【正文】 ssue in intercultural munication. We have to do the cultural parison when we are engaging in the intercultural munication study. Chinese culture is a typical Eastern culture. There are various definitions on ‘culture’ both at home and abroad. Larry, Richard, and Lisa in their book Communication between Cultures give their definition: “We define culture as the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, actions, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and artifacts acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving” (Larry A. Samovar, Richard E. Porter, and Lisa A Stefani. 2000). In the book of Introducing Cultural Studies, Baldwin and the coauthors present their definition on culture: “Outside the natural sciences, the term ‘culture’ is chiefly used in three relatively distinct senses to refer to: the arts and artistic activity。 the learned, primarily symbolic features of a particular way of life。 and a process of development” (Elaine Baldwin, Brian Longhurst, Greg Smith, Scott Mccracken, and Miles Ogborn. 2005). Cultures are extremely plex and consist of numerous interrelated cultural orientations, including values, knowledge, experience, attitudes, norms, and material aspects. Cultural patterns are a term that helps us to talk about these orientations collectively. It helps us to understand a society culture on the whole and enables us to make parisions between different cultures. People in different parts of the world, especially those in the East and those in the West do differ profoundly in their cultural patterns because they have different culture, social customs, economy, language, geography, etc. Individualism versus CollectivismIndividualism is the most important value orientation in the West. Broadly speaking, individualism refers to the doctrine, spelled out in detail by the seventeenthcentury English philosopher John Locke, that each individual is unique, special, pletely different from all other individuals, and the basic unit of nature. American people advocate individualism, they believe that everyone is unique。 they have the right to pursuit freedom and happniess. In a group, American people will pay great attention to the spirit of teamwork, but they still need to maintain themselves as a separate individual and at the same time contain other people’s differences. Love is a kind of extremely romantic thing, American people have the courage to pursuit their own happniess but they will not give up their own independent personality and other pursuits just because of love. Marriage is usually referring to two person, husband and wife, and has nothing to do with other people like their relatives and friends. American people will not give up the independence of love for a certain group, such as a family.Collectivism is characterized by a social framework that distinguishes between ingroups and outgroups. People count on their ingroup such as families, relatives or affiliations to look after them, and they believe they owe loyalty to the group. gives us a summary of this situation: “Collectivism means greater emphasis on (a) the views, needs, and goals of the ingroup rather than oneself。 (b) social norms and duty defined by the ingroup rather than behavior to get pleasure。 (c) beliefs shared with the ingroup rather than beliefs that distinguish self from ingroup。 and (d) great readiness to cooperate with ingroup members” (H. C. Triandis, 1990). Chinese people will receive a kind of education when they are just little children, which is the collectivism spirit. Under this kind of education, child is taught that all matters should take the collective benefit as first, and you have to learn to care for and get along well with others. Chinese tend to be more aware of the connections they have as members of their social groups. In munication behavior, Chinese are likely to show traits such as indirectness, explicitness, saving face, concern for others, group cooperation, group decisionmaking, etc. Marriage is under the great influence of collectivism in China, under the premise of the interests of the family, love and personality may have to make concessions. When a marriage relationship has broken up actually, the couples maybe will maintain the relationship reluctantly just because they have to consider the family interest, their child’s future and parents’ feelings. Because Chinese couples cencern too much for other things, like the families and the other people, they will easily ignore their own feelings. Differences in ReligionDifferent religious beliefs can be a cause of conflict in marriage, not only because the partners may not be in agreement on where and how to worship as a family, but because so much of what people do and believe, their attitudes about what is right and wrong, and their philosophy of life stem from their religious background.In any marriage, problems can arise when religious beliefs differ or when one partner’s behavior conflicts with the other’s beliefs. Mutual respect for each other’s religion is a must for a patible marriage, but often it is not enough.For those couples who encounter religious conflict there are three possibilities: one partner converts to the religion of the other。 both partners keep their own faith and try not to interfere in the practices or beliefs of the other。 or both partners drift away from their own religion and either join a third religion or refrain from adhering to any formal religion at all. In many cases both of the spouses have already distanced themselves from their cultural heritage, and religious practice is not an issue.In Chinese mainland most people don’t have any religious belief, but in America, many people are Christians. So in SinoAmerican intercultural marriages, the religion issue may cause many conflicts. Mrs. He marries an American husband, a pious Chri