A Coconut Among Peaches: Crossing Cultures

Is there such a thing as an extrovert culture and an introverted one? And how are they like these two fruits?

‘We’re going for a coffee, do you want to join us?’ 

I pondered my new colleague’s offer logically and politely rejected it. It was 10:30 in the morning, I had arrived at the office barely an hour before and had definitely had my share of coffee for the morning until then. Plus, I had just entered the flow state of work. Declining an unnecessary second coffee in three hours was obvious. 

My colleagues left the office building to get their coffee — a futile extravagance, I thought, as we had a perfectly good coffee machine in the office kitchen. To my dismay, they returned a whole 40 minutes later, all chatty and slowly pushing their way to their desks. 

This episode occurred almost daily during my first week at that job.

After multiple instances of politely refusing the offer to go outside to a café for a hot beverage barely an hour into my work day, one morning a colleague saved me from myself. She told me that the coffee was just a pretext; they went to socialize, to smooth out the rough edges among them so they could work better together afterward. Huh. That was my first job after moving to Barcelona from Frankfurt, Germany, and it seemed I was missing something.

In the two Anglo-Saxon cultures where I had worked before, personal relationships didn’t blend much with the work culture. Drinking coffee was a practical activity that took 5-10 minutes at most and was done in front of your computer anyway. Even eating lunch took half an hour at most. But here, in the Spanish work culture, I quickly understood that not spending time socializing with colleagues translated into “I’m not willing to work with you. I won’t help you or do you any favors”. Ultimately, it meant “You cannot trust me”. 

This was a practical lesson in the lifelong masterclass that is cross-cultural proficiency. This was the tip. The tip of the cultural iceberg that is Spain, a cultural iceberg I’m still climbing — and sometimes slipping on — 13 years later. 

Peaches (and cream?!)

Spain has a cultural identity of what could be called a “peach personality”. 

People seem to be close friends from the first interaction and they even push you to behave in a friendly, close, chatty way from the get-go. The personal and professional lives overlap. I always get a good laugh seeing the reaction of friends living in other countries when I tell them that all these years I’ve been greeting my bosses by kissing them on both cheeks. It’s a startling closeness for an outsider of the Spanish culture, but perfectly acceptable if you know the norm. And this type of behavior seems awfully similar to being an extrovert.

‘Let’s go for a coffee sometime’ is not always meant literally in a peach culture.

Spanish people are certainly peaches.

They are warm and fuzzy by default, soft and permeable, like a ripe peach… And just like a ripe peach, at some point, you hit the hard core which is impossible to be broken into. If you’re not careful, you chip a tooth or two in the process. Peach personalities seem so easy to connect with, but I find there is an invisible barrier about them, which always keeps you at arm’s length.

My first supermarket visit when I emigrated to Southern US was shocking when I heard the cashier call me ‘honey’. But even more shocking was hearing her call the next customer by the same name. The US is also a peach culture, I quickly found out.  

(Hard-shell) coconuts

When you are what they call a “coconut personality”, the peaches around you might find you unfriendly or closed off at first. But you are not a fuzzy peach. You are a coconut, with a hard exterior one cannot simply bite into. You need time, some tapping, some twisting — but mostly time. And for the ones who have the patience until the hard shell pops open, there is a large soft interior, accessible all the way to the core. 

And this description, in turn, seems awfully similar to that of introverted personalities.

Peaches and coconuts approach human interaction in opposite ways. That often creates misunderstandings between people representing them. Social psychology studies came up with these opposite styles and their names. 

The upside of it is that it allows us to define and better understand diverse cultures. 

The downside of polarizing complex people into clear-cut categories is we tend to exaggerate the differences. In truth, we each are a fruit salad, made mostly of either peach or coconut, but with slices of other harder- or softer-centered fruits, in variable quantities.  

These social psychologists went one step further. They paired the two “fruit” styles with people’s tendency to be extroverted or introverted. You guessed it: the fuzzy peaches are paired with being extroverted, while the hard coconuts are likened to introverted natures. Some studies even linked them with climate differences. You guessed it again: the peachy, extroverted natures live in warmer climates, the opposite is true for the coconuts. 

Crossing cultures

And when we step on a plane and fly off to a new culture, we bring with us our coconut or peach natures. And if we land in a different fruit salad than what we’re used to, then adapting and keeping an open mind become paramount skills. 

Because I’ve lived in Germany and I know Germans’ avoidance of small talk, and because I’ve often seen their anguished faces when they have to talk about the weather or traffic, I avoid doing that in their presence. When you get right down to business after a quick hello, a light suddenly sparks in their eyes, a beacon for efficiency and scarcity of words. 

And because I know that Spanish people are the opposite in this regard, I avoid starting a meeting directly with the day’s agenda. If I did that, they would ask me privately if everything was alright with me, I kid you not.

As a coconut myself, living in a peach culture, and working in a multicultural environment, I have to continuously move in and out of… different fruit-salad bowls.  

We are all fruit  

All this is relative too. Because I might bring my coconut-ness into a peach culture. But I might also seem like a peach in a heavy coconut culture. I was a definite coconut when I lived in the US, but a soft peach in Germany. 

We all mold and shape with the cultures we live in, rather than stay loyal to our initial “fruit” type. We adopt new habits, drop some others forever, we learn new ways of doing business and even flirting styles.

You could say that we’ve become fruit salads.

Then, we go back to our home country and we might feel out of place. We can’t put our finger on it, we don’t know quite what is odd. We just know, we feel foreign in our own homeland. People seem to talk differently than we remembered, they tell jokes we don’t resonate with anymore, they greet one another in “strange” ways.

We might have moved on the spectrum from a pure-bred coconut towards a fuzzy peach, for example, and going back to a coconut culture seems crude. 

“We are all different, but in the end, we are all fruit.”

— Gus Portokalos, My Big Fat Greek Wedding

When they ask me if I could return to my country of birth, Romania, I always answer a clear-cut no. I receive arguments about how the country is so much more functional now, how it reached the EU standards, and other persuasive claims. But for me, it’s not about the salary I’d earn or the upscale gastronomy I’d have access to. It’s about small, subtle aspects, details I couldn’t explain until now. It’s about social norms and a certain “peachiness” of other cultures that Romania couldn’t have. Painting a picture with the peaches and coconuts styles might just help me explain why I couldn’t live there again. 

But no matter where we choose to live, our shared humanity is still stronger than the permeable skin or the hardness of the core of any fruit. In the end, we are all fruit(s).