Forming a couple and starting a family constitutes a normal experience of meeting and negotiating with the other. Every couple must, in fact, build a "common practice" starting from different habits and traditions: what is eaten and how it is cooked, how birthdays and holidays are celebrated, what the important rituals and deadlines are, how affection is expressed, what the standards of hygiene and cleanliness are, gender models, and parent-child relationships – all these things are perceived and regulated more or less subtly differently by each family and constitute the baggage and navigation map that each person carries with them when forming a couple and negotiating with their partner.
When these differences, as happens in mixed couples and families, have not only a so-called idiosyncratic family origin but also a collective one, things obviously become even more complicated. It is no longer a matter of inter-individual and inter-family differences, but between social groups, populations, and cultural worlds. "They" and "we," "yours" and "mine" become overall worlds of different life experiences, giving a particular shape to conflicts and negotiations (about gender models, kinship relations, etc.) that in a "non-mixed" marriage would take on a different code. On the other hand, family cultures, ways of forming a family, are among the most distinctive elements of societies, being part of long-lasting characteristics: the importance of relatives, gender models, and generational relations distinguish societies even within the same geographic area. Italy is not only different from Morocco or Senegal. It is also different from Sweden or Germany or the Netherlands.
These differences become clearer in the presence of children and reappear at every stage of their growth. The "transcultural work" of a mixed family, in some ways, never truly ends.
