The Art of Flourishing Together: Why Connection Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All

I was doing the dishes, half-listening to a German psychology podcast, when one word made me stop scrubbing: flourishing.

The hosts were talking about it as if it were another personal project. Choose your people carefully. Protect your energy. Let go of relationships that drain you. Build a circle that helps you become the best version of yourself.

It all sounded very reasonable.

It also made me slightly uncomfortable.

I turned off the water.

“Wenyan,” I said, “do you think the people around us are supposed to help us thrive – or are they sometimes just supposed to help us get through things?”

She didn’t look up from her phone.

“Those are the same thing.”

“They’re really not.”

She shrugged.

And that was pretty much the beginning of the conversation.

This is how a lot of our conversations start, actually. I bring home some German podcast, article or idea that sounds perfectly sensible to me. Wenyan listens for a while and then points out the assumption underneath it that I hadn’t even noticed.

The idea I grew up with

I suppose I absorbed a fairly German idea of friendship without ever consciously deciding to.

You choose your friends. You invest in the relationships that are good for you. If someone consistently makes you unhappy, you are allowed to step back. If a friendship starts feeling more like an obligation than a choice, that’s probably a sign that something isn’t working.

There is a lot to like about that.

But the older I get, the more I wonder whether something is missing.

Because what happens when the people around you aren’t there because you chose them?

What happens when they are simply your people?

Not necessarily because you would choose them today. Not because every interaction is nourishing. Sometimes simply because they are family, or because you’ve known each other for thirty years, or because there was a time when you needed each other and that history never completely disappears.

That is much closer to the world Wenyan grew up in.

Wenyan’s version

I initially wanted to call it guanxi, because that makes it sound nicely cultural and intellectual.

She would probably just call it family.

In her world, some relationships come with an obligation attached. You don’t renegotiate that obligation every time. You don’t ask whether the relationship is currently contributing to your personal growth.

If you’re family, you’re family.

I was drying a plate when I said, “In Germany, we’d probably call some of that a boundary violation. Someone expecting you to help just because you’re family.”

She looked at me.

“In China? That’s not really a boundary violation. If you’re family, of course they expect something from you.”

“But what if you don’t want to?”

“Then you don’t want to.”

She paused.

“But you still help.”

That was harder to argue with than I expected.

Because I realised that I was treating choice as the thing that makes a relationship healthy.

For her, sometimes it was the fact that you didn’t have to choose.

What does “being there” actually mean?

The podcast had been talking about emotional support, so I asked her another question.

“When you think about someone really being there for you, what does that mean? Listening? Understanding how you feel? Or actually doing something?”

She thought for a second.

“If my mother heard I was sick,” she said, “she wouldn’t ask how I was feeling about it. She’d be on a train.”

I laughed.

Because I knew exactly what she meant.

My instinct would be to call first.

“How are you?”

“How are you feeling?”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I want to understand the problem before I try to solve it.

Wenyan’s instinct is often the opposite.

Something is wrong?

Okay. What needs to be done?

When we first got together, I’m not sure either of us understood that the other was actually trying to care. I sometimes thought she was being too practical. She sometimes thought I was talking instead of doing something useful.

Neither of us was wrong. We had simply been taught to recognise different things as care.

And that, I’ve discovered, is one of the strange things about a cross-cultural marriage.

You don’t just translate languages.

You translate intentions.

The people you didn’t choose

There was another part of the podcast that stayed with me. The idea was that you don’t need a huge social circle to flourish. A few really close relationships can be enough.

I actually agree with that. So did Wenyan.

“But your three or four people are optional,” she said. “Mine aren’t.”

I knew what she meant.

My closest relationships are mostly there because, at some point, I chose them. And choices can change.

Wenyan’s closest relationships are partly there because they existed before she had a say in them.

That’s not necessarily better. It can also be complicated. Family can be supportive and exhausting. It can give you security and put pressure on you. Sometimes the people who love you most are also the people most capable of driving you completely crazy.

And of course, this isn’t really a Germany-versus-China rule. There are Germans who would drive through the night for their parents. There are Chinese people who have spent years trying to create distance from their families. Neither culture is one thing.

But the starting assumptions can still be different.

And when two people with different assumptions share a home, you notice.

The system we accidentally built

After more than ten years together, I don’t think either of us really follows the German or the Chinese rulebook anymore. We have our own.

We didn’t sit down and design it. There was no meeting about our “relationship operating system.” We just kept arguing, adjusting, copying each other and occasionally giving up.

I learned that sometimes Wenyan doesn’t need me to analyse a problem with her. She needs me to get up and do something.

She learned that when I ask how she feels, I’m not necessarily trying to turn a simple problem into a three-hour conversation.

I still talk too much. She still solves things before explaining them. Neither of us has completely converted.

And honestly, I’m glad. Because I don’t think the goal of a cross-cultural relationship is to eventually become the same. It is probably more useful to become fluent in each other’s way of seeing things.

Sometimes I need her way. Sometimes she needs mine. Most of the time, we probably need both.

So, flourishing?

I’m still not sure I like the word.

Maybe because flourishing sounds like something you can measure. Something you can optimise. Another thing to work on.

And maybe relationships aren’t always like that.

Sometimes the people around us help us flourish. Sometimes they annoy us. Sometimes they hold us back. Sometimes they are the reason we get through a terrible week. And sometimes they simply sit across the table from us while we eat dinner and complain about something completely unimportant.

Maybe that counts too.

I don’t think flourishing is something you build alone and then invite people into. At least it hasn’t worked that way for us. For us, it’s been much messier than that…

And somehow, in between all that mess, we’ve built a life that belongs to neither of us completely.

It belongs to both of us.

Bread and Rice is an ongoing series about life between two cultures: a German husband, his Chinese wife, and the small negotiations, misunderstandings and discoveries that fill a bicultural life.