A couple of months ago, my Parisian girlfriend asked me if I wanted to join a gym together. “They have a sauna and a great Sunday yoga class,” she proudly announced. A sauna— this was her selling point? I love a good spa session as much as the next girl, but what about the core classes, the abs, the cycling, the heavy lifting?
Read on HERE!
Last month I, along with the rest of the world, read the Modern Love article “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This”, which chronicles a writer’s experiment of falling in love via 36 questions, derived from some fancy psychological study. Granted, the writer fell in love; I was sold. (Desperate times call for desperate measures.) The challenge now lay in finding a poor sucker who would be willing to sit there and answer 36 questions about himself – and, worse yet, listen to me answer 36 questions about myself, a mildly unbearable feat considering that I’m known to manifest six opposing notions while answering one single question.
Luckily my fan friend and fellow blogger Isaac of Isaac Likes was in Paris for Fashion Week and happened to be a perfect contender for this project – I mean, the guy has a relationship blog of his own! It was a match made in Bloglovin’ heaven! Plus, having only met a handful of times, we didn’t know each other that well, which happened to be one of the prerequisites for the experiment. I sent him the link and he immediately agreed, although he did appear uncharacteristically nervous about the part where we were supposed to stare into each others eyes for a total of four minutes.
Everybody who knows me knows that Men’s Fashion Week is officially my favorite holiday. I can practically feel the butterflies fluttering in my stomach the minute I hear the familiar sound of trolley suitcases on the cobblestone streets of le Marais, and see all the cute international hipsters struggling to locate their Airbnb rentals. Overnight, every gallery space in the hood becomes a showroom, packed with identical men in big black bombers and cropped black pants worn with white socks and trainers, topped with black beanies and perfectly groomed black Jesus beards. This, my friends, is the uniform. Break it and you might not get into La Perle.
The other night, my best friend and hubby-in-law, one of the most in-sync couples I know, had an argument. The reason? He had ‘liked’ some random girl’s selfie on Instagram – mouth open wide, staring into the mirror with an expression of blank stupidity on her face – bref, the usual Instafuckme pic, just like the million others sweeping the Internet like some fast-spreading digital plague.
While I normally mock unreasonable jealousy, deeming it is a completely fruitless pursuit, this one hit a spot. To start, I would hardly call it jealousy – nobody actually thinks that their boyfriend/husband is going to run away with some girl who stacks her breasts on a selfie stick as a hobby. Rather, it is the idea of men virally following these girls – quite literally, like a bunch of dogs following a foul smell – that is unnerving.
I recently realized that I’m over my ex.
Just to make it clear, we broke up exactly 3 years ago (give or take a few days), which means that I’m about 2.5 years late on this pronouncement. Just consider me a late bloomer who didn’t discover the magical forces of young love until the age of 22 and consequently took the breakup to a whole new level, embarking on an Eat Pray Love mission that led me all the way to Paris. In any case, all is well that ends well, as I am over him in a way that circa 2011 me never would have deemed possible, showing that time does indeed heal some stupidity.
Here are some telltale signs.
Recently, one of my best friends became a man.
No, she did not undergo a sex change, cool as Lea T has made them out to be. Nor did she retire her wardrobe, predominantly comprised of Dries and (paradoxically lesbian-esque) Céline. Rather, she simply began having sex like a man – selfishly, indulgently, without any overthought or repercussions.
It all started with a Tinder date. They met up, shared a bottle of wine, she felt herself attracted to him and invited him back to her place around the corner. Two hours later, they were having the best sex of her life. The next morning, an amazing thing happened: instead of exuding the routine paranoia of a woman after a one-night-stand (“What have I done? Have I blown it? Will he call?”), she exuded the glow of a man after a great f*ck. After a day of dirty texting, they scheduled their next “date”.
