You dream in a language I can't understand
How well can you really know someone if you've never heard them think? When you lie down next to your partner and they are not dreaming yet. Just thinking. In a language you have never spoken. You don't ask where they went. You already know you can't go there.
Most people in relationships never name this. They call it distance, or just the texture of a long relationship. What it actually is is architecture. The person you are with was shaped by a language long before you arrived. They learned to feel within it. They were comforted in it, wounded in it, first understanding what feeling any kind of emotion meant through specific words. And if you do not understand that language, there is a room inside them you will never enter. Visible. Closed.
Arthur, in Celine Song's Past Lives, is the rare person who finds the words for it. He tells his wife Nora: " You dream in a language I can't understand. It's like there's this whole place inside of you where I can't go” [1]. Somehow that is the most intimate thing in the film. There is a version of your partner that exists only in the language they grew up in, and anyone who did not grow up inside that language will always be looking in through the glass [2].
This is the essay that line made me want to write. Bilingual couples psychology offers a useful framework for understanding why language differences can shape intimacy even when communication seems effortless. Not about translation in the literal sense, but about what happens when two people who are dating each other grew up inside different linguistic worlds. About the cost of always meeting in a third language that belongs fully to neither person. And whether, in a Bangalore apartment or a New York bar, it is possible to truly know someone whose interior life was built in a language you have never spoken.
The science of feeling in a foreign tongue:
For decades, scholars have noted that bilingual speakers often report that swearing, praying and saying, “I love you” feel different expressed in a native language compared to the expression of the same sentiments in one acquired later. Aneta Pavlenko's work shows that late bilinguals frequently experience their first language as more emotionally intense and their second language as cooler and more detached, sometimes useful precisely because it creates distance from overwhelming feelings [3].
Pavlenko's 2012 review identified two interrelated processing patterns. First, the native language carries heightened electrodermal reactivity; words in your mother tongue produce stronger physiological arousal than the same concepts in a second language. When a multilingual person hears a reprimand or a term of endearment in their first language, their body responds more intensely than when they hear its translation [4]. Second, language is processed semantically, as meaning, but it is not always processed effectively, as feeling.
Other research has focused on how multilinguals experience their own personality shifting across languages. Jean-Marc Dewaele and Seiji Nakano found that participants often felt less emotional and more fake in languages acquired later [5]. Other work in this tradition suggests this effect is particularly pronounced when a later language was first encountered in formal settings, classrooms rather than at dinner tables or on playgrounds, because the emotional conditioning of daily life simply was not present during acquisition. People did not simply translate themselves.They felt like slightly different selves.This phenomenon is a central finding in bilingual couples psychology, where partners may encounter different versions of each other across languages.
A 2024 review synthesised decades of research and found that the emotional gap between the first and second languages is particularly pronounced for late bilinguals, people who learned their second language not as children but in school or through migration. The second language, acquired in formal contexts, lacks the emotional conditioning of the first, which was absorbed alongside the full texture of early life [6]. The kitchen, the fever, the reprimand, the lullaby, that description is an elaboration of the underlying finding, not a phrase from the review itself, but it captures what the research consistently shows.
The implications for intimate relationships are significant. Differences in native language were among the most consistent sources of difficulty in cross-cultural couples. Partners who differed in their primary emotional language reported challenges not just in communication but in emotional validation. They could understand each other's words. What was harder to cross was the feeling-weight behind them [7].
This is different from vocabulary failure. It is something more structural: two people in a relationship, both fluent in the language they share, but each carrying an interior emotional register that was built in a tongue the other has never spoken. The shared language is real. The connection is real. But there is a room inside each of them, furnished in childhood, to which the other has no key. Many of the challenges described in bilingual couples psychology emerge from this experience of connecting through a shared language while carrying emotional histories rooted elsewhere. Researchers describe this as an emotional language gap between emotional experience and emotional expression.
