Two passports, a third country, and a flat that gets edited twice a year

Twice a year our parents come to stay, and twice a year the flat gets edited. Everything goes into a bag, the bag goes into a cupboard, and for a week we live in a version of our home that two sets of visitors find reassuring. We have become extremely efficient at it and we have never once discussed whether we might stop.

We are thirty seven and thirty nine, east side, together eleven years. She is from one country, I am from another, and we live in a third, speaking a language at home that belongs to neither of us.

The consequence for this is that we have no template. Every couple picks up habits from somewhere, and where those two somewheres do not overlap you end up building from nothing and arguing about things other people never have to name. How much gets said out loud. Who tells whom what. Whether any of it is anybody else's business at all.

What we would like is friends in a similar position. People whose life is assembled rather than inherited, and who also have two directions to fly in at the end of every year.

Not a third. Not a comparison of which of our two countries is more relaxed about all this, which we are asked constantly and which is a dull conversation. And not anybody who wants us to justify the editing of the flat, which we are not embarrassed about and are also not going to defend.