News flash: staying home with bébé can make you lose your mind. But, sometimes, in a good way. My friend Rachel, a new mom who regularly references to Disney characters while consulting me on my love life, has recently taken on writing Dr. Seuss rhymes for her mommy blog for La Yummy Mummy. Since the only poetic style I can attempt emulating is Bukowski’s (how is that for a challenge?!), I begged her to write one for us here on Dbag Dating. Here’s the lyrical surprise I woke up to this morning!
Today, we ask writer Sam Davies, an Australian expat with an impressive / masochistic 8-year expat tenure in Paris, to share a much-needed male perspective on the Parisian dating scene.
Earlier this year, Time Out Magazine rated Paris as the best city for dating. Well, it certainly wasn’t going to win plaudits for business confidence, affordable rent, or its great burgers..
What constitutes as “dating” wasn’t clearly explained, which is just as well, as in France it doesn’t really exist. But let’s not let details get in the way of a good clickbait story.
Editor’s Note: This story is brought to you by Jordan Nadler (@Nadleresque), the wunderkind behind French Medicine. Today, Jordan loses her douchebag storytelling virginity, proving, once and for all, that she has a true calling in life. Enjoy.
Fact: Going surfing with a French male model is a TERRIBLE idea if you are aggressively bad at surfing and haven’t mastered the “sexy drown.”
Once Upon A Time I was sleeping with a male model I met on Tinder this summer because I sporadically pepper my life with unfortunate decisions. His profession would be completely irrelevant if it wasn’t for the fact that his face was everywhere when we met. After the clusterfuck that was our last week together, I couldn’t even walk into a pharmacy to buy a tube of toothpaste without seeing his squinty-eyed mug selling moderately luxurious shaving cream. It was like God’s way of physicalizing the fact that my questionable choices in men do, in fact, haunt me.
I was recently hanging out on the couch in Paris with the guy I was seeing. (Yes, was – we are now the happiest divorced couple on the block!) We were hitting the three-month mark and he had already met my brother and sister-in-law by pure coincidence, when I received a text from my mother. “Honey we are on our way from a cruise, passing through Paris today.” Confused, I muttered something about the possibility of my parents being in town. What followed can only be described as a full-on panic attack. “Maybe you think its normal to throw this on somebody with a 2-hour warning but, where I come from (snoozfest London), meeting the parents is actually a big deal!” I actually thought he would be on the next Eurostar back to “where he comes from”, never to be heard from again.
When it comes to dbags, there is nothing like New York. This city breeds them like free-range chicken, giving them an abundance of space to run around and grow and prosper and become the most bizarre, damaged, f*ed up versions of themselves. As a result, we have stories like this one, recently recounted to me by a close friend over a blissful sushi dinner.
My friend is a very beautiful girl with one fundamental flaw: she believes in love. Carrie Bradshaw love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love. This blind faith propels her to make two grave mistakes: give men Real Chances, most of which lead to nothing but time wasted, and attempt to Save Men, which leads to even more poignant disasters. So, when she told me she had recently gone out with a guy who was nice, handsome, but past the point of Chances or Saving, I knew we were looking a whole new level of weird.
If you walk down any Parisian boulevard and inadvertently stumble across a movie theater, you will, without a doubt, see a poster for Gaspar Noé’s Love, yet another explicit French “love story” meant to celebrate mildly disturbing sexual encounters between barely post-pubescent pretty young things. This time, the French had truly outdone themselves, throwing a 3D component, a transsexual encounter, and a threesome into the mix.
