{"id":711612,"date":"2025-11-19T15:28:19","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T12:28:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=711612"},"modified":"2025-11-19T15:28:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T12:28:19","slug":"love-in-translation-on-navigating-a-bilingual-relationship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=711612","title":{"rendered":"Love in Translation: On Navigating a Bilingual Relationship"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Opinion<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Love in Translation: On Navigating a Bilingual Relationship<\/h1>\n
By <\/span>Rachel Whalen<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

November 19, 2025<\/p>\n

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    Photo: Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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    My soon-to-be husband is not in love with me. A Spanish speaker, he tells me que est\u00e1 enamorado<\/em>de<\/em>m\u00ed<\/em>\u2014he is in love of<\/em> me. By its own grammatical logic, love in Spanish is not an act that you do with<\/em> someone; rather, it seems to come from the other, as though drawn from an internal fountainhead.<\/p>\n

    In his book Estudios Sobre El Amor,<\/em> originally published in 1939, Spanish philosopher Jos\u00e9 Ortega y Gasset seems to explain this misalignment of prepositions in almost scientific terms: \u201cAmor es gravitaci\u00f3n hacia lo amado<\/em>.\u201d Love is gravitation toward the beloved. Ortega describes loving as a centrifugal act, the movement of one person infinitely toward the other.<\/p>\n

    It seems natural, then, that upon falling in love with Atza, I felt a sense of vertigo. We\u2019d met in a writing workshop in Mexico City (he was the instructor; I was the timid foreigner, terrified that my writing in Spanish would make no sense). After over a year of close friendship, philosophical conversations, outings to salsa clubs, and group trips with friends, I realized that Atza and I had been slowly, almost imperceptibly, gravitating toward each other. When we finally started dating, the emotional rush of our budding romance destabilized me completely. \u201cI feel like I\u2019m flying inside of my body,\u201d I wrote in my journal. Then I literally began falling down all the time: slipping in my apartment, banging my head on the edge of his fridge. I was constantly bruising my elbows, my knees. I was at once in love with and of him, and it was positively dizzying.<\/p>\n

    Love in any language is hard. Even in my relationships with native English speakers, I found it challenging, at times, to say what I really felt.<\/p>\n

    In a truly bilingual relationship, though, the act of self-translation is especially complex. When I first met Atza\u2019s parents, I was terrified they wouldn\u2019t understand my gringa accent, on top of the usual nerves such a situation calls for. I worried about how I would come across\u2014not as Rachel, but as a translated version of her. Although I managed just fine\u2014and have built a strong relationship with his family since\u2014I still have to contend with the occasional misinterpretation. (At a recent party with his extended family, for example, when Atza\u2019s cousin told me that he and Atza used to leave school \u201cde pinta,\u201d I responded in Spanish, \u201cAnd what would you paint?\u201d The crowd around me burst into laughter; Atza explained that to go \u201cde pinta\u201d means to play hooky.) At other times I find myself reaching for a word that should be commonplace (I recently forgot the Spanish word for whisk<\/em>, \u201cbatidor de globo,\u201d when I asked for help in the kitchen), or I confuse vowels in words like equivocar<\/em> (\u201cequiv-y-car,\u201d I say, much to Atza\u2019s amusement). The extra step I have to take between what I mean and what I say, or what I can\u2019t say, often feels like a break in my ability to express myself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    When my parents come to visit, the language divide widens further. In spite of their valiant Duolingo streaks, they do not speak Spanish and do not understand Atza, nor does he understand them. I don\u2019t fault Atza for never learning English (there are so many more interesting languages!), just as I don’t fault my parents for never having learned Spanish. But what gets lost when I translate for them is an autonomous relationship between my American family and my Mexican fianc\u00e9. I have<\/em> to be present in order for them to communicate, and still I often fail to filter the jokes and quirks of one person into the language of the other.<\/p>\n

    In our relationship, we are always playing on my partner\u2019s home field. But in broader political terms, we are always on mine. We live in a world in which English is violently predominant and American passports are unjustly more valuable than many others (Atza still has not visited my hometown due to stunningly stringent visa regulations, even for a simple tourist visa, while my family and friends can come to Mexico City, where we live, at a moment\u2019s notice). Trump\u2019s America and recent widespread, overtly racist gestures against Mexico and Mexicans only exacerbate this power differential. Atza and I watch from afar as ICE bulldozes through entire communities. Misinformation about Mexico is so shockingly rampant in the US that some of my family members are still deciding whether or not to come to our wedding. Being in a bilingual and multicultural relationship, I\u2019m learning, is an act of balancing scales that are constantly in flux.<\/p>\n

    In anticipation of my and Atza\u2019s wedding, I\u2019ve been asking for advice from my parents, my grandparents, my married friends. Almost unanimously, communication is cited as the most crucial\u2014and, interestingly, most difficult\u2014element of a healthy marriage. For his part, Ortega writes: \u201cUn amor no se puede contar: al comunicarlo se desdibuja o volatiliza<\/em>.\u201d Love cannot be recounted; once told, it evaporates or fades away.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    Love, it seems, is a linguistic problem for all of us. It requires, Ortega suggests, continuous reorientation. \u201cEn el acto amoroso<\/em>,\u201d he writes, \u201cla persona sale fuera de s\u00ed<\/em>.\u201d In an act of love, a person leaves themself. Whether we\u2019re doing that in our first language or our second (or third, or fourth), we have to step outside of ourselves and coalesce with a completely different human being. Love in any language asks us to move \u201cde nuestro ser al del pr\u00f3jimo<\/em>\u201d\u2014from our own person to that of another\u2014and break through the barriers that we erect between our most interior, vulnerable selves and the outside world.<\/p>\n

    Like most couples, Atza and I have created our own language. We have jokes that no one else would understand, key words that allude to the private island we inhabit together. And also, perhaps more importantly, we have a shared vocabulary that needs no language at all. When I peer up from my book and catch him looking at me, when he embraces me at the end of a long day, we are using that other, speechless mode of communication. In these moments and countless others, we are expressing \u201cTe amo,\u201d \u201cI love you,\u201d and so much more\u2014without having to say a word.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

    Source URL: http:\/\/vogue.com\/article\/on-navigating-a-bilingual-relationship<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Opinion Love in Translation: On Navigating a Bilingual Relationship By Rachel Whalen November 19, 2025 Photo: Getty Images My soon-to-be husband is not in love with me. A Spanish speaker, he tells me que est\u00e1 enamoradodem\u00ed\u2014he is in love of me. By its own grammatical logic, love in Spanish is not an act that you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":711613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-711612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-vogue-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=711612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/711613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=711612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=711612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=711612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}