'Over time, I came to believe that the cultural dating chasm was too vast for me to cross — that no matter how long I stayed in France, I would remain an American, through and through'
Photo: J.V. Aranda Welcome to It’s Complicated, stories on the sometimes frustrating, sometimes confusing, always engrossing subject of modern relationships.
I offered a detailed summarization of the six months with my last boyfriend. “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” I said.I remember being more surprised by the timing than anything else: It was 9:30 on a Saturday night. Where was she?The third married Frenchman to ask me on a date was my language instructor, whose immediately prior act had been to ask me to write an essay on love and my ideal partner. In the end, I did not complete that essay, and I found another French tutor, a communist Ph.D.
Still, though, I was curious. I had friends, American and otherwise, with French partners, and those partners seemed, true to form, attentive, chivalrous, gallant — as well intellectually inquisitive and kind. They held open doors and cooked galettes only on specially made pans. What would it be like?He was French, but he pronounced his name David, the American way, with a long A in the first syllable. He had studied filmmaking at NYU and claimed he had investigated our American dating rituals.
In my four years in France, I had observed many relationships between French people and foreigners, as well as French relationships themselves. At their best, they transcended cultural differences to be only themselves: loving and enviable. When they went wrong, though, they seem to go wrong in a fundamentally different way from the American relationships I knew best.
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