I have done this in three countries and they are nothing alike
Posted as three_countries_worth
- Looking for
- one person for both directions, negotiated slowly and in writing
- Experience
- Twelve years across three countries, one long dynamic in each.
- Around
- the south, Amsterdam
Three countries, and the differences are far bigger than anybody admits. Where I grew up it was almost entirely private and arranged through people you already knew. In Berlin, for two years, it was so public that I found it exhausting. Here it is the easiest of the three to talk about and by a distance the hardest to find a room in.
Thirty five, switch, Italian, in the south, four years here and staying.
What I have taken from all of it: negotiate slowly, in whichever language both people are strongest in, and never assume a word means to somebody else what it means to you. I have had one genuinely bad experience and it came out of exactly that. Two people using the same word for two different things and neither of them checking.
I switch roughly evenly and I want one person for both. An arrangement where I occasionally lead a stranger does not appeal. I want somebody I know well enough that going the other way is not a full renegotiation from scratch every time.
Not looking for a person who wants to try switching once to see how it feels. Not looking for somebody who finds my accent or my English charming, which happens and which I find tiring. Not looking for anything that requires me to be anywhere at eight in the morning, because I work late and always will.