How I Navigate a Cross-Cultural Relationship as an Expat in Southeast Asia

By Trevor Fenner | Updated 2026

I grew up in Seattle. Went to college in Los Angeles. Spent most of my adult life in Southern California building businesses, chasing the next thing, operating with the kind of relentless forward momentum that American entrepreneurial culture rewards and rarely questions.

My wife grew up in Jakarta. She’s Indonesian through and through, shaped by a culture, a language, a family structure, and a set of values that operate completely differently from the world I came from.

We met at a skate bowl in Bali called the Bukit Bowl. We got married in 2022. We share a home in Bali, a love for cats that has somehow grown into caring for nearly twenty of them, and a relationship that has been one of the most challenging and most rewarding things I’ve ever built.

I’m not writing this as a relationship expert. I’m writing it as someone in the middle of it, who has made a lot of mistakes, learned from most of them, and developed a genuine appreciation for what a cross-cultural marriage asks of you when you take it seriously.

Here is what I’ve actually learned.

How I Ended Up in Bali in the First Place

Understanding the relationship requires understanding the path that led me here, because nothing about it was a straight line.

In 2016 I sold everything I owned, moved out of Los Angeles, and started traveling as a digital nomad. I’d been building ecommerce businesses through Ecommerce Paradise and my stores were running well enough that the physical anchor of an apartment in LA felt like an unnecessary constraint. So I let it go.

I spent time in different parts of Southeast Asia over the following couple of years. In 2018 I settled in Bangkok for roughly a year. Bangkok is a genuinely compelling city for a certain kind of digital nomad: fast, modern, affordable, with great food and a huge international community. But it never felt like home to me in the way I was looking for.

What eventually pulled me to Bali was the skate scene. I’d been skateboarding my whole life and the skate culture in Bali, particularly around the Bukit area, was something I hadn’t expected to find at that quality level. I started spending more time there and less time everywhere else. The combination of the skateboarding, the climate, the cost of living, and the general quality of life in Bali eventually became impossible to argue with. I stopped leaving.

The personal dimension of my life was also shifting during this period. I had been going through a separation from my first marriage, a long and difficult process that anyone who has been through something similar will understand doesn’t resolve quickly or cleanly. Meeting my current wife in Bali, and the relationship we built together, gave me the clarity and motivation to finalize that divorce so we could actually build a life together properly. We married in 2022.

How We Met

We met at the Bukit Bowl, a skate spot in the Bukit Peninsula area of Bali. She wasn’t skating. I was. The details of how a conversation starts in that kind of setting are probably familiar enough that I don’t need to spell them out.

What I’ll say is that meeting someone in a context that’s genuinely yours, a place you’re at because it reflects who you actually are and what you actually love, produces a different quality of first impression than meeting someone through an app or at a networking event. She saw me skating before she knew anything else about me. That felt like an honest starting point.

The Ups and Downs of Cultural Difference

I’m not going to paint a picture of cross-cultural marriage as a beautiful seamless blending of two worlds. It isn’t. It’s two people who grew up with fundamentally different assumptions about how life works trying to build something together, and that produces real friction.

My wife is from Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, a massive fast-moving city with its own culture distinct even from the rest of Indonesia. She’s Indonesian, shaped by a family structure and social framework that operates very differently from anything I grew up with in Seattle or Los Angeles.

The differences that created the most friction for us in the early years were not the dramatic ones. They were the quiet structural ones that only become visible when you’re actually living together and making real decisions together.

Family obligation is one of the biggest. In Indonesian culture the relationship between adult children and their parents, and the broader extended family network, carries a weight and an ongoing practical reality that doesn’t have a direct equivalent in most American contexts. I grew up in a culture that treats adult independence as the natural goal. My wife grew up in a culture where family interdependence is simply how things work, not as a limitation but as the actual structure of a good life.

Early in our relationship I sometimes experienced these obligations as complications. I was wrong about that. What I was actually encountering was a different and in many ways richer model of how people take care of each other. Learning to see it from my wife’s perspective rather than my own took time and humility that I didn’t always have readily available.

Decision-making styles were another real source of friction. I tend to be direct, fast, and individually-oriented in how I make decisions. My wife’s approach is more deliberate, more attentive to how a decision lands for everyone affected rather than just the two of us. Neither approach is wrong. They just produce real tension when you’re trying to make decisions together and you’re not yet fluent in each other’s process.

The Hobby Gap Is Real

Honest cross-cultural relationship writing has to include the things that don’t overlap, not just the things that do.

My wife doesn’t skateboard. She doesn’t follow ecommerce or find it particularly interesting. Some of the things that have defined my identity and my daily life for years simply aren’t part of her world, and that’s fine, except for the moments when it isn’t.

The hobby gap is something a lot of cross-cultural couples deal with and it’s worth naming directly. When two people come from the same cultural background they often arrive with shared reference points, shared tastes, shared assumptions about how leisure time should be spent. When you come from genuinely different backgrounds those overlaps are smaller and they have to be built deliberately rather than assumed.

We’ve had real conversations about this. About how to make sure both people in the relationship have space for the things that matter to them individually, even when the other person doesn’t share those interests. The skateboarding, the ecommerce building, the Paradise Skate Mag project: those are mine. I pursue them and she supports that without being required to participate. There are parts of her life and interests that I show up for in the same way.

