The moment for languid afternoons spent naming the knees and the eyelashes had passed. Our classroom was the kitchen. Illustration by Eleni Kalorkoti

I moved to Geneva to be with my husband, Olivier, who had moved there because his job required him to. My restaurant French was just passable. Drugstore French was a stretch. IKEA French was pretty much out of the question, meaning that, since Olivier, a native speaker, worked twice as many hours a week as Swiss stores were open, we went for months without things like lamps.

We had established our life together in London, where we met on more or less neutral ground: his continent, my language. It worked. Olivier was my guide to living outside the behemoth of American culture; I was his guide to living inside the behemoth of English.

He had learned the language over the course of many years. When he was in his teens, his parents sent him to Saugerties, New York, for a homestay with some acquaintances of an American they knew. Olivier landed at JFK, where a taxi picked him up. This was around the time of the Atlanta Olympic Games.

“What is the English for ‘female athlete’?” he asked, wanting to be prepared to discuss current events.

“ ‘Bitch,’ ” the driver said.

They drove on toward Ulster County, Olivier straining for a glimpse of the Manhattan skyline. The patriarch of the host family was an arborist named Vern. Olivier remembers driving around Saugerties with Charlene, Vern’s wife, and a friend of hers, who begged him over and over to say “hamburger.” He was mystified by the fact that Charlene called Vern “the Incredible Hunk.”

Five years later, Olivier found himself in England, a graduate student in mathematics. Unfortunately, his scholastic English—“Kevin is a blue-eyed boy” had been billed as a canonical phrase—had done little to prepare him for the realities of the language on the ground. “You’ve really improved,” his roommate told him, six weeks into the term. “When you got here, you couldn’t speak a word.” At that point, Olivier had been studying English for more than a decade.

After England, he moved to California to pursue a Ph.D., still barely able to cobble together a sentence. His début as a teaching assistant for a freshman course in calculus was greeted by a mass defection. On the plus side, one day he looked out upon the residue of the crowd and saw a female student wearing a T-shirt that read “Bonjour, Paris!”

By the time we met, Olivier had become not only a proficient speaker but a sensitive, agile one. Upon moving to London, in 2007, he’d had to take an English test in order to obtain his license as an amateur pilot. The examiner rated him “Expert”: “Able to speak at length with a natural, effortless flow. Varies speech flow for stylistic effect, e.g. to emphasize a point. Uses appropriate discourse markers and connectors spontaneously.”

I knew Olivier only in his third language—he also spoke Spanish, the native language of his maternal grandparents, who had fled over the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War—but his powers of expression were one of the things that made me fall in love with him. For all his rationality, he had a romantic streak, an attunement to the currents of feeling that run beneath the surface of words. Once, he wrote me a letter—an inducement to what we might someday have together—in which every sentence began with “Maybe.” Maybe he’d make me an omelette, he said, every day of my life.

We moved in together quickly. One night, we were watching a movie. I spilled a glass of water and went to mop it up with some paper towels.

“They don’t have very good capillarity,” Olivier said.

“Huh?” I replied, continuing to dab at the puddle.

“Their capillarity isn’t very good.”

“What are you talking about? That’s not even a word.”

Olivier said nothing. A few days later, I noticed a piece of paper lying in the printer tray. It was a page from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

Capillarity noun ka-pə-’ler-ə-tē, -’la-rə-.

1 : the property or state of being capillary

2 : the action by which the surface of a liquid where it is in contact with a solid (as in a capillary tube) is elevated or depressed depending on the relative attraction of the molecules of the liquid for each other and for those of the solid.

Ink to a nib, my heart surged.

Still, we often had, in some weirdly basic sense, a hard time understanding each other. The critic George Steiner defined intimacy as “confident, quasi-immediate translation,” a state of increasingly one-to-one correspondence in which “the external vulgate and the private mass of language grow more and more concordant.” Translation, he explained, occurs both across and inside languages. You are performing a feat of interpretation anytime you attempt to communicate with someone who is not like you.

In addition to being French and American, Olivier and I were translating, to varying degrees, across a host of Steiner’s categories: scientist/artist, atheist/believer, man/woman. It seemed sometimes as if generation was one of the few gaps across which we weren’t attempting to stretch ourselves. I had been conditioned to believe in the importance of directness and sincerity, but Olivier valued a more disciplined self-presentation. If, to me, the definition of intimacy was letting it all hang out, to him that constituted a form of thoughtlessness. In the same way that Olivier liked it when I wore lipstick, or perfume—American men, in my experience, often claimed to prefer a more “natural” look—he trusted in a sort of emotional maquillage, in which one took a few minutes to compose one’s thoughts instead of walking around, undone, in the affective equivalent of pajamas. For him, the success of le couple—a relationship, in French, was something you were, not something you were in—depended on restraint rather than on uninhibitedness. Where I saw artifice, he saw artfulness.

Every couple struggles, to some extent, to communicate, but our differences, concealing one another like nesting dolls, inhibited our trust in each other in ways that we scarcely understood. Olivier was careful of what he said to the point of parsimony; I spent my words like an oligarch with a terminal disease. My memory was all moods and tones, while he had a transcriptionist’s recall for the details of our exchanges. Our household spats degenerated into linguistic warfare.

“I’ll clean the kitchen after I finish my dinner,” I’d say. “First, I’m going to read my book.”

“My dinner,” he’d reply, in a babyish voice. “My book.”