Je t'aime my darling gargoyle

Anyone who has been one half of a bi-lingual love story knows about the linguistic mishaps that arise in day to day communication.

For example, an eavesdropper whose ears are too small to hear all the sounds might think I know less about music then I actually do:

H: Hey you know that old band “Colonzey Gong”?

Me, uninterested, just some boring French band I’ve never heard of:

“no don’t know 'em”

H: Yes you know them!

Me: No I don’t.

Look here...he googles (the internet is always alight at my place)

Oh Kool and the Gang!

H. recounting a conversation he had when he went to see, what he assures me was a post hard core band, the other night:

"And so then I started talking to the other photographer there
and she said she photographed the Madonna concert the other week, so I said
`oh I didn’t know Madonna was in Paris' and she said `Not Madonna, Modonney!'
She was saying Modonney so I felt really stupid but that music was loud!"

Blank look from me: "Who is Modonney? Is he French post hard core as well?"

H: You don’t know who Modonney is??!

Google again: Oh Mudhoney. Right yes.

But when I'm speaking in French, often correcting H's French because it doesn't correspond with the way I would say it with my Australian accent, I've found that i'm more free n easy with the language of love.

I'm not much of a kissy kissy person in English. One Australian friend complains I’m
not very liberal with my “xx”s in correspondence and that he has counted every x I’ve ever signed at the end of my name and put them in a little treasure box (one x on his birthday in 1997, and three xxx's when I wanted something in 2005). But here in France, the ritual of hello-kissing people you don’t know has transposed itself into my emails and I'm now more likely to put bises at the end of my correspondence.

However, I still find "je t'embrasse!" quite frightening. When French men speaking in English decide to translate this as: `I kiss you' (as they often do) it sounds like a blessing, the kind of phrase that should be reserved for when your long white dress is billowing in a persistent breeze and you lean down and kiss someone on their forehead before they go forth to discover a new planet - "I kiss you, now go forth and conquer".

In English if a boyfriend called me "dear" I'd biff him one, but in French I quite like being someone's chérie, like I'm full of sugar and spice and all things nice.

And then there is that whole “I love you” thing. Some of the boys I’ve been with have been the types who have been champing at the bit to say "I love you" after two weeks. This bores me senseless as it means that after that you have nothing really to look forward to except for the first time he says "I hate you, hope you get pecked to death by bored pigeons".

In English I shy away from saying I love you, it seems like too much of a deal clincher. But now that I’ve been given "je t’aime", I'm much more hardcore about it: "Je t’aime! Je t’aime!". I guess it's because I still don't feel comfortable enough in French to feel any real affinity with the language so for me saying "je t'aime!" is as easy as saying "aussie aussie aussie oi oi oi". Saying "I love you", however, remains post hard core.

There are of course constraints on giving free reign to your passion when you aren't operating in your mother tongue. I remember one time before I could understand French when I composed a particularly saucy text, rampant with soft English innuendos, to my French boyfriend who hadn't yet dusted off his English grammar books and he wrote back with: "I think about some good stuffs too".