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When Lena McPeters first messaged her now-girlfriend on Facebook Dating, she didn’t know much about her; she just thought Camilla was cute. But pretty quickly, she realized: They didn’t speak the same language. Like, not even a little bit.
Lena, a hotel manager in Lubbock, Texas, spoke only English; Camilla, a factory supervisor who lived five hours away in Dallas, spoke only Spanish. She told Lena she’d been messaging her with the help of a translator app, and taught her to do the same—and then they just kept talking, each replying in the other’s language. Often, something wouldn’t translate well, so they’d have to keep trying to rephrase it. About three months in, Camilla visited for the first time.
On the way to pick her up at the bus station, Lena was terrified. How would they get through this first car ride without saying anything? But they ended up having a ball. Lena’s friends were totally charmed by Camilla. Keeping a steady back-and-forth conversation was tough, but still: “She was drinking with everybody, and she was dancing with everybody,” Lena told me. “And when she noticed there was silence in the room, she filled it.” (Using the translator app.) Every time someone told a story, Lena would use the app to summarize it for her.
Roughly 10 months later, they still don’t speak each other’s language fluently. But they do live together.
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Today, multilingual relationships are more possible than ever. Globalization, accessible travel, and social media have made it easier to meet people who speak different languages. Language-learning resources such as Duolingo are widely available, and translators like the kind that Lena and Camilla use are becoming quicker, more accurate, and more popular. It’s a good time to fall in love across a language barrier. And when I talked with people who did, I came to think that they know something special about the guts, humor, and patience that falling in love with anyone requires.
What drew these partners together, if not conversation? The people I spoke with weren’t necessarily having profound discussions off the bat. (Though the same is true of plenty of partners who speak the same first language.) Regardless, they felt they got a strong sense of the other person, some vibe that didn’t just come from their words. That didn’t surprise the researchers I talked with; Nai Chieh Tien, a psychologist who has studied multilingual relationships and specializes in intercultural couples and family therapy, told me that a remarkable amount of communication is nonverbal. We might find someone appealing for any number of complex reasons—not always because of their eloquent philosophical musings, but maybe some mix of their smile, the way they hold themselves, the tone they use when talking to other people.
Some couples even felt that a language barrier helped relieve the typical weirdness of a first date; it shook them out of being serious or anxious. Sabrin Hasbun, an Italian Palestinian writer, grew up hearing family lore about her parents’ funny, awkward multilingual courtship. When they were first dating, for instance, her father didn’t know enough Italian to express his feelings for Sabrin’s mom. Instead, he’d sing her Frank Sinatra songs; she couldn’t understand English, but she knew that the music was romantic. So when Sabrin met her now-husband, Sergio, at university in the U.K., she started learning his native Spanish; in the meantime, they got by using her very basic English and the smidge of Italian that Sergio knew. But she didn’t find it scary—it was fun, even “liberating.”
People like Sabrin who tackle a language barrier for love might be a self-selecting group; they’re probably game for a learning experience in the first place. Research has shown that people high in open-mindedness and social initiative seem to feel more at ease in their multilingual relationships. Jean-Marc Dewaele, a linguistics professor at Birkbeck, University of London, told me that those who are more neurotic might worry that the obstacles are insurmountable. “I think you need to be a little bit of an optimist,” he said. Tien has also found that these partners tend to demonstrate openness and curiosity—after all, they’re there, willing to stumble through a conversation. A romance like this might be really hard for some people. But maybe those aren’t the people who are trying it.
[Read: What second-chance couples know about love]
The couples I talked with had thrown themselves into learning to communicate. But still, of course, they’d run into misunderstandings: At one point, Sabrin told Sergio she wanted to spend New Year’s Eve out rather than with his family, and said that if he decided to stay in, she would go celebrate without him. He interpreted her words as meaning she would break up with him. They realized they’d confused each other only weeks later, she said, when he professed how glad he was not to have lost her: “And I was like, What?”
