Dr Aneta Pavlenko, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Temple University, who has conducted research into emotions including anger in bilingual relationships, agrees. “Differences become particularly acute during arguments, because arguments are the time when you have the least control of your language but at the same time you need most to express your emotions,” she says.

Even the way different cultures perceive anger can affect arguments, Pavlenko, a native Russian speaker, continues. “English-language scholars often treat anger as a universal concept, but, as a Russian speaker coming to this culture, it was at first hard for me to understand exactly, because in Russia we make somewhat different distinctions. I found the gap between English anger and the two Russian concepts, serdit'sia (to be cross at someone) and zlit'sia (to be angry, irritated with someone) somewhat difficult to navigate at first. The way psychologists explain this is that situations trigger certain feelings in us, but the way we name these experiences differs depending on our native languages.”

This means than in an argument, every word counts – which has a surprising upside, Anna Irvin explains. “It slows everything down” she says. “But I think that actually that can lead to a more solid basis,” she says. “It forces you to be more careful about the way you speak and what you say and how you say it”.

It’s all relative

“It felt good to touch Olivier in his own language – to be able to push his buttons, graze his pleasure points”, Lauren Collins writes, after gaining fluency in her partner’s language brings her closer to him. And an understanding of the French language, and the importance it gives to the separation of formal and informal addresses, helps her unpick some of her own misunderstandings of his attitudes. “I had once interpreted Olivier’s reticence as pessimism, but I now saw the deep romanticism, the hopefulness, of not wanting to overstate or to overpromise”, she writes.