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Cross-cultural communication in intimate relationships 349

enon makes abundantly clear. Therefore, in this section, I will argue that it is
globalization as increased international cultural exchange that is instrumental in
encouraging an increasing number of people to actively seek out a cross-cultural
intimate relationship. Cross-cultural desires in this view are not some kind of
inner state, but rather a discursive construction (see Cameron and Kulick 2003a,
2003b for a full discussion of desire as a discursive construction). In this under-
standing public discourses – be they a Hollywood movie or a pop song – provide
structures that individuals can draw on.
In previous work (Piller 2002, in press), I have described that a number of the
partners in long-standing cross-cultural intimate relationships I interviewed ex-
plained that, at the beginning of their relationship, the fact that their partner came
from another culture was part of the attraction. One German woman, for in-
stance, said of her US-American husband, “I always wanted to marry a cowboy”.
Another German woman has the following exchange with her British partner:

Erika 10 @and if you weren’t an Englishman, you wouldn’t stand no
chance. not like a snowball in hell, so.@ @@@ das hat
fuer mich ne grosse Bedeutung, dass du Englaender bist.
((that is very important for me that you are an English-
man.))
Michael immer noch? ich glaube am Anfang war das mal.
is that still the case? I think that used to be so in the
beginning.

My data show that partners in a cross-cultural intimate relationship may initially
see each other as a representative of their culture. The more established the
relationship is the less partners see each other as cultural representatives, and
the more they see each other as individuals. In her study of Russian–American
marriages, Visson (1998: 102) similarly observes that partners tended to see
themselves as individuals, but their spouses in cultural terms, “as products of a
‘foreign’ culture”.
Takahashi’s PhD research provides a further important contribution to our
understanding of cross-cultural desire as a discursive construction within a
specific context: this researcher shows that some Japanese women actively
seek out an English-speaking partner because they take them to be good-look-
ing and considerate ladies’ men, similar to the media images of celebrities such
as David Beckham, Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt (Piller and Takahashi 2006; Taka-
hashi 2006). There are numerous sources from which these images of Western
men as attractive, caring, loving, and giving emanate: there are of course
Hollywood movies and numerous other US cultural products, but, more cru-
cially for our discussion, international cultural interconnectedness has reached
such levels that these images also emanate from Japanese cultural products,
such as manga and anime, Japanese pop songs (as opposed to American ones,