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I moved to Spain and started dating a Spaniard. We've had culture clashes I never would've expected.
Selena Templeton
- Two years ago, I moved to Spain, and began dating a Spaniard several months in.
- We had some immediate cultural clashes, mostly around communication and our argument styles.
- I've learned that being fluent in a language doesn't necessarily make communication easy.
I'd spent years learning Spanish before I moved to Spain, but once I arrived, I realized how much further I had to go before I could call myself fluent.
I consider myself "conversationally adjacent"; I'm a few neighborhoods over from fluent, but I still get lost.
So, when I started dating a Spaniard six months into moving here, I was fully prepared for regular vocabulary deficits and butchered grammar (especially with my archenemy, the subjunctive).
What I didn't expect was that even when I understood every word, I could still misunderstand the meaning behind it — because language was only part of the equation.
I was shocked when he called me 'ugly'
Early in our relationship, my Spanish boyfriend casually called me "fea" — literally "ugly" — and was baffled when I burst into tears.
To him, the word didn't carry the cruelty I heard in its English equivalent. In Spain, words like "fea" or "feo" are often used as playful terms of endearment. Understanding this, though, didn't make it hurt any less.
Another time, I asked him how to say "making out" in Spanish. He had no idea — and, in fact, he didn't even understand the concept when I explained it.
"You know," I said. "More than kissing, less than sex. The kind of thing teenagers do on the sofa while pretending to watch a movie." He looked at me like I had invented a new sport.
That was when I started to realize that I wasn't just learning Spanish, but discovering that dating comes with different assumptions in every culture.
We followed very different dating rules
Selena Templeton
After six months together, things were going really well, but my boyfriend and I still hadn't had "the talk."
Having lived in Canada and the US, I was used to relationships hitting a certain point when someone would say something along the lines of, "I really like you, and I think this is going well. Do you want to be in a relationship or date exclusively?"
When I brought this up, my boyfriend looked genuinely puzzled. So I asked how, in his experience, two people knew they were on the same page about progressing a relationship and not dating anyone else. He shrugged and told me that usually it's just assumed.
My mouth dropped open. "But what if you assume you're exclusive, and she assumes you're not, and it turns out she's dating other people?"
He shrugged again. "You just trust that you both feel the same way," he said.
My boyfriend isn't the only one who feels this way. After our discussion, I asked several Spanish friends about this, and they all said that neither they nor anyone they knew had ever had this conversation.
I've had to separate language, culture, and personality
Selena Templeton
Some differences are easy to laugh about later — like when we argued about "compromiso," a word I understood as "compromise" and he meant as "commitment" — but others are harder, because they're embedded in our DNA.
For instance, we argue in different ways. My boyfriend can feel ready to move on from disagreements moments after they happen. I, on the other hand, take a bit longer to recover.
Two years later, we're still together and still in love. We're also seeing a couples therapist who has experience with bicultural relationships, because not being quite fluent in each other's languages means we may understand most of the words, but we're sometimes still confused about what the other person is trying to say.
Our therapist is helping us see which misunderstandings are linguistic, which are cultural, and which are simply differences between two people.
Movies often make cross-cultural dating seem romantic — after all, body language is universal, wink, wink — but I beg to differ. Communication is supremely important when trying to build a life with someone.
So this relationship has forced both of us to assess our assumptions at every potential speed bump. Now, we ask: Is this cultural? Personal? A relationship incompatibility? Or just a "lost in translation" misunderstanding that we'll laugh about later?
