The last relationship I was in that lasted like, longer than two weeks, ended more than a year ago.
After everything was said and done and taking almost another full year to get over it, putting myself through a comical series of first dates, hookups and the like, I started trying to think of it as having been this free extended spanish immersion course with an emotional aspect not found in most classrooms. Whenever you’re learning a language and have any kind of relationship with someone where you’re actively using their language, that’s when you really go through that pivotal transition from speaking like a textbook to developing real social fluency, forming your voice — and that person is going to have a huge influence on that voice (think of the phrases you use taken from your friends and family). So the odd thing about that is it means there is this weird sentimental value to my language ability. Rather than having left behind a crappy mixtape or whatever other silly trinkets people are expected to shuffle through when they break up, my thing is this immaterial communication ability marked by a certain down-home chilean style that can’t be thrown away.
It’s cool because i can carry it around with me everywhere pretty much under the radar, or so i thought until very recently. Now that I am starting a relationship with someone who went through kind of the opposite situation (learned english through a relationship), this oddity has come to the forefront of my emotional preoccupations. Suddenly the particular contours of his idiomatic english is this uncomfortable little thing that can never be put in a box in the attic. I wonder if it has ever occurred to him that my idiomatic chilean spanish is the same.
