At 19, I loudly told a boyfriend, in front of his friends, that I needed to run back to his room to take off my pants. This was back before England experienced regular heatwaves, and I was in the habit of wearing jeans under the sundresses I’d brought with me from America. It was also before I understood that here, “pants” means underpants. The Noughties teenagers I’d moved country to study among were gracious about it and, eventually, whole hours would go by without someone mentioning my unmentionables.
In Netflix's Too Much, a fish-out-of-water romcom series about an American anglophile in London, 30-year-old Jess is confused when her taxi pulls up to the Hoxton “estate” she’s rented online. She thought she had magically satisfied her Downton Abbey taste on a flatshare budget; instead she's stumbled into one of British English’s most befuddling lexical puzzles, ranking up there with the use of “quite” to mean “not very” and “that’s interesting” to mean “please, dear God, move on”. The series, from Girls creator (and UK-based expat) Lena Dunham and her British husband, Luis Felber, traffics in casual mix-ups that betray deeper ones.
A few months after I left my, ahem, trousers in that boy’s room (not his “dorm”), I met my husband. He grew up in Birmingham, which he apologetically called “the second city”, as though I knew anything of British geography apart from the literary landmarks. I assumed it must be somewhere between Thornfield Hall and the moors where Catherine haunts Heathcliff. All these years later, and my heart still hasn’t hardened to an English accent. Watching the first episodes of Too Much, I had to wonder if White Lotus star Will Sharpe, as Jess’s scruffy new love, Felix, was actually delivering a masterclass in dirtbag charm, or if he was simply saying his lines with a non-rhotic, softly consonant inflection that my ear, along with Jess’s, associates with romance across the Tube map, from Notting Hill to Rye Lane. (For the record, I’m sure it’s the former.)
When we first were dating, I would beg my husband to read aloud to me, which he would do despite feeling self-conscious. I’d never much liked my given name, which sounds childish when I say it, but I liked it in his voice, especially the second A. Amaaaaandah. I liked his vocabulary, which, being in England, I occasionally adopted. I started revising at the same library as him instead of “studying” at my desk, and we daydreamed about taking summer holidays instead of “vacations”. In plain English, I fancied him.
I recently asked my husband if what he liked about me 20 years ago was tied up in my Americanness or not. He said that it partly was, and then, like a native speaker of British English, effortlessly managed to make the American things he liked about me sound like insults. For example, he thought my Americanness gave me “licence not to follow social rules”. Like what, I demanded. “You were conversationally adversarial,” he answered. He then added that I was “flirtatious” and “confident”, which, in his opinion, allowed us to escape the inertia that plagues repressed English teenagers without resorting to binge drinking. If I squint really hard, I can find a compliment in that, I guess.
What distinguishes British from American English, I’ve learned over the past two decades, transcends vocabulary and pronunciation. I’m generalising here, but American English is intimate and confessional and urgent. You get to know a person by trading stories, learning the names of their siblings. But to know someone in British English is to understand what they think about things rather than the details of their histories. I remember it struck me as impersonal. How can I be close to a man who’s never asked me how my family spends Christmas? Fights between us then were – and sometimes still are – especially ugly because my husband remembered the logical flow of the arguments raised. I couldn’t tell you what I’d said two minutes ago, and I didn’t think it mattered. It was the emotion I was trying to communicate. We were speaking English, but not the same language.
Sometimes this was an advantage. Under the pretence (“pretense”) of decoding each other’s English, we could broach sensitive topics more forthrightly: “Maybe this is American of me, but…”. Our personal foibles could be generously excused as chasms in the cultural divide. In fact, the words “cultural divide” became a shorthand, a white-flag we could raise when we felt misunderstood.
Twenty years later, our vocabularies have merged – his kitchen roll has become my “paper towel”, my “garbage” is now rubbish – but habits have remained stubborn. I take the milk out of the refrigerator and find only a few sips in the jug. Where my husband sees a polite refusal to hog what’s left, I still see a functionally empty container for me to wash out for recycling. (See also: three cashews at the bottom of the tin, the final strawberry in the crate, the last squares of toilet roll.) My husband, for his part, still gets annoyed when I strike up a conversation with a stranger or, frankly, with a neighbourhood acquaintance he would have rather pretended not to notice walking along the same stretch of pavement (which I used to call “sidewalk”).
Falling in love is always a matter of translation, but doing it across a cultural divide makes you feel new and bright
Our ways of fighting have proved even more obstinate than our habits. In an argument, my measured English husband almost never says anything unkind, even by accident, and he continues to expect me to compose the raw material of my thoughts into something constructive – no matter how many times I prove that I can’t do it. To me, the worst thing a person can do in a fight is go quiet – what he calls “thinking” – thereby leaving the other person alone with the remains of the conversation. Our vocabularies have merged, yes, but we still can’t complete each other’s sentences. Language is a way of thinking masquerading as a way of talking.
In Too Much, when Jess arrives in England, she’s reeling from a bad breakup. In an early episode, she laments how “bright” she used to feel. Her Americanness proves a liability at work in London, but with Felix, it’s an asset. My husband remembers me as confident and flirtatious, but I know that most of the time, I felt insecure and terrified of being boring. Falling in love is always a matter of translation, but doing it across a cultural divide – even a divide as modest as dialect – makes you feel new and bright. It compels you to stop taking for granted the little things about yourself you’d stopped noticing.
Plus, if you really don’t understand what the other person is saying, it helps to love how it sounds.
‘Too Much’ is out now on Netflix
