My French Then-Boyfriend, Part I: How We Met
What happens in France is unlikely to stay in France, in the life of a solo female traveler. It will be dragged around several more countries in a smelly, overstuffed backpack to finally burst at the seams upon a page back home. I’ve relived the story so many times in my head, it seems silly to break it down in paragraphs months later. But it is such a significant part of my literal and metaphorical journey that I absolutely need to explain.
I went to France because I thought I was in love with a Frenchman. It was in Italy when we finally called it quits, after our time together in his country that should have been supremely romantic and was instead supremely frightening. That end part of the story is a real bummer, the two-and-a-half weeks we spent hurting and hating each other in two of the world’s most romantic countries.
But the two-and-a-half years we spent getting to know each other while in two totally different countries, that part is a great story. I was home alone on the prairie, three hours and thirty minutes away from my Big 3-0 birthday, when the mysterious Facebook message arrived. Meeting people online had not worked well for me in the past, so I usually ignored messages from strangers, especially handsome, foreign ones.
This fellow wasn’t exactly a stranger. We had a mutual friend who’d met the Frenchman while studying abroad. Frenchman explained that Mutual Friend suggested contacting me because I have “an open mind.” Hearing that made me happy. It was flattering and exciting to have this attention from afar.
I was at the end of my twenties and the end of my rope. All the eligible men within 100 miles or so, I’d already dated them, or they were already married! And so I, with my desperately open mind and heart, took that step across the International Date Line and began internationally dating, trading romantic messages with the Frenchman (who was, at the time, in the South Pacific, so don’t lecture me about misusing the IDL reference.)
I don’t mean “romantic messages” as code for text sex, naked video chats or erotic fiction passages. I truly mean romantic, in a way which I now understand is just so French, and in a way that was the answer to my dreams. Within hours, he was sending me bisous. Within days, he was inviting me to visit his island paradise or at least to rendezvous in halfway-point Hawaii. Within weeks, he proclaimed that he would always care for me and we’d have the best love story. We half-jokingly discussed getting married and “half-seriously” discussed how he may come visit and not want to leave the U.S., as I supposedly represented his American dream.
With limited travel budgets, 7130 miles between us and various times when we were dating people within our own nations, sometimes we didn’t chat much. It’s difficult to devote time to someone you doubt you’ll ever meet. But when the Frenchman reached out shortly after I was unexpectedly let go from my job, I definitely had the time to reply… (stayed tuned for My French Boyfriend, Part II: How I Ended Up in Europe)
Your voice matters!