Two households, two languages, and a relationship built out of both

Neither of us grew up speaking English at home, and neither of us grew up speaking the other one's language either, so we met in a third and we live in it, mostly, except when we do not. There is an entire register of things we say to one another that neither of our families would understand and that we could not translate for anybody.

Thirty four and thirty six, out in the 905, together eight years. It matters here more than we expected. The conversation this thing requires is very specific, and we had to build the words for it from nothing, because neither of us had them in a first language and the English ones came out of reading and felt like somebody else's clothes.

What that produced is a private vocabulary that works extremely well and travels absolutely nowhere. Twice we have tried to talk about any of it with other people and found we were translating our own relationship, badly, and by the end neither of us recognised the thing we had just described.

So we are looking for people who are used to this: households where more than one language gets spoken, couples who switch mid sentence, anybody for whom the idea that a relationship happens partly in a language nobody else in the room speaks is completely ordinary. Around here that is a great many people, which is one of the reasons we stayed.