Last spring I was dating a guy from Australia. He was wonderful: sweet, caring, kind, and totally smitten for me. We met while I was down in the south of France, where I had once lived, visiting friends. I was so excited after meeting him that I knew I had to go see him again, hoping to take the chemistry between us and build a relationship. After returning back to Paris, we talked every night and I realized how much I was really starting to like him. I knew I couldn’t wait a month or even two weeks to see him again, and without saying anything I booked a flight for the next weekend to Cannes. Trying not to seem too eager, I convinced one of my best friends to come with me; two days before I was suppose to take off I let my Aussie know I was coming back down and he seemed excited at the prospect of seeing me again. However, my giddiness was stifled slightly when the night before I left, I text messaged him and in his response he wrote an answer to my message followed by, “take care gorgeous.”
Now being American, I (along with others who I considered on this matter) would only use the phrase, “take care” when I know that I was most likely never going to see someone again. Or if I had no desire to see someone again it was my polite way of saying, “ok, see you never!” So you can only imagine my reaction when I was a, scheduled to fly back down to see him in less than twelve hours and b, was finally allowing myself to really like a man. I didn’t know what to think! So of course I thought the worst. I imagined it was his nice way of saying you were just a fun little fling for a few days, that he had no intention of seeing me in Cannes let alone visit Paris and I felt foolish. But some how I made myself (in thanks mostly to my great friend) to go to the airport and get on the plane.
Once back in Cannes I started to feel better; maybe it was the sea air or the idea that I was in one of the most beautiful places in the world and it didn’t matter what happened. And almost to my own surprise my Aussie called a few hours after I landed so we could make plans for the night. Phew, I thought, I wasn’t being blown off and once I saw him that night I was able to dismiss any negative thoughts about the ambiguous text. Yet, I was still curious to know what he had meant by it, so I asked. As soon as the concerned words came out of my mouth, the ones about how terribly polite yet cold those words mean to an American, he just began to laugh. He looked me in the eye, with a big grin on his face, “Cass,” in that darling accent, “I say that to my family, it doesn’t mean anything but what it means: take care, I hope you will be okay.”
I felt so silly and so relieved once he told me. And I started to think, as we become foreigners by living in Paris the rules that once applied to interpret someone we are dating (usually there are no rules, it is mostly utter chaos) have even less weight when we leave our own countries and start dating outside our natural boarders. And how do we go about understanding without being unintentionally hurt by what the other person is saying? Is there a systematic process we can apply universally or must we accept the chaos of international dating and just not forget to buy the guidebook?
Out of the two different cities in France that I have now lived in, I have had the opportunity to become involved with men from all over the world: Ireland, England, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and even the U.S. Ironically, no matter what country you visit you will still find the emotionally unavailable man, the sleazy man, the a-little-too aggressive man and even the sweet but shy man. Yet despite their similarities all these different men, from many different countries have their own traditions, techniques and personalities that connect to their heritage and their culture. These slight differences are what we have to learn to decipher between a red flag and sweet gesture. We also have to learn to understand what words have a lot of weight and which essentially mean nothing.
But now it seems that we do need the guidebooks- maybe just a little one, which outlines certain stereotypes about men and women from different cultures. Yet wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of international dating? It would seem that we all ended up in Paris for one reason or another and neither of those reasons were because we eat “freedom fries.” Obviously we understand that stereotypes are bogus and to survive at AUP and even in Paris for that matter we have to learn to forget those ignorant ideas. So perhaps an actual guidebook would be a little extreme, maybe we could just buy a little instruction manual or even a little, laminated map?
Or we could go with option number three and just get out there and date! The only way we will ever learn to crack the codes of culture is to go out and date culture, hold cultures hand, kiss culture and even sleep with culture. Perhaps it will be intimidating at first, sitting in bar or at a restaurant with a table full of French people, and you being the only foreigner at the table. But if you don’t do it, you will never know that you can do it, and enjoy it. Claim your world citizenship because boarders are only political.
And then run out and buy my critically acclaimed guidebook to international dating- it hits Parisian bookshelves next week.
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