It was a Friday night and everybody in Paris had plans. At least, that’s what it felt like when I found out that my own coup de vin had been postponed.

On any other night, the cancellation would have been welcome news – a chance to binge-watch Money Heist, or read, or scour The Real Real for some mid-00’s Chloe. (You know those dresses that Nicky Hilton danced on tables in? I’m into that.) But that night was different. Due to an unprecedented heat wave, the entire city seemed to be out – together, in groups – cooling off by Canal Saint Martin with their Carrefour picnics, flirting over apéros, polluting the air with puffy clouds of cigarette smoke, one terrace at a time.

I scrolled through Instagram to confirm that all my 3^rddegree acquaintances were, indeed, living far cooler lives than myself. I stalked a girl I haven’t been friends with for a decade, but still like to regularly compare myself to. I considered ambushing my boyfriend from 400 miles away, but, in a rare moment of self-control, resisted.

Read More

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, an event I usually reserve merely for celebrating my own mother, the unsung hero. And yet, this year was different. Blame it on my ripe age or my atypically happy relationship status, but, this year, the entire Mother’s Day production somehow seemed bigger, brighter, more personal. Every man I saw navigating through Tribeca with a child and bouquet in hand seemed to speak directly to me, beckoning questions. Will it ever be me enjoying a Mother’s Day massage while my partner hunts down a decent bunch of peonies? If so, when?

It was a novel voice speaking, one that I am still quite unfamiliar with and don’t know how to include in the free-spirited chaos of the United States of Marina. And so, I decided to get to know it  via a little admissions interview. Without further ado, here is a conversation between Marina, the responsibility-phobe who is happy living out of a suitcase, and Masha, the traditionalist who feels quite behind on the whole baby train and has emerged out of the woodwork to ruin my life.

Read More

(Yes, I am well aware that the OG version of this quote belongs to José Micard Teixeira, but I prefer it misattributed to Saint Meryl, ok?!) 

There are a few pivotal moments in a young woman’s life. There is the moment you realize that your waist-to-hip ratio is never going to measure up to Candice Swanepoel’s, so you might as well make peace with it. There is the moment you start feeling uncomfortable in denim hot pants paired with heels and worn as outerwear. There is also the moment when your taste shifts from tortured hipsters / arrogant rich boys / [insert your personal dbag kryptonite here] to normal human beings.

Like most real-world miracles, it doesn’t happen overnight. First, you get burned by a few douchebags, weakening your overall tolerance for all things shady. Then, you find yourself dozing off while listening to eat another “life-is-out-to-get” me rant or life-altering Burning Man recount. Next, you go apeshit when a guy reappears after a week of radio silence, or his wallet gets hijacked by invisible evil birds for the third time in a row. (ENTER EUREKA MOMENT!) You catch yourself suddenly engaging in a long intellectual discussion with the super-nice nerd at work, all while estimating how much effort it would take to tweak his cool factor. When it proves to be too much of an undertaking, you revert to your familiar zone of dbag misery, only to discover yourself less comfortable there than before.

You begin realizing that there is something pleasant in good manners and predictability. That you want to – no, deserve – to be taken out to dinner and treated like a lady. You start choosing more wisely and having fewer terrible dates. Before you know it, the mere sight of a dirty beanie makes you want to regurgitate your $15 avocado toast that you just ate at a yuppie restaurant with you boyfriend who showers on the regular and understands the logistics of a mortgage.  It dawns on you  that your rebellious youth is not only in the past, but also replaced by everything you previously abhorred: stability, sanity and a clean shave.

Read More

A 31-year-old friend recently started seeing two guys, let’s refer to them as X and Z. Both are charming, employed and cute – in fact, similar to the point where I can barely tell them apart. The only difference is that X (for Gen X) is a perfectly ripe 35, while Z (for zygote) happens to a barely-hatched 25. You would think that my friend is using Z “for fun” and X for serious dating, da? Nope. Much to everybody’s bewilderment, Baby Z actually courts her and cooks for her and even recently helped her build a bookshelf, while the “better on paper” X routinely benches her, messes with her head and generally drives her loco.

A friend’s wedding was coming up. I asked my friend if she was considering bringing either of them as her date.

“Maybe I’ll ask Z. X would freak out and ghost immediately.” The casual manner in which she said this, as though it is completely habitual for a grown-ass man to come undone at the idea of accompanying a woman he is seeing to a wedding, may have been scarier than the statement itself. It also played into my then-budding theory, which is that men in their thirties are completely undateable.

You see, as a 30-year-old woman living in New York City, I am, technically, surrounded by an infinity of age-appropriate dating options. I should, technically, be seeing one of the hundreds of thousands of 30-something eligible bachelors roaming this city, running down the West Side Highway, dining in Williamsburg, dancing at Casablanca, etc. However, I find said mission virtually f*cking impossible.

Read More

Ever since I was a kid, the last few weeks of summer have been a period of extreme inner turbulence for me. In my childhood bedroom in Saint-Petersburg there are journals that describe my annual anxiety over la rentrée, accompanied by strategies on how I plan on becoming the most popular girl in class and finally understand chemistry (#goals). As an adult, I have often chosen this time to roll out the next life step – a new job, a move to or from Paris, even the launch of this blog almost four years back. Somehow, September always feels like an opportunity to change something important, to start fresh, to do more.

This September I don’t have any grand Life Changes lined up. After a tumultuous, eye-opening year of dealing with personal changes and observing the that world we live in, the transitions I’m experiencing are happening below the surface. They relate to the way I think, the people I want to be surrounded with, the impact I want to have. They also involve the things I want to write about. As hard as it is to believe, configuring subtle strategies on getting French men to shower no longer fits the bill.

Read More

N.B: This post comes to you in the midst of peak FOMO season, when it feels like the entity of your Instagram feed has collectively migrated to Capri and Mykonos.

To borrow from our President’s ten-word vocabulary, envy is a nasty feeling. It eats one up inside like one of those intestinal parasites, preventing them from attaining any semblance of peace. Religious scriptures of every faith speak of envy as the predominant source of evil. Envy catalyzes wars and ruins lives. And yet it remains a human emotion that is not going anywhere. In fact, I believe that it is currently experiencing a revival, having been reformatted, democratized, revolutionized, by social media.

In a way, we are victims of our time, the first generation stuck with the virtual embryos of the big green monster right at the tips of our fingers, ready to unleash the worst in us. We scroll and we look and we “like” and we absorb everything with the impressionable sponges that are our brains. And then, before you know it, we are comparing ourselves to some Slovakian IMG model or globetrotting fashion editor or second degree acquaintance who has graduated to become a Tribeca housewife. Because, on the surface, they all seem to have it so easy.

Read More