The Language Situation

My wife speaks excellent English, which has made a lot of things possible that wouldn’t have been accessible otherwise, including the depth of conversation that a real relationship requires.

My end of it is less impressive. I don’t speak much Bahasa Indonesia. I’ve picked up enough to navigate basic daily situations but I’m nowhere near conversational fluency in her language. That asymmetry is real and something I carry some honest self-awareness about.

The practical reality in Bali is that the language barrier matters less than it would in many other places. Bali is so accustomed to international visitors and residents that English works almost everywhere in daily life. But there are moments, particularly in conversations with family members who don’t speak English, where I’m aware of being on the outside of something important. That’s a consequence of not having invested more in learning Bahasa and it’s worth naming honestly.

If you’re entering a cross-cultural relationship with someone from Indonesia or Southeast Asia more broadly, do better than I did on this front. The respect it communicates when you make the effort to learn the language, even imperfectly, is genuine and significant.

The Things We Share

Here is where the story gets genuinely warm.

Cats. We both love cats with a level of commitment that most people would probably describe as unreasonable. We currently care for nearly twenty cats in Bali. This started as a gradual accumulation, a stray here, a rescue there, and has become something we’re both genuinely invested in. It sounds like a small thing but shared genuine enthusiasm for something, anything, is one of the building blocks of a lasting partnership.

Beyond the cats there is a shared love of being in Bali specifically: the climate, the pace of life outside the tourist areas, the community we’ve built here. We both genuinely prefer this to the alternatives we’ve each experienced. That shared sense of place matters more than I would have predicted.

And there is the deeper shared value underneath a lot of the surface differences: both of us want a life that is rich in actual experience rather than just in the metrics that get celebrated online. That alignment on what actually matters is the foundation everything else gets built on.

Why Practical and Romantic Don’t Have to Be Opposites

I’ll be direct about something that often comes up in conversations about cross-cultural marriages in Southeast Asia. Being married to an Indonesian citizen makes the long-term residency situation in Bali significantly more manageable and less expensive than the alternatives available to a foreign national. Visa runs, tourist extensions, and digital nomad programs all carry ongoing cost and uncertainty. Marriage changes that equation meaningfully.

I want to be clear about the order of things though. The practical benefits didn’t create the marriage. They made the timing easier to commit to. The relationship came first. The logistical advantages were a welcome reality on top of something that was already real.

Both things can be true simultaneously. In a cross-cultural relationship that has to function in the real world, the practical and the personal are often more intertwined than they are in relationships where both people share the same nationality and the same legal context. There’s no shame in acknowledging that.

What Coming Through the Hard Parts Taught Me

We went through genuine difficulties in the early years of our relationship. Cultural friction, the hobby gap, family dynamics, communication differences, and the shadow of the personal history I brought into it from my first marriage. None of that resolved quickly or painlessly.

What getting through the hard parts taught me is that the willingness to stay in the difficulty, to keep talking, to keep trying to understand rather than retreating into your own cultural defaults, is what actually builds the foundation of a real marriage. Not the easy parts. The hard ones.

My wife’s patience through the periods when I was less than my best self, and my own gradual development of patience through the periods when cultural differences made things harder than they needed to be, is the actual relationship. The Instagram version of any couple’s life is not the relationship. What happens between the good photos is the relationship.

What Cross-Cultural Marriage Has Changed in Me

Living inside a genuinely different cultural perspective, through the closest relationship I have, has changed how I think about a lot of things.

It has made me slower to assume that my cultural defaults are universal truths. A lot of my assumptions about efficiency, decision-making, the right scope of obligation to other people, were things I’d never examined because I’d never been in sustained close contact with someone who did all of those things completely differently.

It has made me more patient in contexts where I used to default to speed. My wife’s approach to decisions has been a genuine counterweight to my tendency to move fast and optimize later. Some of my better business decisions in recent years have come from slowing down in ways I wouldn’t have done naturally.

And the cats have taught me something too, which is that a shared commitment to caring for something beyond ourselves, in our case nearly twenty Bali strays, is one of the more grounding things two people can build together.

What I’d Tell Someone Considering a Cross-Cultural Marriage

Go in with your eyes open about the structural differences, not just the romantic ones. Family dynamics, communication styles, the practical realities of residency and legal status: these are real and they require real navigation. Romanticizing them in advance doesn’t help. Understanding them does.

Do not underestimate the language asymmetry, even when one partner speaks the shared language fluently. Learn as much of the other language as you can. It communicates something that goodwill expressed only in your own language cannot.

Find the genuine overlaps and invest in them seriously. The things you actually both love, whether that’s cats, a particular place, a shared value, are not trivial. They’re the connective tissue of a relationship that has to do a lot of cultural bridging work in other areas.

Give yourself permission to be honest about the full picture: the practical dimensions alongside the personal ones, the difficulties alongside the rewards, the things that don’t overlap alongside the things that do. A cross-cultural marriage that works in the real world has to be built honestly, not just romantically.

The depth of understanding available through a relationship with someone from a genuinely different background is unlike anything available when both people already share all the same cultural assumptions. The work is real. So is the reward.

Trevor Fenner is the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, an education and services platform for high-ticket dropshipping entrepreneurs. He has been building location-independent ecommerce businesses since 2013 and currently lives in Bali, Indonesia with his wife.