About Facilitator:
Tilman has a dual nationality (US-American/German), is married to a Mongolian-Chinese woman with whom he started his relationship 2,5 years ago with only 500 (Chinese) words in common. Meanwhile they have increased their common vocabulary considerably and are happily married despite of cultural differences and language limitations.
Having lived, studied, and/or worked in Chicago, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Madrid, Zürich and now Shanghai Tilman is not only a cosmopolitan but can also look back on more than 10 years of cross-cultural relationships with failures, painful learnings, great cultural enrichment, deep connection and a lot of personal growth. During the past five years of living and working in China Tilman who is also a certified Coach has been professionally dedicated mainly to the field of cross-cultural communication.


Little Article about the workshop:
A romantic relationship or marriage is always a challenge and a cross-cultural one even more, especially when the two cultures are very destinct like it is the case with Chinese vs. most Western cultures. Adding language problems to it makes it even more difficult and not few couples fail to bridge the cultural and language gap, among others also with the parents in law which can be a challenge of itself.
On the other hand a cross-cultural relationship also has its advantages and is full of discoveries. As a matter of fact, it can never get really boring because it is always enriching to learn more about the other one’s culture or study the partner’s language. Indeed there is probably no better method than learning a new language with the support of a partner from another culture.


When a Chinese and a Westerner start a romantic relationship with each other different expectations, habits, perspectives, experiences, socialization, circumstances and hopes are colliding in a more extreme way than it is already the case in a mono-cultural relationship. On the other hand we must never forget that all human beings share the same needs. We may just have different priorities regarding the importance of those needs in our lives and how to meet them. The values we grow up with, the scarcities we encounter as well as the traumata we experienced in our lives play a critical role in developing our preferred needs portfolio. In order to make a cross-cultural relationship work it is therefore important to be more interested in learning about the needs of the other one than judging the way or strategy they get met. The secret of a successful cross-cultural relationship is to establish a mutual non-judgmental attitude of acceptance towards each other.