My darling daughters, if you should marry—as I did—someone who speaks another language, it will be, in the beginning, an adventure. Like bushwhacking through virgin forests, but in a safe way, because the person holding your hand has assured you there are no poisonous snakes here, no man-eating crocodiles, no active volcanos. This person—whose sensual, mysterious verbiage rustles like birds against your ears—will introduce you to their relatives. And their relatives will love you, at first, because they don’t understand a word you’re saying.

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If you should marry someone who speaks another language, it will, eventually, occur to you that you’ve made a mistake. If you have children, this will happen not long after the birth of your first child, when you’ll discover that a child isn’t so much a person as a container into which everyone related to that child wants to put things. They’ll say they only want to teach the child their language. But you’ll observe that every idiom hides ideas; that every phoneme harbors principles; that every morpheme wraps memories; that every story is in fact a dogma delivery system—a way of telling your child not just how to speak, but how to be.

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If you should marry someone who speaks another language, it will, at some point, founder, even if you don’t have children. In fact, if you don’t have children, that will be the reason it founders, because no matter what language your partner was raised to speak, it will be a language that loves itself, and wishes to perpetuate itself. So essentially, if you don’t have children, both your partner and your partner’s family will come to see this as a missed opportunity. They may allow a lengthy grace period—decades, even. But sooner or later, as your partner’s relatives age, and watch their glorious tongue fail—for lack of fertile grandchild mouths—to root and blossom anew, they will put most of the blame for that on you.

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My darling daughters, I’m sorry to tell you this, but if you should marry someone who speaks another language, it will mean, quite simply, that you married anyone, period. Because no two people ever share the same language, even when they think they do. And if you don’t believe me, just try talking to one man for nearly half your life, only to discover that words like “father,” “husband,” “honesty,” “loyalty,” and “love” have been lost—all that time—in translation.