You Can Want to Belong in Spain and Still Want Your Dentist to Speak English

Dear Calvin,

Today on the blog we’ve invited guest writer, Ross of Your Mate Pat, to help us explore the delicate balance of wanting to feel integrated in Spain, while also sometimes preferring to seek out English-language specialists.

When he got in touch to share about his free directory of English-speaking lawyers, accountants, gestores, doctors, dentists and therapists across Spain, we found that the philosophy behind Your Mate Pat really spoke to us in a way that other similar sites haven’t before.

Ross really gets both sides. He understands the tension that can exist for those of us who long to ‘integrate’—and yet also sometimes need to stop making life harder than it needs to be. We asked him to share his thoughts on holding both sides of this truth and we’re so excited to share with you what he had to say.

Without further ado, we bring you Ross…

 

You Can Want to Belong in Spain and Still Want Your Dentist to Speak English

A few weeks ago I played padel with three friends. All of us British, all of us living in Spain, and all of us at completely different points on the Spanish-speaking spectrum.

Joe is aiming for full fluency. His partner is Argentine, and he wants to sit at her family’s table and follow every thread of the conversation, jokes included. Dan would happily settle for getting through an ordinary day without having to keep rehearsing the sentences in his head first: ordering at the bakery, asking for help in El Corte Inglés, knowing if his appointment at the Oficina de Extranjería had been a success… Somewhere in between was me and Matt, both of us fluent in the ancient art of understanding roughly 80% of a conversation and nodding confidently through the other 20%.

Different goals. Genuinely different. But afterwards, in the bar, we got onto the subject of learning Spanish, and it turned out our experiences were almost identical. We were all finding it hard, and the rewards were all there anyway. The same small triumphs. The same embarrassment over a word mangled earlier that day. Dan treated us to the story of how he’d reached for “tengo miedo” (I’m afraid, or literally “I have fear”) and instead informed someone that “tengo mierda” (I have shit). And the same quiet surprise, every time, at how kind people are when you clearly make the effort and clearly get it wrong.

We also got onto the tension this piece is really about, the same one Dani and Claudia raised when we first started emailing. You want to integrate. You want to belong here, properly, not as a permanent visitor. And you also, sometimes, just want your life to be a bit easier. Those two wants don’t always sit comfortably in the same body.

The richness is in the trying

Let me say the obvious part first, because I believe it completely. The good stuff is on the other side of the language.

I’m not talking about fluency. I’m talking about the small, daily expansion of the number of people you can actually connect with. Xisca at the bakery who now asks how my daughter is when I go to buy my bread. Jaume, my neighbor, who stopped being a polite nod in the stairwell and recently helped unblock our sink. None of that required me to be good at Spanish. It required me to be willing to be bad at it in public.

That’s the thing nobody tells you clearly enough. A little goes a long way. The gap between “no Spanish” and “a bit of broken, enthusiastic Spanish” is far wider, socially, than the gap between “a bit” and “fluent.” The first step buys you most of the warmth. In my experience, people meet effort with effort.

You can, of course, move to Spain and learn none of it. I know people who have. I know one or two who seem to take an active sporting interest in avoiding even the basics. You do you. But I’d gently suggest you’re leaving the best part on the table. Those small, fumbling exchanges, and what they grow into, are as much a part of the life you came here for as the weather, the food, and the pace of life.

 

So where does the tension come from?

Dani, one of the editors of this very blog, told me over email that even after more than a dozen years in Spain, she still struggles to hold both truths at once. Wanting to be fully in the culture, and also wanting less friction in a life that already has plenty. If someone twelve years deep still feels the pull, I think the rest of us can stop treating it as a personal failing and start treating it as the normal condition of living abroad.

The truth is that not all friction is equal.

Mangling your order at a cafe is a good kind of friction. Low stakes, high reward. You stumble, someone smiles, you both move on, and you’re a tiny bit braver next time. That’s the friction that builds a life here. I would never outsource that, and I’d encourage you not to either.

But then there’s the other kind. Sitting in a dentist’s chair while someone explains, in fast Spanish, what they’re about to do with a drill in hand. A meeting with an accountant about your obligations as a newly registered autónomo, where “I think I understood most of that” is not a sentence you want anywhere near your ‘la Renta’. An appointment with an immigration specialist about a visa renewal, where a single misunderstood condition can cost you months.

These are not cafe moments. The stakes are real, the vocabulary is specialist, and the cost of nodding through the 20% you didn’t catch is genuinely high.

For me, this is where I’ve land: it isn’t integration versus ease. It’s about where you choose to spend a finite, hard-won amount of Spanish. You spend it generously on the everyday, where getting it wrong is part of the fun and part of the point. And you give yourself permission to switch to your own language for the high-stakes, high-stress moments, where clarity matters more than the principle of the thing.

 

A blessing and a quiet curse

I’ll admit something that complicates this, because pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Native English speakers have it easy, and that ease is a trap.

Spain, like much of the world, puts real weight on teaching English in schools. The reverse wasn’t true where I grew up. The practical upshot is that there are English-speaking professionals here if you look for them. Try finding a fluent Spanish-speaking dentist in Bristol or Manchester. I haven’t done the research, but I bet you could count them on one hand and have fingers spare.

So the option to retreat entirely into English is genuinely available to us in a way it isn’t for most immigrants in most countries. And that’s exactly the danger. When opting out is that frictionless, it’s very easy to wake up five years later having opted out of everything. The help is there to catch you on the hard days, not to build you a sealed English-speaking bubble you never have to leave.

So I’d hold two questions in mind. Should you feel bad about wanting to see a therapist or a doctor, in the language you actually dream and panic in? No. Not even slightly. Some conversations are hard enough without translating them in real time. But should you feel bad about doing everything in English, indefinitely, by default? That one I’ll leave with you. It’s not my place to judge, and I’m not going to. I just think it’s a question worth sitting with, rather than answering by accident.

 

Back to the padel court

What I keep coming back to is that none of my three friends, with their wildly different goals, were trying to be perfect. They were trying to be in it. To make the effort, accept the mistakes, and not let the fear of the 20% they’d miss stop them from showing up for the 80% they’d get.

Easing the genuinely stressful stuff isn’t switching off from Spain. Done right, it’s what frees up the energy for the part that actually matters: the language, the people, the slow business of belonging somewhere new. You’re not buying your way out of the culture. You’re making sure you’ve still got something left in the tank when you get to the good bit.

 

Thank you, Ross, for these genuine insights from your life here in Spain. If you want to feel supported in the exact sort of moments described above: the high-stakes, high-stress ones where you’d rather not be translating as you go, check out Your Mate Pat. Browse by region to find someone near you. And then go and embarrass yourself beautifully talking to a stranger at your local vermutería, because that part’s on you.