She had been depressed and drifting away for a long time – she broke up with her other partner first, then a while later with me. She wanted a monogamous relationship, but I think wasn’t honest with herself about that for the last couple years of our relationship.
I’m still with my other long term partner, and she is engaged now to a guy who seems great and supportive. I miss her, but I love her and want her to be happy, so I’m glad she’s found what she wants.
Interestingly, while French was the lingua franca of Europe for several hundred years, it wasn’t the origin of the term ‘Lingua Franca’.
That term meant the “language of the Franks” and was the Mediterranean trade language in the medieval through Renaissance eras. It was actually a pidgin of Italian, French, Greek and Arabic adopted as being roughly mutually intelligible among Venetians, Byzantines and North Africans.
The reference to the ‘Franks’ is because the generic word for a western European (in the Byzantine, Greek world) had long been “Frank”.
I always thought the same thing! I only found this out relatively recently, and I thought it was pretty cool