By Jonathan Landaw

As the deadline for this column has come and gone and I again serve as the teacher of patience for the staff of this magazine, my wife’s college career once more comes to the rescue by suggesting a suitable topic. Her latest assignment in anthropology class was to interview people about critical incidents in their lives. In the context of this course, “critical incident” has a very specific meaning. As stated in the course material itself, such an incident occurs “when the expectations and values of one culture do not mesh with those of another.” It usually refers to a confrontation, misunderstanding or disagreement between two people that is rooted in differences in their underlying, and usually unconscious, conceptual frameworks.

For example, there were two businessmen, one English and the other Spanish, who carried on a profitable long-distance relationship. Although they had never met in person, they were highly successful. Then it happened that they became involved in a particularly complex and potentially risky business venture, so they decided it was finally time to see each other face to face. This meeting took place at an embassy party, and it was an outstanding failure. It went so badly, in fact, that their partnership was dissolved.

What happened? As onlookers later described it, during the entire evening it seemed as if the Spaniard were stalking the Englishman around the room; the more the one advanced, the more the other retreated. The Englishman blamed the fiasco on the Spaniard. “How can I work with someone who is so aggressive?” he asked. “He kept attacking me.” As for the Spaniard, he claimed that the problem lay squarely with his English counterpart. “How can I possibly trust anyone who is such a cold fish, who keeps running away from me? What is he trying to hide?”

So what was the real problem? Simply that they came from two cultures having widely differing notions about what constitutes personal space. In England, as in most northern European cultures, the acceptable distance between two people when conversing is significantly greater than it is in such Mediterranean cultures as Spain. Therefore, as the Spaniard came close to establish a distance that he felt to be comfortable and trusting, the Englishman retreated, feeling his personal space was being violated. Because neither of them realized that their differences were cultural in origin, they misinterpreted the other’s behavior.

Another area where such cultural differences often create problems is that of punctuality. Even within one country, the idea of what it means to be “on time” can differ greatly from one region to another. In the United States for example, people on the East Coast generally interpret such things as invitations to dinner and the announced starting time of teachings much more literally than their cousins on the West Coast. If something is scheduled to begin at eight o’clock, for instance, most New Yorkers arrive early while the California crowd does not even begin to show up until significantly after the hour. And I have been told of similar differences between those living in northern and southern Germany. To those with differing cultural expectations, Californians and Bavarians can therefore appear to be lazier and more irresponsible than they really are. But compared to certain Asian cultures, where time is even more loosely defined, they might appear downright anxious.

Another fruitful area for misunderstanding is to be found in the relationships between men and women. Over the years, this has provided a great deal of material for comedians. A staple of most stand-up comics – who until recently were nearly all male – has been sexist joking focused on the supposedly unreasonable, tyrannical or fickle nature of women. “Mother-in-law” jokes, for example, were such stock-in-grade that even unmarried comedians would tell them. Now, with more and more women performing on television and in nightclubs, jokes about men’s false bravado, superficial bonding rituals and infantile sexuality are all the rage.

An attempt to comprehend the differences in the way men and women view the world has been made in the popular work entitled Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, though I suspect many people feel that having the sexes originate within the same solar system underestimates their mutual strangeness. Gallantly avoiding the temptation to turn this column into a misogynist Henny Youngman routine (I wonder how that translates into Italian), I will end (and not a moment too soon) with the following true story.

A man, whose fiancée had recently broken up with him, was walking along the shore of a beach near Los Angeles, feeling very sorry for himself, when he happened to see a brass lamp lying half-covered on the beach. As he picked it up and brushed away the sand, a genie appeared and granted him one wish. The man thought for a while and finally said, “I have always wanted to visit Hawaii, but I’m afraid of flying and boats make me seasick. So, genie, please build me a highway between here and Maui.”

The genie replied, “A highway, eh? (Evidently he was a Canadian genie.) That’ll take some doing, even for a powerful genie like me. Securing the proper foundation will be a major problem and it won’t be easy to design the various suspension bridges and tunnels that will probably be needed. Also, I’ll have to avoid the shipping lanes of the ocean liners and take into account the migratory pattern of the whales or else the project will be a disaster. And then there is the movement of the tectonic plates beneath the Pacific to consider.”

The man was surprised and said, “I had no idea that building this highway would be so complicated.” And the genie answered, “Well, it is pretty difficult, but I don’t want to disappoint you. Tell you what: while I’m trying to figure out how I can construct this highway for you, why don’t you make another wish. Then, if I can’t grant one, I should be able to grant the other.

The man replied, “Recently my fiancée and I broke up and I’ve been feeling miserable. That’s how all my relationships end. Things start out well but inevitably we disagree, argue, fight and break up. That has been the pattern of my life. And so, genie, please grant me this wish. Give me the power to understand women.”

“Was that two lanes or four?”