Tien has also found that these partners tend to demonstrate openness and curiosity-after all, they’re there, willing to stumble through a conversation. “I think you need to be a little bit of an optimist,” he said. 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. Research has shown that people high in open-mindedness and social initiative seem to feel more at ease in their multilingual relationships. 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. But she didn’t find it scary-it was fun, even “liberating.” 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. Instead, he’d sing her Frank Sinatra songs she couldn’t understand English, but she knew that the music was romantic. When they were first dating, for instance, her father didn’t know enough Italian to express his feelings for Sabrin’s mom. Sabrin Hasbun, an Italian Palestinian writer, grew up hearing family lore about her parents’ funny, awkward multilingual courtship. 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. 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. 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. (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. What drew these partners together, if not conversation? The people I spoke with weren’t necessarily having profound discussions off the bat. 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. It’s a good time to fall in love across a language barrier. 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. Globalization, accessible travel, and social media have made it easier to meet people who speak different languages. T oday, multilingual relationships are more possible than ever. Read: The scariest part of a relationship Roughly 10 months later, they still don’t speak each other’s language fluently. “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. 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.
Lena’s friends were totally charmed by Camilla. How would they get through this first car ride without saying anything? But they ended up having a ball.
On the way to pick her up at the bus station, Lena was terrified. About three months in, Camilla visited for the first time. Often, something wouldn’t translate well, so they’d have to keep trying to rephrase it. 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. Lena, a hotel manager in Lubbock, Texas, spoke only English Camilla, a factory supervisor who lived five hours away in Dallas, spoke only Spanish. But pretty quickly, she realized: They didn’t speak the same language. W hen Lena McPeters first messaged her now-girlfriend on Facebook Dating, she didn’t know much about her she just thought Camilla was cute.
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