Mi piaci, ti voglio bene, ti amo. In Italian these are three distinct steps of affection, each with its own weight and its own moment. In English, more often than not, they become a single phrase: I love you. Anyone who falls in love with someone who speaks a different mother tongue soon discovers that between these words lies a whole world waiting to be translated.

Living in another country often brings us into contact with people who don't share our country of origin, and we end up communicating in a language both of us know. But language carries customs with it: our habits and the other person's, the way we joke, argue and make up. Language defines who we are.

In the past, for cultural, religious and economic reasons, people who emigrated tended to stay deeply tied to the community they came from. Those gathering points still exist today, and for many they remain a precious bridge into a profoundly different reality; yet we also feel freer to follow our curiosity and to approach the other with real openness. Thanks to social media, meeting "the other" has become part of our experience from a very young age.

The language of the heart

The language we learned as children is not just a tool: it is the language in which we first met our emotions, lullabies, reprimands, caresses. That is why the words of our mother tongue reach deeper. Many bilingual people say that saying "I love you" or "I'm angry" in a second language is easier, precisely because it hurts less: there is a small safety distance.

In my practice I often work with bilingual Italian-English patients, and it happens that halfway through a sentence they switch language, drawing on both vocabularies. This is no accident: certain memories and certain feelings "live" in one language only. Research by the linguist Aneta Pavlenko confirms this: for bilingual people, words in the mother tongue often carry a stronger emotional charge than those learned later in life.

In a bilingual couple, this means that part of the other person will always reach us in translation. And that we, too, partly present ourselves in translation.

The fear of not understanding each other

One of the fears I hear most often is that, in the long run, misunderstandings will arise… that we won't truly understand each other, that we'll lack the shared words to explain ourselves, and that these misunderstandings will lead to tensions that are hard to overcome, in the couple and in the family.

There is also a very concrete dynamic: when a couple argues, whoever is speaking in their mother tongue has the advantage. The other may feel slower, less sharp, less "themselves". Recognising this, and perhaps allowing each partner to argue in their own language, can already change a great deal.

In my view, however, misunderstandings depend on language only on the surface. Far more often they stem from a lack of clarity about what we desire, what we expect from the other, and what we are happy and ready to give. In my work with couples, whether they come from different cultures or the same one, what often emerges is how much we expect our partner to read our mind and guess what we would like to happen. No language, however shared, makes telepathy possible.

Expectations and the mirror of the other

For a healthy life as a couple, it is vital to ask whether our expectations can be met within the relationship we are building. Entering a relationship believing we can change the other person, perhaps convinced that if they learned our language everything would be simpler, will often leave us dissatisfied. And above all, it is an unfair demand.

Difference can also become a screen onto which we project our desires: the other who is "freer", "more romantic", "so different from my family". Sometimes choosing a partner from another culture is also a way of distancing ourselves from where we come from. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is worth asking: did I fall in love with this person, or with what they represent for me?

And there are small griefs that are rarely spoken about: not being able to share the songs of our childhood, the sayings of home, the jokes that only make sense to someone who grew up in a certain place. Later, new questions arrive: which language will we speak to our children? How will the grandparents talk to each other?

When curiosity fades

Curiosity is the engine that drives us to get to know the other and to share a part of ourselves. When we feel it fading, or when our hopes for the relationship are disappointed, we can slip into a sense of unease and sadness, losing hope and the desire to carry on with the relationship, and more generally the desire to do anything at all. We feel "switched off". How can I go on?

To rediscover that drive, it can help to pause and reflect:

· What leads me to make certain choices?

· Which moments from my past still shape my present?

· What kind of partner am I looking for, and what do I really want from the relationship?

· What do I want, and what do I think my family and friends want?

· In which language do I feel most myself when I ask the other for something?

A third language

Many bilingual couples end up building a language all their own: invented words, sentences halfway between Italian and English, jokes no one else would understand. It is one of the most beautiful signs of a growing intimacy: not my language, not yours, but ours.

A couple is made of two people who have found a mutual attraction strong enough to push them past the language barrier. Grasping the difference between mi piaci, ti voglio bene and ti amo, when English resolves them all into I love you, asks us to develop a reading of nuances and small gestures. That is where we discover whether the other can understand us beyond our alphabet, and whether we are willing to learn weights and measures different from our own.

Because loving someone is, in the end, always an act of translation.