The Language Barrier

I dated a woman for five years, and did not know her name. I married her without knowing her name, which is — words fail me here — bad. A faux pas, if you will.

I thought I knew her name, but I didn’t. I only learned it after we had been married-slash-dating for four years. I was on the phone with my friend James — who I hadn’t spoken to in a while — and we were on speakerphone. My wife was in the room. “Hey, do you want to talk to her,” I said. They had never talked before.

“Sure,” he said, and then did a dumb thing where he seemed to forget that we were on speakerphone. “What’s her name again?” He’d forgotten; I’d told him many times.

“Velina,” I told him, and then turned to my wife Velina and made a joke. “…I am pronouncing that right, aren’t I, honey?” I said to her. I was trying to sound like an olde-tyme-y husband in a 1950s sitcom. I’m such a funny guy.

“No, you’re not.” she said. “It’s VEY-lina. You always say it like this: VELL-INA.”

I absorbed this information for a second: “And you waited four years to tell me this?”

“…You would have gotten it wrong anyway!”

I forget how the conversation went after that.

When you’re young, you always think — I’ll travel the world; see exotic places, meet exotic people. The term that you don’t think about enough is “exotic.” When you meet exotic people, you are by definition always doing something weird or stupid or wrong.

Velina was from Bulgaria. I met her while I was travelling in Europe. I like to think of myself as being at least a sort of semi-smart person. I’ve read books about European history; I studied Latin and Ancient Greek in college. I can do the Roman emperors in order: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero. But I didn’t know where Bulgaria was until I moved there, and me moving there happened by accident. I had a crush on this person who was a Bulgarian woman, and so I moved there. So it goes. So goes a good deed in a fallen world. …But I did know absolutely nothing about Bulgaria. And here, my reading of books totally failed me — Bulgaria was, as it happens, part of both the Greek and Roman empires. I didn’t know that either. So much for wasting time reading about anything.