Jhumpa Lahiri wrote about this in In Other Words (2016), her memoir of learning Italian as an adult. She describes the self that speaks Italian as a different person from the self that speaks English, smaller, less defended, more uncertain, but also more honest in unexpected ways. This is a literary reflection rather than a scientific conclusion, but it echoes the research finding that multilinguals often report feeling differently across languages. The person you are in your second language, she suggests, is a translation of yourself. Fluent, possibly beautiful, but not the original [8].
What does this mean in a relationship? It means that if you and your partner met in a metropolitan city, and you both have a common language (English) that is different from your mother tongue and neither is what either of you dreams in, your partner may have only ever met the common language version of you. Competent, articulate, perhaps even eloquent. But not the “you” who exists in your mother tongue.
Two migrants, one shared island:
English in urban India is described as a link language, a bridge across dozens of regional tongues and a marker of education, mobility and class [10]. In cities like Bangalore it has become the default medium in which strangers approach each other. Dating apps, corporate campuses and co-living spaces all lean on English as neutral ground. Yet, for most Indians, English was acquired in school rather than at the dinner table. It is a life language, not a mother tongue. That gap between life language and mother tongue is precisely where cross-linguistic intimacy lives.The connection is real. But their partners have only ever met in translation.
When intimacy happens only in English, certain textures get quietly shaved off. There is no exact English equivalent for kanmani, just as there is no tidy Hindi or Tamil equivalent for “I am not ready for that emotionally” in the way that particular phrase circulates in American therapy-speak. Disagreements move toward a rationalist vocabulary that can sometimes obscure as much as it reveals. The jokes tilt toward meme culture not rooted in either one's childhood. Over time, the relationship can become a small English-speaking island in a sea of other languages that hold your earliest terrors and comforts. That island can be beautiful. It can also feel oddly weightless [11]. An emotional language gap can persist even when both partners are highly proficient in the language they share.
Research on bilingual couples suggests that engaging with a partner’s native language can strengthen feelings of connection and mutual understanding [12]. The act of learning even a few words in your partner’s mother tongue is not merely gesturally kind. Even small efforts to engage with a partner’s native language can carry disproportionate emotional significance. You are reaching into the room.
When the argument breaks into a language you don't speak:
Experiments on what researchers call the foreign language effect show that when people make moral judgments or navigate emotional conflict in a non-native language they are often more utilitarian and less bound by emotional instinct [13]. The language you use changes how strongly your body and brain react to a scenario, even when the content is identical. In other words, a fight conducted in English between two people whose emotional wiring was laid down in Tamil or Bengali is not a simple translation. It is a structurally different event.
Many multilinguals also report feeling slightly fake or less like themselves in non-native languages, especially when trying to express anger or deep hurt [14]. Science tells us this is not a failure of intelligence. Instead, the emotional language gap reflects the different ways emotions become attached to words across the lifespan. It is a predictable result of emotional lexicons being differently wired across languages.
The cost, in a relationship, is that one partner can start to believe the other does not feel things as deeply simply because those feelings do not come wrapped in familiar phrases.
Learning to say the word they grew up with:
There is a hopeful turn here, and it is not sentimental. Learning to speak your partner’s language is not a performance of multiculturalism.Research in bilingual couples psychology suggests that engaging with a partner's native language can deepen feelings of understanding and connection. It is an act of genuine intimacy, etymologically and practically. You are saying: I want to enter the room. I cannot go all the way in, I did not grow up there, the furniture will always be slightly foreign to me. But I am willing to stand at the threshold and learn what it means to see everything through the pupil of my eye.
From a cognitive point of view, learning even a small slice of a partner's language can shift how you encode memories with them. Language used when an event is experienced can become a retrieval cue later, shaping how vividly and with what emotional colouring it is recalled [5]. You are building a small bilingual archive inside the relationship, planting memories tagged in more than one tongue.
