My soon-to-be husband is not in love with me. A Spanish speaker, he tells me que está enamorado de mí—he is in love of me. By its own grammatical logic, love in Spanish is not an act that you do with someone; rather, it seems to come from the other, as though drawn from an internal fountainhead.
In his book Estudios Sobre El Amor, originally published in 1939, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset seems to explain this misalignment of prepositions in almost scientific terms: “Amor es gravitación hacia lo amado.” Love is gravitation toward the beloved. Ortega describes loving as a centrifugal act, the movement of one person infinitely toward the other.
It seems natural, then, that upon falling in love with Atza, I felt a sense of vertigo. We’d met in a writing workshop in Mexico City (he was the instructor; I was the timid foreigner, terrified that my writing in Spanish would make no sense). After over a year of close friendship, philosophical conversations, outings to salsa clubs, and group trips with friends, I realized that Atza and I had been slowly, almost imperceptibly, gravitating toward each other. When we finally started dating, the emotional rush of our budding romance destabilized me completely. “I feel like I’m flying inside of my body,” I wrote in my journal. Then I literally began falling down all the time: slipping in my apartment, banging my head on the edge of his fridge. I was constantly bruising my elbows, my knees. I was at once in love with and of him, and it was positively dizzying.
Love in any language is hard. Even in my relationships with native English speakers, I found it challenging, at times, to say what I really felt.
In a truly bilingual relationship, though, the act of self-translation is especially complex. When I first met Atza’s parents, I was terrified they wouldn’t understand my gringa accent, on top of the usual nerves such a situation calls for. I worried about how I would come across—not as Rachel, but as a translated version of her. Although I managed just fine—and have built a strong relationship with his family since—I still have to contend with the occasional misinterpretation. (At a recent party with his extended family, for example, when Atza’s cousin told me that he and Atza used to leave school “de pinta,” I responded in Spanish, “And what would you paint?” The crowd around me burst into laughter; Atza explained that to go “de pinta” means to play hooky.) At other times I find myself reaching for a word that should be commonplace (I recently forgot the Spanish word for whisk, “batidor de globo,” when I asked for help in the kitchen), or I confuse vowels in words like equivocar (“equiv-y-car,” I say, much to Atza’s amusement). The extra step I have to take between what I mean and what I say, or what I can’t say, often feels like a break in my ability to express myself.
When my parents come to visit, the language divide widens further. In spite of their valiant Duolingo streaks, they do not speak Spanish and do not understand Atza, nor does he understand them. I don’t fault Atza for never learning English (there are so many more interesting languages!), just as I don t fault my parents for never having learned Spanish. But what gets lost when I translate for them is an autonomous relationship between my American family and my Mexican fiancé. I have to be present in order for them to communicate, and still I often fail to filter the jokes and quirks of one person into the language of the other.
In our relationship, we are always playing on my partner’s home field. But in broader political terms, we are always on mine. We live in a world in which English is violently predominant and American passports are unjustly more valuable than many others (Atza still has not visited my hometown due to stunningly stringent visa regulations, even for a simple tourist visa, while my family and friends can come to Mexico City, where we live, at a moment’s notice). Trump’s America and recent widespread, overtly racist gestures against Mexico and Mexicans only exacerbate this power differential. Atza and I watch from afar as ICE bulldozes through entire communities. Misinformation about Mexico is so shockingly rampant in the US that some of my family members are still deciding whether or not to come to our wedding. Being in a bilingual and multicultural relationship, I’m learning, is an act of balancing scales that are constantly in flux.
In anticipation of my and Atza’s wedding, I’ve been asking for advice from my parents, my grandparents, my married friends. Almost unanimously, communication is cited as the most crucial—and, interestingly, most difficult—element of a healthy marriage. For his part, Ortega writes: “Un amor no se puede contar: al comunicarlo se desdibuja o volatiliza.” Love cannot be recounted; once told, it evaporates or fades away.
Love, it seems, is a linguistic problem for all of us. It requires, Ortega suggests, continuous reorientation. “En el acto amoroso,” he writes, “la persona sale fuera de sí.” In an act of love, a person leaves themself. Whether we’re doing that in our first language or our second (or third, or fourth), we have to step outside of ourselves and coalesce with a completely different human being. Love in any language asks us to move “de nuestro ser al del prójimo”—from our own person to that of another—and break through the barriers that we erect between our most interior, vulnerable selves and the outside world.
Like most couples, Atza and I have created our own language. We have jokes that no one else would understand, key words that allude to the private island we inhabit together. And also, perhaps more importantly, we have a shared vocabulary that needs no language at all. When I peer up from my book and catch him looking at me, when he embraces me at the end of a long day, we are using that other, speechless mode of communication. In these moments and countless others, we are expressing “Te amo,” “I love you,” and so much more—without having to say a word.