Even with the right words, partners with different linguistic backgrounds might interpret things in very different ways. Finnish people tend to be quite comfortable with silence, Erika Sorvisto, a student in Finland, told me; their partner, Morris, who speaks Dutch and Bosnian, used to worry that Erika was mad at him. “Are you okay?” they said he’d ask. “You haven’t said anything in, like, five minutes.” Several people mentioned to me that the phrase I love you is used much more casually in English than its translation in some other languages. Ingrid Piller, a sociolinguist at Macquarie University in Australia, told me that in her native German, “I love you is … almost creepy.” When I asked what term she would use in German to express strong feelings, she said, “You don’t verbalize it so much.” Erika and Morris do declare their love—but in the other’s native language.
That’s partly because I love you really does mean something different in different cultures. But Erika also told me that when they and Morris hear it in their first language, it just seems to hit harder; “it has more feeling.” That’s a common phenomenon, Dewaele told me, related to what researchers call “emotional resonance”: Even when people speaking non-native tongues know what the words mean, they don’t always feel their power. When you acquire your first language, he said, the phrases you learn become loaded with meaning: Thinking of a swear word, you might imagine your teacher’s face when you used it inappropriately as a kid. Using an expression of love, you’re probably repeating what you’ve heard other people use—perhaps your parents while you were growing up, or in years of rom-com viewing. But you might not have those “rich emotional connotations” attached to subsequent languages you learn, at least not at first.
That can be especially tough in conversations you’d likely have with a partner: flirting, professing affection, arguing, discussing the future. You might feel like a bad actor on a stage, Dewaele told me, performing lines without really knowing if they’ll land. “It’s a minefield,” he said. “You don’t know whether these words will get you a slap in the face or, in fact, won’t be strong enough to express how you feel.”
You might even feel like another person altogether. In one study, Dewaele found that 85 percent of participants reported feeling somehow different when they switched languages. That could just be the lack of emotional resonance, or the clumsiness of not being fluent. But many people describe wholly separate personalities in their non-native tongue that might not be explained away by those factors.
Partly for this reason, the language a couple chooses to use together can shape their power dynamic in complicated ways. If they speak a language that’s native to only one partner, the other won’t just have to work harder to communicate; they might never feel like their most authentic self in the relationship. (Notably, women adopt their partner’s language much more commonly than men do.) When couples use a lingua franca—a third option that’s neither party’s first language—they might stand on more equal footing. But they might both sense that some crucial part of their identity is lost.
Several sources told me they worried that they and their partner might never know each other’s true selves. One of them was Asemahle Giwu, a teacher living in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her first language is Xhosa, and her partner’s is Sotho, but they speak English together. She told me that when she speaks Xhosa, she’s louder and funnier; when she speaks English, she’s “more deep” but also “a bit toned down.” And when her partner speaks Sotho, she finds him to be less of a gentleman, more “bad boy-ish.” Neither side is bad, but the shift itself makes her uncomfortable, especially when she notices it in herself. “Am I a hypocrite?” she wonders. “Am I trying to be someone I’m not?”
But I asked Asemahle if she feels like she’s really not herself when she speaks English—or if she’s just finding a different, but equally true, version. She said it’s the latter. Ultimately, she’s grateful that she’s discovered this new side of herself, and that she’s gotten to witness varied dimensions of her partner as well. “You get two worlds when you’re dating a person who speaks a different language,” she said. “And it’s nice living in both of them.”
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The arc of my talk with Asemahle mirrored what seemed like a pattern in most of my conversations: Many of the initial obstacles to multilingual relationships turned into sources of connection and deeper understanding—and eventually a richer life together.
For instance, the potential for miscommunication can lead couples to be more careful with their words, to try to speak as clearly as possible, and to check in more often to see if they’re on the same page. Kaisa Pietikäinen, a researcher at the Norwegian School of Economics, has found this in her studies on partners who use English as a lingua franca. “They’re quite patient in trying to arrive at a shared understanding,” she told me. “Instead of jumping to conclusions, they listen, and they take time, and they ask again, and they rephrase.” That struck me as a good idea for any couple.
Some long-term partners even develop what Pietikäinen calls “couple tongue”: their own unique lexicon that incorporates features of multiple languages. Sabrin and Sergio, for instance, now speak a mix of Italian, English, and Spanish together—and they didn’t even realize they’d been switching back and forth until their friends pointed it out. Sabrin told me that using three languages lets her access a wider range of thought and emotion, because some concepts are better expressed or only exist in one of them.