Pavlenko has argued that new languages can eventually acquire emotional weight comparable to the mother tongue, especially when they are used in intimate, embodied contexts rather than only in classrooms [15]. Teaching each other words for closeness is one of the fastest ways to do that. The act of borrowing a pet name from your partner's language and making it yours is profoundly intimate because it acknowledges the existence of that interior room and asks, gently, to be allowed a little closer.
What the room holds:
Ultimately, bilingual couples psychology is less about translation and more about understanding how language shapes emotional experience. Emotional responses expressed in a second language are often less physiologically reactive, and some studies find shifts in moral judgment compared with a native language. Pavlenko called this disembodied cognition, the experience of processing feeling as information rather than as sensation [4]. For millions of urban Indians whose relationships unfold primarily in English, this dynamic may shape everyday intimacy in ways that often go unnoticed.
Linguists call the mother tongue the L1. The notation is clinical but the reality it describes is not. The L1 is where emotional memory is first encoded, where the body learns what words feel like before the mind learns what they mean. Every language acquired after that, the L2, the L3, the English of the office and the dating app, sits on top of that original architecture without ever fully replacing it. Many multilinguals report that their dreams occur primarily in the language most deeply tied to childhood experience.
What cross-linguistic relationships ask of us is: the willingness to accept that the person you are closest to may possess registers of feeling you will never fully access, and to stay anyway. To learn the word even when you cannot feel it the way they feel it. To ask what it means when they slip into their mother tongue at 1 AM, not because you will understand the answer completely, but because asking is itself a form of arrival.
You dream in a language I can’t understand. Yes. The room inside your partner that is written in another language may not open fully. But the threshold is real. And standing at it, curious and unhurried, is as close as most of us will ever get to knowing someone completely.
References:
1. Song C. Past Lives [film]. A24; 2023.
2. High On Films. Past Lives (2023) movie ending explained and themes analyzed. High On Films. 2024 Feb 2.
3. Pavlenko A. Bilingualism and emotions. Multilingua. 2002;21(1):45-78.
4. Pavlenko A. Affective processing in bilingual speakers: Disembodied cognition? Int J Psychol. 2012;47(6):405-428.
5. Dewaele JM, Nakano S. Multilinguals' perceptions of feeling different when switching languages. J Multiling Multicult Dev. 2013;34(2):107-120.
6. Santesteban-Echarri O, Etchezahar E. The landscape of emotional language processing in bilinguals: A review. Prog Neurobiol. 2024.
7. Yurtaeva E, Charura D. Comprehensive scoping review of research on intercultural romantic relationships. J Soc Pers Relat. 2024;41.
8. Lahiri J. In Other Words. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 2016.
9. Song C. Missed Connections: Celine Song on Past Lives and future selves. Letterboxd Journal. 2023 Jun 22.
10. Tanvi. Role of English language in the modern context in India. Am J Lang Lit Learn STEM Educ. 2024;2(3):1-10.
11. Badyal P. Development of the English language in parallel with changing socio-cultural trends in India. Indian J Lang Linguist. 2022;3(2):1-14.
12. Stepkowska A. Identity in the bilingual couple: Attitudes to language and culture. Open Linguist. 2021;7(1):223-234.
13. Hayakawa S, Tannenbaum D, Costa A, Corey JD, Keysar B. Thinking more or feeling less? Explaining the foreign language effect on moral judgment. Psychol Sci. 2017;28(2):138-148.
14. Geipel J, Hadjichristidis C, Surian L. The foreign language effect on moral judgment: The role of emotions and norms. Cognition. 2015;134:215-226.
15. Pavlenko A. Emotions and Multilingualism. Cambridge University Press; 2005.
About the author:
Sharvani is a bioinformatics graduate and neuroscience enthusiast passionate about understanding behavior, emotion, and connection. She enjoys exploring how science and technology influence modern relationships. In her free time, she loves watching films and reading. Connect with her on LinkedIn
You dream in a language I can't understand
How well can you really know someone if you've never heard them think? When you lie down next to your partner and they are not dreaming yet. Just thinking. In a language you have never spoken. You don't ask where they went. You already know you can't go there.
