We don't have what you might call a traditional 'story'. In some ways, it's very traditional: boy and girl get invited to a party, they meet, they fall in love. However, our story has a twist: boy speaks French and girl speaks English. Also boy has shoe polish smeared around his eyes and girl is wearing a tail. It turns out there's a lot that you can overcome with a little help from Google Translate and some homemade Polish vodka.

Thanks to DeepL being a much better translator and an seemingly unending curiosity to learn about the other's likes and dislikes (I like orange, j'aime lavande), we made it through our first months of dating. We even survived perhaps our greatest hurdle as a couple: Antoine discovering Sylvana was a vegetarian with an allergy to many cheeses while on a date where the plan was wine and charcuterie. Needless to say when Antoine ate that raw vegetable board, Sylvana knew he must love her.

Eventually Antoine's English got better (even learning favourite phrases like 'break the seal') and Sylvana's French did too (merci à la daronne). There was, of course, still the occasional hiccup such as when Antoine asked Sylvana if she wanted to go window licking (window shopping directly translated from French) much to her horror.

From surviving COVID-19 lockdowns in a studio apartment to living briefly in Lisbon to buying our first apartment in Paris to never quite managing to get organised enough to get PACS'ed, the past five years have been filled the ups, the downs, the in-betweens of life. Together, we've always swam through and we can't wait to splash into this next adventure!

Registry