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This paper aims to adopt a relational dialectics analysis approach to provide qualitative depth and insight into the ways intercultural families manage intercultural tensions around consumption. The authors pay particular attention to how a relational dialectics analysis reveals a relational change in the family providing evidence to demonstrate how a family’s unique relational culture evolves and transitions.

Qualitative insights from a relational-dialectic analysis on 15 intercultural families are used to illustrate the interplay of stability with instability in the management of intercultural dialectic tensions within these families.

Intercultural dialectical interplay around food consumption tensions are implicit tensions in the household’s relational culture. Examples of dialectical movement indicating relational change are illustrated; this change has developmental consequences for the couples’ relational cultures.

This study provides qualitative insights on relational dialectics in one intercultural family context and reveals and analyses the dialectical dimensions around consumption in the context of intercultural family relationships. The research approach could be considered in other intercultural and relational contexts.

Family narratives can be analysed within the context of two meta-dialectics that directly address how personal relationships evolve; indigenous dialectic tensions within a family can also be identified.

This paper demonstrates the qualitative value of a relational dialectics analysis in revealing how food consumption changes within families are the result of reciprocal or interdependent learning, which has consequences for relational change.

Recent global migration trends have led to an increased prevalence, and new patterning, of intercultural family configurations. This paper is about intercultural couples and how they manage tensions associated with change as they settle in their new cultural context. The focus is specifically on the role food plays in navigating these tensions and the effects on the couples’ relational cultures.

A qualitative relational–dialectic approach is taken for studying Polish–Irish intercultural couples. Engagement with relevant communities provided multiple points of access to informants.

Intercultural tensions arise as the couples jointly transition, and food consumption represents implicit tensions in the household’s relational culture. Such tensions are sometimes resolved, but sometimes not, leading to enduring tensions. Dialectical movement causes change, which has developmental consequences for the couples’ relational cultures.

This study shows how the ways that tensions are addressed are fundamental to the formation of a relational family identity.

Recommendations emphasise the importance of understanding how the family relational culture develops in the creation of family food practices. Marketers can look at the ways of supporting the intercultural couple retain tradition, while smoothly navigating their new cultural context. Social policy analysts may reflect on the ways that the couples develop an intercultural identity rooted in each other’s culture, and the range of strategies to demonstrate they can synthesise and successfully negotiate the challenges they face.

Dealing simultaneously and separately with a variety of dialectical oppositions around food, intercultural couples weave together elements from each other’s cultures and simultaneously facilitate both relational and social change. Within the relationship, stability–change dialectic is experienced and negotiated, while at the relationship’s nexus with the couple’s social ecology, negotiating conventionality–uniqueness dialectic enables them reproduce or depart from societal conventions, and thus facilitate social change.