How Age Impacts the Challenges of Being in a Bilingual Marriage

• My husband speaks French and I speak English, and we live in Tel Aviv.
• I joke that we speak “Fringlish,” a mix of French and English.
• We were determined to raise our children bilingually.

At home, my Strasbourgeois husband and I speak “Fringlish,” our ad-lib language: a little bit of French
and an abundance of English. While our marriage is bilingual, our life is more trilingual since we live
in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Thirty-four years ago, I fell in love with Philippe for his lingua franca, homemade crepes, and his great abs.
From the beginning, we spoke French, thanks to my mother, who enrolled
me in a program in my Northern California hometown, my host family’s race-car-fast French during my junior year
of college in Paris, and my polyglot coworkers at the European Jewish Congress, where I worked after college.
During my two sojourns in the city of love, I pursed my lips to pronounce the basic “bonjour,” “merci,” and “au
revoir.” I hid my braces-straight American-white teeth and dunked in Frenchdom.

We spoke French, so no one else could understand us

Notably, Philippe and I met after I quit my job and flew to Israel for an extended stopover to learn Hebrew.
Seconds after swapping kisses on each cheek at a Shabbat retreat with Francophones, we flirted, reading Sha’ar
LaMatchil, the defunct newspaper for new immigrants written in beginner Hebrew, and playing backgammon.

The attraction was mutual and fierce. Two months later, I moved into his apartment in Haifa, Israel. Seven months
later, we got engaged. Nine months later, we wed. Mostly, we spoke French, especially when we didn’t want anyone
to understand, always on the telephone.

We wanted to raise our kids bilingual

In our late 20s, after our first baby was born, language got messy. Philippe and I each spoke our mother tongues
to him and mixed them together like a science experiment to one another.

After our marriage turned mobile — Paris for his MBA program, the San Francisco Bay Area for my soul —
communication became territorial.

In California and committed to raising bilingual children who could connect with their faraway grandparents, we
indoctrinated our children with French videos, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes. That’s until, at some point in my
home country, as my husband grew more comfortable with English and I lost my doggedness for French, my lingo
usurped his.

With age, things have gotten more complicated

Now, three decades later and back where our story started, Israel, language is even messier. Age plays tricks on
our linguistic prowess. We can no longer converse from different rooms in our apartment if one is in the shower
or music is in the background.

Sometimes, my slipshod French accent makes it tough for Philippe to follow. Likewise, his inability to process my
garbled English makes me question his comprehension. I worry for us when we’re in our 80s. Will we still be able
to communicate?

Yet I feel hopeful that my multilingual marriage will keep my mind agile. Perhaps I’ll avoid my father’s fate,
being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, along with 6.7 million other Americans. One University of California, Los Angeles, medical
study found that people who spoke two languages proficiently could forestall dementia symptoms by about
four years compared with monolinguals.

Rather than dwell on “woe is us,” I opt for the glass half full. I do Wordle before starting my day. I shop at
the souk for Shabbat. I speak Franglais with my family. And I cross all 10 fingers and toes that both Philippe
and I remain married and nimble-minded, since everything else is out of our control.