Can the language that we speak affect intimacy in our marriage?
It’s Wednesday, the day when we always talk marriage! And today I want to share an email I received recently from a reader that I think is just fascinating.
I love hearing from so many of you, even though I’m so sorry that I can’t respond to many of you personally (just so many come in!). But I get so many ideas for blog posts from the questions that you all ask.
And recently a missionary sent me the most interesting story, and I just want to share it with you today.
She writes,
First of all, thank you so much for this blog. I read it regularly through my first couple years of marriage and it was such a blessing. My husband and I even bought and read “31 Days to Great Sex” together and loved it!
This past year, though, has been super stressful for my husband and me. We’re serving as missionaries in a closed access country, coming up on 1.5 years on the field. The transition hasn’t been easy, and I’ve been struggling with mild depression for the past 4-5 months.
This took a real toll on how frequently we were being intimate. I felt too tired to respond to his advances, then guilty for not doing so, you know the cycle. Even when I did say YES it was hard for me to be mentally and emotionally present, and foreplay just wasn’t doing anything for me.
I’ve been making changes to my life in general to deal with the depression, but the solution to our bedroom problems came from a really unexpected place.
I was listening to a podcast about languages and how we respond differently to stimuli in our mother tongue versus our second language. This really caught my attention since my mother tongue isn’t English, but Spanish.
Luckily, my husband is also bilingual in Spanish. So I asked him to try an experiment with me: what if we spoke Spanish instead of English when we were intimate? Would it make a difference?
Oh boy, did it ever!! Wow, I haven’t felt that way in a long time! It was the sexiest thing in the world for me. I had no idea I was missing out so bad!
We’ve made the switch permanently and it’s been a total game changer for me. I feel connected, passionate, sexy. It’s been great. Even just saying certain words and phrases out loud in my own language seems to tap into a part of myself that English just doesn’t touch, even though it’s the primary language I use everyday (except for the national language of the country we live in).
But nobody is talking about this! So I thought I would reach out to you and tell you my story. If you wanted to share it with your readers, who knows? Maybe some other bilingual woman out there might experience a breakthrough.
Isn’t that neat? I love it! I hope that it may have encouraged some of you, too.
It reminds me again how important it is to worship in our native language. We have to be able to pray and sing and read the Scriptures in the language of our hearts, because it’s the language of desperation, of vulnerability, of identity. And because, as I talked about all last month, vulnerability is so related to passion, when we’re putting on a “mask” by using a second language, sometimes that really can hinder intimacy.
But what if you’re bilingual and your spouse isn’t?
Well, maybe sometimes while you’re having sex it’s okay to speak in your native language, even if your husband doesn’t understand! He may even appreciate learning a few important phrases! 🙂
What do you think? Anyone else in a bilingual marriage ever experienced this? As a Canadian, with so many friends who have French/English marriages (including in my own extended family), I imagine many may really need this advice!
So let’s talk in the comments: does language influence your ability to feel intimate?
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Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 25 years and happily married for 20! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature "Girl Talk" about sex and marriage. And she's written 8 books. About sex and marriage. See a theme here? Plus she knits. Even in line at the grocery store.
What an interesting thought! I’m glad she had the courage to bring up the suggestion to her husband, and I’m sure she’s glad, too. I’ve always admired you for talking about the things that most people are afraid to talk about! There aren’t many of us willing to step out and do it 🙂
My husband and I were both raised monolingually (different languages), but are both fully bilingual now with each other’s languages. (Actually, I also speak a third language fluently and can communicate fairly well in a fourth, and he speaks some of my third language and a tiny bit of my fourth, as well.) So I found this post particularly interesting. What’s especially interesting to me, though is that for various reasons, we’ve gone through phases in our marriage speaking mainly one language or mainly the the other, but my husband mostly uses MY language for terms of endearment, and I mostly use HIS language. I have no idea why! But when he then does use his language…that feels even more intimate. However, he’s only tried using our third language a couple of times…it doesn’t go down well with me, because before him, I’d only ever dated guys who spoke that other language. It’s not so good when my husband saying “I love you” in a different language makes me think of my first boyfriend rather than of him…
Oh, that would be weird, wouldn’t it? Language definitely evokes different emotions in us, I think!
Bilingual marriages are common in Europe too. My wife and I have different native tongues, and we communicate in a mixture of the languages we both speak. Which language we use for a particular sentence definitely matters a lot. But I never thought of experimenting with that when it comes to intimacy! Thank you for the great idea!
You’re welcome! I hope it helps!
I suppose this would work for colloquialisms, too. For example, if your wife grew up hearing “booty” used sexually and likes that, but you grew up hearing “@$$”and prefer that (in reference to anatomy), that could cause some language barriers. After all, booty is pirate treasure or a baby shoe and @$$ is a donkey or stupid person.
My husband has a name for my female anatomy. I was indifferent to it, but wondered why he called it that. I googled the word and found out it actually has a rather negative and disgusting connotation. But, by that time I heard the name so much from him that it would have been weird to ask him to stop. It is a term of endearment to him, regardless of the common use of that slang.
I do prefer softer language at first. Once fully aroused, he can speak a harder, more adult language.
It’s interesting, at least to me, how different people can view the same word. I used to use a word that brings up warm thoughts, a word that I actually hold as sweet and sensual. My wife, after months of hearing it, nicely let me know that she really hates the word, so that has been erased from our intimacy (everywhere, actually, since that is the only place for it). I still think it, but I don’t say it, which I surprisingly miss doing. However, I don’t want her to be uncomfortable so it is not an issue. I wonder if I could say it in another language, if it was so different that she wouldn’t realize the English translation. However, it wouldn’t be worth the risk.
This doesn’t affect my marriage, because my hubby and I are English only. However, I find this very interesting. It makes so much sense!
My husband is bilingual and I am slowly learning his native language. When I first started learning I used a translator app to learn how to say “kiss me” as a bit of a foreplay surprise, but didn’t realize there were multiple words for kiss depending on who it’s with. I thought I was using the generic one like you would kiss a family member. Nope. I used the one that was the knock your socks off type of kiss. Oh my. That was one happy man!! Short time after I added “I want you” in his native language. It works. Really well. 😆 8 years later both phrases are still a near guarantee fire starter. And if he says it back to me, it holds such fond feelings that gives me a good boost in the right direction too even though it’s not my heart language.
I love that! Too funny. 🙂
Interesting thought.
I am bilingual, with English not being my native language/ mother tong. I do read my Bible and pray in Afrikaans. Can’t worship in Afrikaans, cause we’re in the US. My husband only speaks English.
This is an interesting issue for me, because various language studies show that children learn better in their native language. It makes a huge difference to their learning if they had their primary education in their native language vs. some other language. This gives me another incentive to homeschool. But I’ve been here so long, I don’t know if I could actually school the children entirely in Afrikaans. 🙁
This also annoys me when presumably well-meaning teachers tell parents to not teach a child/ speak to the child in their native language because it “confuses them”. No, no, NO!! A child can learn any number of languages growing up with no problems. They just need to hear the language consistently from the same person. If the child only hears Korean from you, and English from their teacher, they will learn both just fine. If you mix it up though, sometimes talking to them in Korean and sometimes in English, that’s where it gets hairy. Specially if the mother speaks rather bad/ heavily accented English (thinking of a specific family in my church).
Don’t try and stifle/ eliminate a child’s heritage because you are not properly up to date with bilingual/ multilingual education best practices.