Tea in the restroom

I had dinner with my friends yesterday evening. One of them is from London who doesn't speak Japanese so I had to communicate with him in English (well, he calls my English "American" though... typical Englishman!). When he was going to tell us a funny story happened in his office, he started as...

He: When I was having tea in the restroom before work...

Me: What? Tea in the RESTROOM???

He: Yes, tea in the restroom... oh wait, it's not toilet. We call it "toilet," not restroom.

Me: Oh, you mean you had tea in a resting room or break room, okay...

As I learned English in the US, restroom means a place to relieve nature. But he says they don't call it restroom in England. Is that right? I never noticed this difference and thought it funny.

Through the conversation with them, I have found a sort of power dynamics a certain couple of a Japanese woman and a Western man seem to have. When the Japanese woman is not really good at speaking his language and the Western man doesn't speak Japanese, their depth of verbal communication is not as much as they think it is. Of course, you don't need words when you are in love. But because of this shallow verbal communication, their relationship seems to work better.

In this case, the man is (or wants to be) in the dominant position and the woman is (or wants to be) subsidiary - I'm not saying this applies to everyone but it seems to work fine for certain couples, by the way. Therefore, they don't care even if one of them says, "Show some respect." The dominant person generally wouldn't have respect to the subsidiary person and the latter could hardly show it to the former by her limited vocabulary in the case I'm talking here. She just tells things to him in a very short sentence of a few words in his language mixed in tons of Japanese words he basically doesn't understand and he, in return, unconsciously overwhelms her with his familiar mother tongue, sometimes speaking it very slowly as if he is trying to make her understand. No matter how they live their life together, there always is this politic of him being a teacher and her being a pupil underneath. It's amazing that they are capable of ignoring all that miscommunication so easily. I do respect them for that! Really!!

Hmmm... there must be a tip in that to make things work for me when it comes to romantic relationships now that I have finally digested the vague uncomfortableness of being surrounded by the married/unmarried couples who often sound like they look down upon each other. Good for me :)