This chapter challenges the pursuit of frictionless harmony in intercultural encounters, arguing instead for the ethical and transformative value of engaging with contradiction. It introduces a set of concepts such as audinnation, expericomplicity and nontriumphance that reframe disorientation, miscommunication and unresolved tension not as failures but as essential sites of learning, becoming and being together. The chapter critiques superficial models of intercultural communication education, advocating instead for a deeper, more critical literacy that attends to power dynamics, strategic silences and the ‘unsaid’. All in all, the author calls for a shift away from instrumental, outcome-driven approaches towards valuing the ongoing, difficult and often opaque labour of intercultural engagement.