Hi Eric, I'm doing great, hope you're well my friend, how is life treating you?

I completely agree with all that you're saying, and I wasn't arguing at all that understanding and learning about your partner and where they came from aren't important. Far from that. I'm simply saying at the end of the day people are people and for all our differences we are more alike than different, there are some learning curves and bumps along any relationship but if couples are making it work, it seems silly as an outsider to comment negatively on what is personal between 2 other people, we're not involved in the dynamics of their relationships, we can't tell them what it is supposed to look like, that is for them to define. The poster here was saying how he feels about his friends relationships...let them worry about it. We can just be the best partners we can be and what will work for others may not work for us and vice versa. There may be some ignorance or naivity initially in some who start relationships across cultures/distances/religions what have you but that quickly erodes and reality sets in pretty fast, and people will either make an effort to know their partner, or they won't and the ones that won't usually don't last. It's hard enough to make a relationship work that we don't need others giving us arbritrary standards to live up to.