Re: Address with respect …
Here’s the funny thing, I speak Urdu fluently but my husband doesn’t know much or speak at home either so I really have to correct him when he talks. He knows the difference between tum and aap, but he doesn’t realize that ‘kia kar rahe ho’ and ‘kia kar rahe hain’ are two different things in terms of informal/formal. So he tends to mix up stuff like that.
As for the two of us, it’s hard for me to call my husband ‘aap’ when we are the same age, known each other for sooooo long and are best friends. I don’t share that relationship with him where I need to be formal with him. Since we don’t talk in urdu on a normal basis, the tum and aap doesn’t come up but when we do, I call him tum. It doesn’t go down very well with my aunts who always correct me followed by a lecture (no woman in my family calls her husband by his name, let alone TUM..lol) but he always steps in and tells them, she can call me whatever she wants, I don’t need a title in order to be respected. My parents don’t mind because they know what our relationship is like, as for his parents and extended family, I have always addressed him as tum in front of them, and they haven’t said anything. Maybe because they’ll get the same response 