Gloria MacDonald: My name is Gloria MacDonald and I am a dating and relationship expert. I have a dating service called Perfect Partners. Today, we are talking about a really important topic which is interracial and intercultural relationships. In this segment we are talking about the different types of interracial and intercultural relationships and the varying degrees of differences in those relationships.

Host: Are there degrees of difference between interracial and intercultural relationships?

Gloria MacDonald: There are a wide range of degrees of differences between interracial and intercultural relationships and the way I look at this is starting off by thinking about when you meet someone for the first time what's the very first thing you do. You see them and your subconscious mind says, "Okay, we look alike," or "We don't look alike." So the first thing is in a couple, do they look alike or not and the second thing is do we sound alike?

So again, go back to when you are meeting someone for the first time, the very first thing you do is you see them and then you hear them. So the question is do we sound alike? Do we speak the same language or do we speak different languages? If we speak the same language do we have the same accent? Do we use the same vocabulary or do we speak two very different languages? The third thing is do we act alike? So, do we have similar traditions? Do we celebrate holidays in the same way? Do we have the same mannerisms because different cultures have different mannerisms and the fourth thing is do we think alike? So, what are our values? What are our morals? What are our ethics? Do we have different religious backgrounds?

So it goes really on a continuum. If you are thinking about meeting someone new, the first thing you do is you see them then you hear them then you start to see how they act and only after you have gotten to know someone for a while, do you start to understand how they think. So the closer we are in each one of those four things the easier our relationships are going to be and the farther apart we are as a couple on each one of those four things the more levels of complexity and potentially, the more levels of challenges we will face in our relationships.