As his dad was Dutch and his mom is Spanish, he grew up speaking both languages. Dutch is closely connected to German and Spanish shares vocabulary with Italian. Then given the art of the Roman languages, he understands a little bit of French as well.
With the excellent education system in the Netherlands coupled with his, uh, fondness of online gaming, he is fluent in English, which is what we initially used to communicated in when we first started dating. Now that we've been together for more than 3.5 years, his progress in Indonesian is remarkable. And partly concerning as to how natural it is for him to randomly say, among others:
"Yaudah deh."
"Gapapa kok."
"Ini, ini."
"Bawel banget sih kamu."
"Jangan galak-galak ya."
Oh, trust me when I say the list goes on. The worst thing is we'd combine multiple languages in one saying, it goes something like, "Altijd ya, whenever aku asking for selfies, kamu say, 'Manana' and then enggak pernah do it." Or, "Nanti klaar working jam berapa and makan dinner-nya di mana?" Yup. Bottom line, the only time we would use a full, proper English sentence like a normal human being is during our more-intense-than-an-argument-but-less-snarky-than-a-fight situation, which literally happens once in every blue moon.
What impresses me the most, however, is how well he understands me. How well he detects the emotion I truly feel that I hide behind another. How well he notices the upset tone underneath my chirpy text. How well he interprets my facial expression despite only getting to look at it through the phone screen. How well he senses what I really need him to say to me. How well he listens to my untold needs. How well he speaks my language. The nebulous language that I'm not even very articulate of.
To many, our relationship doesn't make a lot of sense. We live far astray, we see each other after a crazy long period of time, we were raised completely differently, and so on, and so forth. But we speak in the same language, and that's good enough for us for the time being, while we are sorting out the other issues and proving them wrong.
