbies could unite people, but at the same time they did not constitute any prerequisites for disengagement. Today, everyone strives to create a closed social environment around themselves with their own values, behavior style, dress code, slang, etc. Even representatives of different youth subcultures, some kind of emo-kids and cyberpunks, treat each other aggressively or, at best, with complete indifference.
- Happy marriages… by (correct) calculation
But still, these are age-related phenomena, and therefore club parties are only temporary shelters. Further, the search for work, study, housing all mix in one boiler. The new environment forces adaptation. Cooperation, solidarity are more important than acquired skills and habits. Herzen said that in youth, beyond the equality of years, people are bound by a common religion, or rather, the need for it, and therefore they often and with pleasure try on someone else’s. All young people feel like «chosen vessels». This alone is enough to create a sense of kinship.
It is during these years, as a rule, that families are created. Only months or even years later, with a common life and the appearance of children, the spouses realize that they came to this joint life from different worlds.
It would seem that if there is love, sooner or later people will find a common language, and all previous hobbies cannot serve as serious obstacles. In reality, everything develops differently: some, indeed, find this language, others part. But the difference in socio-cultural experience for both is a serious obstacle.
Communication in the family is the exchange of passwords. Over the years, with a favorable course of life, our own passwords are developed, but first, as in a war film, in order to recognize that we are from the same camp and from the same team, there is a password recognition test. You know the answer — yours, you don’t know — the test must be continued.
And just imagine: one spouse gives a cue from Khutsiev’s film “July Rain”, the other answers with a tune from Tutyshkin’s musical comedy “Wedding in Malinovka”, one knows by heart the repertoire of the ensembles “Gems” and “Pesnyary”, the other listened to Okudzhava and Novella together with his parents Matveev, whose names mean nothing to the first. The husband lovingly and meaningfully quotes Bitov or Shukshin, and the wife, except for Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, does not want to hear about anything.
But all these signals are not just exercises of people of one culture or another, they are designed for intimate pickup, filled with home-made irony or pathos, the confidence that we look at things in a similar way, that we are relatives not only by passport and love attraction. Behind these signals are still different political and religious views, attitudes towards money, incompatible tastes in clothing and interior design, and this is sometimes more important for a life together than ideological disagreements.
What else to add? The only thing, perhaps, is that young people should be prepared for such a situation. This will help to avoid over-dramatization of her and ambitious obstinacy in the future.