He understood when I was too exhausted to speak in French after a day at the university; he would come over to comfort me when I felt lost; he corrected my French and assured me that he knew the real me even when I had doubts because I couldn't truly express myself (it's hard to be funny in a foreign language!).
I showed him how to carve pumpkins at Halloween and he showed me his favorite spots in Toulouse. When we visited my family in the United States, Copain started to re-learn English (his lycée classes had only gotten him so far!).
Copain has put up with my love-hate relationship with France, my hopping from one town to another (Cannes being his worst nightmare), and my yearly Thanksgiving parties where I cook for a week in advance and we eat leftovers for two weeks afterwards. We couldn't be more different. As we create our lives together, we learn, we yell, we hug, we fight, we stress, we switch from French to English and English to French, we blame the French and then we blame the Americans, we fly across the Atlantic every year, we say I love you and Je t'aime everyday.
Creating a life with someone of a different culture and language has a new set of relationship challenges entirely - so welcome to the wonderful world of a bi-cultural relationship and the hilarious bits that happen along the way...
