Have any of you experienced culture shock?!

My family and his operate very differently aha.

1] my family likes to eat dinner and meals TOGETHER. but his they never do that at all.

2] his family is very messy - my mom would have a heart attack if she ever saw his family's kitchen. my mom is a neat freak and minimal so i've always been raised that way and seeing how they're basically hoarders was just something to get used to.

3] my family is far more family oriented. we go on outings together and hang out. but his family doesn't have any family time.

it does take some getting used to when you enter into a new group, especially one with such different ways of operating from what you're used to

I’m French and he’s American so we do a lot of things differently, but he understands other cultures well because he traveled a lot, and I’ve lived in the US for 11 years so I’ve adapted. So I don’t feel many differences based on that.
But the biggest difference is how important family is to each of us.
I am insanely close to my parents and my sister, but he is very independent and always has been. I always thought it would be an issue, until we were looking to move from NY (where he’s from) and he was looking at places out West because he knew I’d want to be closer to my parents (they live in CA). It was really touching that he’d think of that without me saying anything.

Yes, and no.

I'm an only child with divorced parents and some pretty toxic family patterns... but my dad and I are super close, and we have a WASP (without the P - I never went to church) background in the suburbs.

DH has a sister, comes from NYC, is Italian-American, and, while his family has their own issues, their patterns are a lot LESS toxic than mine...

And, yeah. His family is LOUD. DH is LOUD. I can be loud, but, I'm an only child and I'm used to a lot of silence. They have big, huge holiday dinners (my family had those before the divorce, but usually only family), that include a lot of their church friends. Honestly, sometimes I'm sitting there, going, "...I feel like I stick out like a sore thumb," because I'm not Christian and can totally lose the thread of conversations centered around church/faith/theology. I mean, DH's godfather is an actual MONK, and those dinners tend to leave me looking at DH, begging him to explain what in the heck any of this means.

On the flip side, I grew up with a little bit of privilege, and my dad has always been super open about money, which is ...not something I see in DH's family. This has created it's own communication problem with us, which we've been working on. The consequence of this is that I'm a lot more financially literate than DH, which worries me a little.

It's not been nearly as huge a culture shock as a lot of people experience, because we share a lot of other things, but... yeah, coming from the Anglo-German, we've got Mayflower blood family into the Italian-American New York City family? ... I'm sure we're comedy gold.

My DH and I are from different countries and very different families. How each family thinks about and handles money is probably the biggest difference. He and I have had an easy time managing our finances together but the system we use is very different from the way either of our families manage things.

Do you and your FS talk about the pros and cons of your differences?

He has a small family from the Pacific Northwest vs. my huge southern one. My family are all huggers and kissers (on lips or cheeks) and he and his family aren't in the slightest. They do not even say I love you.

He was raised poor and I was upper middle class. His mother primarily raised he and his sister. I was raised by grandparents who worked until they died.

His mother is really nonchalant about everything where mine was very cautious.

He and his sister do not get along and my sister and I are inseparable (for the most part).

My family works through anger and hurt to get to the root of a problem where he and his change the subject and bury the topic until it festers.

His mom was a nurse on night shift when he was growing up and was never there to regulate what happened. My family was strict and I was sheltered.

We ate homecooked meals at the dinner table 7 nights a week and his family went their separate ways to eat whatever they could fix real quick.

He is a very "this is the way I learned so this is the only way it is allowed to be done" and I am a "i know how to do it this way, do you know a better or easier way?" kind of person