We discuss this in two languages and it goes differently in each

We speak English to each other most of the time, but this particular conversation only works properly in her first language, and mine is a third one that neither of us uses at home. I did not expect that to matter at all. It has turned out to be the single largest fact about how we do this.

In English she is careful, slightly formal, and will agree to things she has not fully decided on. In her own language she is blunt, funny and much harder to move. Early on I was collecting the English version of yes and treating it as the real one. It took one bad night and a very long apology to work out what had been happening for months.

Thirty five and thirty eight, the western suburbs, eighteen months open. One arrangement of about four months that finished when he went back to his own city, on entirely good terms.

So we go slowly, and we check things twice, and sometimes a pause in a conversation that looks like hesitation is in fact a translation. If that seems tedious, we are the wrong household and no offence is taken.

What we would like is somebody who does not need every exchange to be quick and smooth. Somebody who will ask a second time rather than assume the first answer was the whole answer. We are not fragile people. We are two people who found out the hard way that a marriage can have one language it is honest in and another it is polite in.