Even a lack of emotional resonance can be helpful sometimes. On the one hand, it can make arguing particularly difficult. Tien told me partners will say things like “I don’t even know how to start a fight, okay? … I just want to yell in my first language.” On the other hand, a language barrier can give partners some needed emotional distance; it can slow them down, allowing them to cool off—even laugh at the situation. “In the heat of an argument,” Sabrin told me, she’ll sometimes stop and say, “Oh … but can you tell me how to say that in English?” And that breaks the tension. Lena told me the same about using her translator app with Camilla. “How can you stay serious when you’re sitting there staring at each other all angrily with a robot voice behind you?” she said.
Many of the sources I spoke with found their language differences particularly challenging with people outside of the relationship. Sabrin said she felt totally overwhelmed meeting Sergio’s grandmother, who spoke a Spanish dialect that she hadn’t begun to master. She told me Sergio felt the same when he met her family, who spoke Italian so quickly that he felt he had to “close himself off.” Erika sometimes felt excluded hanging out with Morris’s friends, who didn’t want to limit their own conversations by switching to English, and struggled to communicate with his mother, who didn’t speak much English at all. Pietikäinen told me that this is a common dynamic: The partner meeting the friends or family feels isolated and left out, and the partner doing the introducing has to act as a translator rather than just relaxing with people they love.
And yet, my sources seemed to be tackling this test, too, with the optimism and tenacity that researchers said are so common in multilingual couples. Erika is practicing their Dutch, but they also show Morris’s mom pictures on their phone to illustrate what they mean. The two sometimes bake together—and even though they don’t speak much during, they eat the sweets in each other’s company. “I feel closer to her,” Erika told me.
When I interviewed Sabrin, she said her best friend was visiting and Sergio was practicing Italian with her; they were all laughing as he mixed up words and smushed others together into new ones. And when his family was over for Easter, they had fun teaching Sabrin a new verb tense in Spanish. “It becomes an ongoing bonding experience,” she said.
Perhaps language learning is an apt metaphor for falling in love. You have to be vulnerable, to admit what you don’t know, to risk messing up and making a fool of yourself. But if you can laugh at yourself, listen, and stick with it, you stand to gain a lot. Dewaele said that he’s told students learning a foreign tongue, “You will learn concepts that don’t exist in your first language, so it will open your mind.” So, too, might a partner, if you commit to understanding them more and more over time.
Things with Camilla haven’t always been easy, Lena told me. Once there was a fire in their building, and when she shook Camilla awake from her nap to tell her to leave the apartment, Lena found she couldn’t relay what was going on. She was frantically trying to explain while she gathered up her cats, and Camilla was just confused. They weren’t hurt, but it clarified just how much a language barrier can matter. Lena was shaken by it.
At one point, they almost broke up. Lena was tired of using the translator, tired of having to keep her phone charged in order to talk to her own girlfriend, tired of constantly working on her Spanish, tired of striving and stretching herself all the time. She worried that perhaps Camilla would never really know her, the version that came out when she was casually speaking English with friends. But when the couple decided that Camilla should go back to Dallas, Lena found she couldn’t bear to buy her the bus ticket. She didn’t want to wake up the next day, she realized, without Camilla there.
Earlier this spring, they had a big achievement: They sat at a bar for two hours without their translator, having a basic conversation using what they’d learned of each other’s language. It gave them hope, Lena told me. Since then, they’ve been spending most evenings without the app—unless they’re gossiping or having long talks—and they happen to make an excellent charades team. Lena has realized that this relationship is making her grow, however painfully at times, more than any other has.
She can’t wait for the day when she and Camilla can stop using the app for good. At that point, which could be years into the relationship, other couples might be growing bored; after the initial rush of getting to know each other, the honeymoon phase could be over. But Lena and Camilla will still have miles and miles of ground to cover—all the stories that were too hard to tell with the translator, the different ideas and selves that a new language can draw out. Lena hopes they’ll eventually move to Mexico, where Camilla is from and where much of her family still lives. “I’m excited to raise kids together and teach them our languages,” she told me. And she hopes that those kids will be inspired by their parents’ history to believe that love is worth working for.
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