So you can imagine the skips my heart did when I met (and later married) a tall, handsome man from Melbourne.

I’ve since learned that in many major respects, Australia is almost exactly like America – but with one winning advantage (in my mind at least): that accent.

I remember the woman in Springdale, Arkansas, for example, who was charmed by my husband. After a ten-minute, long-distance explanation of why he needed to pay for my rental car with his credit card, all she could say was “I love the way you sound”; only with her Arkansawyer accent, it came out as “Ah luuuuuv the why you say-yound.”

There have been plenty of benefits to marrying a man with an accent. For starters, my parents are completely in love with him. Somehow, everything he says sounds wise and interesting to them, from his justification of the extensive Australian welfare system, to the type of jeans he wears.

Better still, after five years of marriage, we still haven’t endured the basic marital arguments, such as which of us spends the most money or who is the fattest. No, we’re too busy trying to work out whether we’re shopping for “pro-deuce” or “prod-juice”, whether that piece of meat is a “fill-let” or a ‘fee-lay’, or whether we’re standing in the “foy-your” or the “foy-yay”.

Sometimes though, we do get a little lost in translation. How much, exactly, is much of a muchness? Apparently, it’s the same amount as six of one or half a dozen of another, but the expression itself makes no sense. Neither do so many other Australianisms; when you say “biscuit”, do you mean a cookie – or a scone? And who is Bob, and how did he suddenly become my uncle?

Misunderstandings aside, I hope the differences between me and my Antipodean husband will help keep our relationship interesting long after the expiry date on which I might have begun to tire of one of my hometown men. But to all those Abu Dhabi singletons swooning over a man for the way he sounds when he speaks – beware – you do get over it.

Laura Fulton