Most people in relationships never name this. They call it distance, or just the texture of a long relationship. What it actually is is architecture. The person you are with was shaped by a language long before you arrived. They learned to feel within it. They were comforted in it, wounded in it, first understanding what feeling any kind of emotion meant through specific words. And if you do not understand that language, there is a room inside them you will never enter. Visible. Closed.
Arthur, in Celine Song's Past Lives, is the rare person who finds the words for it. He tells his wife Nora: " You dream in a language I can't understand. It's like there's this whole place inside of you where I can't go” [1]. Somehow that is the most intimate thing in the film. There is a version of your partner that exists only in the language they grew up in, and anyone who did not grow up inside that language will always be looking in through the glass [2].
This is the essay that line made me want to write. Bilingual couples psychology offers a useful framework for understanding why language differences can shape intimacy even when communication seems effortless. Not about translation in the literal sense, but about what happens when two people who are dating each other grew up inside different linguistic worlds. About the cost of always meeting in a third language that belongs fully to neither person. And whether, in a Bangalore apartment or a New York bar, it is possible to truly know someone whose interior life was built in a language you have never spoken.
The science of feeling in a foreign tongue:
For decades, scholars have noted that bilingual speakers often report that swearing, praying and saying, “I love you” feel different expressed in a native language compared to the expression of the same sentiments in one acquired later. Aneta Pavlenko's work shows that late bilinguals frequently experience their first language as more emotionally intense and their second language as cooler and more detached, sometimes useful precisely because it creates distance from overwhelming feelings [3].
Pavlenko's 2012 review identified two interrelated processing patterns. First, the native language carries heightened electrodermal reactivity; words in your mother tongue produce stronger physiological arousal than the same concepts in a second language. When a multilingual person hears a reprimand or a term of endearment in their first language, their body responds more intensely than when they hear its translation [4]. Second, language is processed semantically, as meaning, but it is not always processed effectively, as feeling.
Other research has focused on how multilinguals experience their own personality shifting across languages. Jean-Marc Dewaele and Seiji Nakano found that participants often felt less emotional and more fake in languages acquired later [5]. Other work in this tradition suggests this effect is particularly pronounced when a later language was first encountered in formal settings, classrooms rather than at dinner tables or on playgrounds, because the emotional conditioning of daily life simply was not present during acquisition. People did not simply translate themselves.They felt like slightly different selves.This phenomenon is a central finding in bilingual couples psychology, where partners may encounter different versions of each other across languages.
A 2024 review synthesised decades of research and found that the emotional gap between the first and second languages is particularly pronounced for late bilinguals, people who learned their second language not as children but in school or through migration. The second language, acquired in formal contexts, lacks the emotional conditioning of the first, which was absorbed alongside the full texture of early life [6]. The kitchen, the fever, the reprimand, the lullaby, that description is an elaboration of the underlying finding, not a phrase from the review itself, but it captures what the research consistently shows.
The implications for intimate relationships are significant. Differences in native language were among the most consistent sources of difficulty in cross-cultural couples. Partners who differed in their primary emotional language reported challenges not just in communication but in emotional validation. They could understand each other's words. What was harder to cross was the feeling-weight behind them [7].
This is different from vocabulary failure. It is something more structural: two people in a relationship, both fluent in the language they share, but each carrying an interior emotional register that was built in a tongue the other has never spoken. The shared language is real. The connection is real. But there is a room inside each of them, furnished in childhood, to which the other has no key. Many of the challenges described in bilingual couples psychology emerge from this experience of connecting through a shared language while carrying emotional histories rooted elsewhere. Researchers describe this as an emotional language gap between emotional experience and emotional expression.
