Importance Of Friendships From Different Cultures

Friendships are beneficial to us in more ways than we may know. Often times we would have heard or made reference to this quote – “Friends are the family we choose”. This is true because it’s done of our own accord. We find that in our little communities, we keep friends for different reasons; either they we have a similar taste in books, movies, music, fashion or the likes of things.  Friends benefit us in many ways and this is a known fact, but does the same stand true of friends that we make from different cultures?

So why are friends from different cultures important?

Multi-Culturalism: Having friends from different cultures promotes multi-culturalism. It helps you accept people from different races and ethnicities for their uniqueness and shows how to practice beliefs different from yours.

Personality Development: Traveling they say, helps one gain different experiences and which influences a one’s personality positively. But not everyone is opportuned to travel, thus having friends from different cultures helps to give some experience too. When you interact and become friends with people from different cultures, you leant about their practices, language, habits and so on and without realizing, you’re taking on different situations in life which help you develop yourself personally.
Knowledge and Experiences: One of the main advantages of making friends from different cultures is the amount of knowledge you gather. You learn about their world, beliefs, practices and more. The possibilities are limitless if you only just think about it.

Open and Accepting
Growing up, we learned about culture and practices that are specific to us. We mostly learn about other cultures from interacting with people from various cultural practices. There could be several things in their culture that are different from yours and it is not always that we agree with them, but we learn to become more accommodating, accepting and more broad minded of others’ differences. This makes us broaden our horizon and get away from a particular mindset.