Two months after I first arrived in Paris, I ended up at the Oberkampf apartment of a boy who deemed it romantic to feed me frozen carrots en lieu of dinner. Sometime in the midst of our post-veggie make-out session, he suddenly paused, looked me straight in the eye, and whispered seductively: “Je te désire.”

At that moment, I had to do everything in my power to hold in the snort that was threatening to explode frozen carrots and cheap wine all over his pleather couch. For some reason, the sound of a French man trying to talk sexy to me was possibly one of the funniest bedroom encounters of my life (second only to the time I could not locate my skirt at some hipster’s house and had to go to the office in tights and a trench coat.)

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Ever since a Russian girl named Veronica saved me from getting my pudgy butt kicked by playground bullies at the age of 5, female friendships have been the driving relationships of my life. No matter how bleak my love life tends to get, I’m always comforted by the fact that I have a loyal team of girlfriends who have my back through thick and thin and merely bloated and potentially psychotic and whatever other state I happen to be in.

This is why I find it rather hard to trust women who have no female friends. Take Angelina Jolie – this is a woman who, despite her many virtues, publicly admits to having no girlfriends. This is also the woman responsible for the biggest homewrecking scandal of the 2000’s. See the link there? I think my dog Chloe could, and she’s more beauty than brains.

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Vacationship (portmanteau of vacation and relationship) – a romantic affair one engages in while on vacation. Often has similar characteristics to a real relationship, yet must never be mistaken for such.

(*FYI portmanteau means word hybrid; I learned this by Googling Kimye)

You know the drill. It’s summer, and you head to a warm European destination with your girlfriends, determined to live out an expedited version of Vicky Cristina Barcelona. At club recommended to you by a Facebook friend, you meet Marco, a handsome local with a thick accent and excellent John Lobb loafers. You spend the next few days blissfully admiring Marco’s city through a rosé-tinted prism, dreading the day you must bid adieu. Of course, Marco happens to love New York (Paris / London / whatever urban metropolis you are from) and is planning a to visit next year.. Your paths will cross again! You exchange Facebook information and promise to keep in touch. With none of that rosé to lubricate the language barrier, your interactions quickly become limited. Soon, Marco becomes a mere fragment of your vacationship past, a blissful memory that cheers you up while trudging to the office on a dreary Tuesday morning..

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My mother almost never gives me dating advice, fearing that her guidance will steer me in the wrong direction and cost me the potential love of my life. Having married my father at the age of 23, she feels that she has little understanding of the modern dating world and all the crazies it has to offer (needless to say, this blog is a perennial question mark in her mind).

The best lesson I learned from my mother was by watching her in action. When I was little, my parents slept on a pullout futon in the living room. Every evening, my father would ask my mother to prepare the bed for him, and she would dutifully  head to the living room to undo the ancient green futon. Years later, when we moved to a bigger apartment where my parents had a real bedroom and a queen-sized bed, my father still continued ask my mother to “prepare” his bed. Instead of telling him to take a long hike to Bed, Bath & Beyond (or whatever Russian equivalent of it), my mom would go to the bedroom, undo the covers, and fluff my father’s pillow to make it look nice and accommodating.

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