Jhumpa Lahiri wrote about this in In Other Words (2016), her memoir of learning Italian as an adult. She describes the self that speaks Italian as a different person from the self that speaks English, smaller, less defended, more uncertain, but also more honest in unexpected ways. This is a literary reflection rather than a scientific conclusion, but it echoes the research finding that multilinguals often report feeling differently across languages. The person you are in your second language, she suggests, is a translation of yourself. Fluent, possibly beautiful, but not the original [8].
What does this mean in a relationship? It means that if you and your partner met in a metropolitan city, and you both have a common language (English) that is different from your mother tongue and neither is what either of you dreams in, your partner may have only ever met the common language version of you. Competent, articulate, perhaps even eloquent. But not the “you” who exists in your mother tongue.
Two migrants, one shared island:
English in urban India is described as a link language, a bridge across dozens of regional tongues and a marker of education, mobility and class [10]. In cities like Bangalore it has become the default medium in which strangers approach each other. Dating apps, corporate campuses and co-living spaces all lean on English as neutral ground. Yet, for most Indians, English was acquired in school rather than at the dinner table. It is a life language, not a mother tongue. That gap between life language and mother tongue is precisely where cross-linguistic intimacy lives.The connection is real. But their partners have only ever met in translation.
When intimacy happens only in English, certain textures get quietly shaved off. There is no exact English equivalent for kanmani, just as there is no tidy Hindi or Tamil equivalent for “I am not ready for that emotionally” in the way that particular phrase circulates in American therapy-speak. Disagreements move toward a rationalist vocabulary that can sometimes obscure as much as it reveals. The jokes tilt toward meme culture not rooted in either one's childhood. Over time, the relationship can become a small English-speaking island in a sea of other languages that hold your earliest terrors and comforts. That island can be beautiful. It can also feel oddly weightless [11]. An emotional language gap can persist even when both partners are highly proficient in the language they share.
Research on bilingual couples suggests that engaging with a partner’s native language can strengthen feelings of connection and mutual understanding [12]. The act of learning even a few words in your partner’s mother tongue is not merely gesturally kind. Even small efforts to engage with a partner’s native language can carry disproportionate emotional significance. You are reaching into the room.
When the argument breaks into a language you don't speak:
Experiments on what researchers call the foreign language effect show that when people make moral judgments or navigate emotional conflict in a non-native language they are often more utilitarian and less bound by emotional instinct [13]. The language you use changes how strongly your body and brain react to a scenario, even when the content is identical. In other words, a fight conducted in English between two people whose emotional wiring was laid down in Tamil or Bengali is not a simple translation. It is a structurally different event.
Many multilinguals also report feeling slightly fake or less like themselves in non-native languages, especially when trying to express anger or deep hurt [14]. Science tells us this is not a failure of intelligence. Instead, the emotional language gap reflects the different ways emotions become attached to words across the lifespan. It is a predictable result of emotional lexicons being differently wired across languages.
The cost, in a relationship, is that one partner can start to believe the other does not feel things as deeply simply because those feelings do not come wrapped in familiar phrases.
Learning to say the word they grew up with:
There is a hopeful turn here, and it is not sentimental. Learning to speak your partner’s language is not a performance of multiculturalism.Research in bilingual couples psychology suggests that engaging with a partner's native language can deepen feelings of understanding and connection. It is an act of genuine intimacy, etymologically and practically. You are saying: I want to enter the room. I cannot go all the way in, I did not grow up there, the furniture will always be slightly foreign to me. But I am willing to stand at the threshold and learn what it means to see everything through the pupil of my eye.
From a cognitive point of view, learning even a small slice of a partner's language can shift how you encode memories with them. Language used when an event is experienced can become a retrieval cue later, shaping how vividly and with what emotional colouring it is recalled [5]. You are building a small bilingual archive inside the relationship, planting memories tagged in more than one tongue.
