We negotiate in a language that belongs to neither of us
Posted as our_third_language
- Looking for
- a dominant woman who is patient about what a word means
- Experience
- Six years together, four with this in it, two meetings so far.
- Around
- the south, Amsterdam
We negotiate in English, which is neither of our first languages, and last year that produced the only genuinely bad evening we have had in six years together.
Thirty six and thirty nine, together six years, in the south. One of us is Dutch and one is Brazilian, and at home we speak a mixture nobody else would follow. English is what we use for anything that has to be precise, because it is the only language in which we both have all the same words.
The bad evening happened because a term one of us used meant something heavier to the other, and neither of us checked, and it took an hour afterwards to work out what had actually gone wrong. Nobody was hurt. It was still the thing that made us start writing everything down before anybody does anything at all.
So we are looking for a person who is patient about wording. Somebody who will let us stop and confirm, and who does not find it unromantic to be asked what a term means to them specifically before we agree to it.
One dominant woman, for both of us, occasional rather than constant, with a long conversation before anything. Not looking for anybody who will be irritated by the checking. Not looking for a person who wants to arrange things with one of us and then inform the other. Not looking to be somebody's practice run at dealing with a couple.