Pavlenko has argued that new languages can eventually acquire emotional weight comparable to the mother tongue, especially when they are used in intimate, embodied contexts rather than only in classrooms [15]. Teaching each other words for closeness is one of the fastest ways to do that. The act of borrowing a pet name from your partner's language and making it yours is profoundly intimate because it acknowledges the existence of that interior room and asks, gently, to be allowed a little closer.
What the room holds:
Ultimately, bilingual couples psychology is less about translation and more about understanding how language shapes emotional experience. Emotional responses expressed in a second language are often less physiologically reactive, and some studies find shifts in moral judgment compared with a native language. Pavlenko called this disembodied cognition, the experience of processing feeling as information rather than as sensation [4]. For millions of urban Indians whose relationships unfold primarily in English, this dynamic may shape everyday intimacy in ways that often go unnoticed.
Linguists call the mother tongue the L1. The notation is clinical but the reality it describes is not. The L1 is where emotional memory is first encoded, where the body learns what words feel like before the mind learns what they mean. Every language acquired after that, the L2, the L3, the English of the office and the dating app, sits on top of that original architecture without ever fully replacing it. Many multilinguals report that their dreams occur primarily in the language most deeply tied to childhood experience.
What cross-linguistic relationships ask of us is: the willingness to accept that the person you are closest to may possess registers of feeling you will never fully access, and to stay anyway. To learn the word even when you cannot feel it the way they feel it. To ask what it means when they slip into their mother tongue at 1 AM, not because you will understand the answer completely, but because asking is itself a form of arrival.
You dream in a language I can’t understand. Yes. The room inside your partner that is written in another language may not open fully. But the threshold is real. And standing at it, curious and unhurried, is as close as most of us will ever get to knowing someone completely.
References:
1. Song C. Past Lives [film]. A24; 2023.
2. High On Films. Past Lives (2023) movie ending explained and themes analyzed. High On Films. 2024 Feb 2.
3. Pavlenko A. Bilingualism and emotions. Multilingua. 2002;21(1):45-78.
4. Pavlenko A. Affective processing in bilingual speakers: Disembodied cognition? Int J Psychol. 2012;47(6):405-428.
5. Dewaele JM, Nakano S. Multilinguals' perceptions of feeling different when switching languages. J Multiling Multicult Dev. 2013;34(2):107-120.
6. Santesteban-Echarri O, Etchezahar E. The landscape of emotional language processing in bilinguals: A review. Prog Neurobiol. 2024.
7. Yurtaeva E, Charura D. Comprehensive scoping review of research on intercultural romantic relationships. J Soc Pers Relat. 2024;41.
8. Lahiri J. In Other Words. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 2016.
9. Song C. Missed Connections: Celine Song on Past Lives and future selves. Letterboxd Journal. 2023 Jun 22.
10. Tanvi. Role of English language in the modern context in India. Am J Lang Lit Learn STEM Educ. 2024;2(3):1-10.
11. Badyal P. Development of the English language in parallel with changing socio-cultural trends in India. Indian J Lang Linguist. 2022;3(2):1-14.
12. Stepkowska A. Identity in the bilingual couple: Attitudes to language and culture. Open Linguist. 2021;7(1):223-234.
13. Hayakawa S, Tannenbaum D, Costa A, Corey JD, Keysar B. Thinking more or feeling less? Explaining the foreign language effect on moral judgment. Psychol Sci. 2017;28(2):138-148.
14. Geipel J, Hadjichristidis C, Surian L. The foreign language effect on moral judgment: The role of emotions and norms. Cognition. 2015;134:215-226.
15. Pavlenko A. Emotions and Multilingualism. Cambridge University Press; 2005.
About the author:
Sharvani is a bioinformatics graduate and neuroscience enthusiast passionate about understanding behavior, emotion, and connection. She enjoys exploring how science and technology influence modern relationships. In her free time, she loves watching films and reading. Connect with her on LinkedIn
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