It may not strike you immediately but over time you would start to notice that everyone in Paris is wearing black. Every season no matter what is happening in fashion, for Paris, black remains the new black. I've always been quite colorful, so colorful in fact that I won the Coco Chanel award back in the 6th grade for my colorful ensembles and I accepted that award with blue tights, a white jean skirt and a multi-colored patterned blouse that together all said "loud". I guess those 6th grade teachers were only relying on Coco Chanel's status in the fashion world and not in her French DNA which adheres to the strict: black is the new black ethos. For the French it seems from what Sylvain has told me, black is classy, it will always be classy and you can never go wrong with being classy and thus wrap yourself in black and get the added benefits of it being slimming.
On valentine's day we were walking to the grocery store to get food as Sylvain was going to make me lunch. I was surprised to see man after man walking around the streets with flowers. With all the sobering black and adherence to classiness I frankly thought France was way too cool for Valentine's Day. I mean, in America is there any holiday that gets more flack for it's cheesiness and general low-rent status? It's corny, it's cliche and apparently the French soak it up. Last year for Valentine's day I got a stuffed bear with a fake plastic rose in a plastic see-through box from a student, the thought was nice, it really was, as a teacher in the Bronx all our gifts are from the dollar store, and it feels great to be remembered but come on, yuck. So after lunch when we were headed to meet up with friends of ours I was shocked to see that handfuls of women were carrying similar items, roses in plastic boxes- the roses were real, but France had let me down. Paris you're cheesy!
It's hard to figure out what to make of it. I guess everyone thinks of France and the French as terribly romantic, and to be honest most French people do seem to be in relationships, but I can't figure out how all these French people bought into all this cliche American garbage. I mean if you want to celebrate Valentine's Day, by all means go crazy, but cheesy red roses in boxes, that's seriously lame. I think the French are like men who secretly love cheesy American romantic comedies. At a party they'll pull out all the intellectual and philosophical stops, they'll impress you with their classy black outfits looking slim and stylish, they'll be well-versed in culture and dirty jokes but when it comes down to it, they relish in the cheese and make no apologies for it. Unlike American's who participate begrudgingly going out of their way to hate on love, girls who host scary movie nights with other single girlfriends, boys who refuse to indulge their girlfriends on principal, and general cynics.
If I've learned one thing from being with a Frenchman it's that American's do it all wrong. From a young age we have all this hype about dating, and thus there is all this pressure built around rejection, the men and boys bear the brunt of this rejection but the girls suffer it's side effect too. It makes for good drama in the movies, but it makes for unrealized high expectations in life. Europeans don't ask each other out, they meet, they hang out together and at the end of the night, whatever happens happens, no pressure, no expectations, and no wondering whose paying for the drinks. I think Americans are messed up about love, there are so many of us that are single and lonely and desperate and if only we lived in a society where we were free to just stop analyzing the what ifs and the what does it all mean, we might just find ourselves spending less time dissecting the minutiae of text messages and facebook posts with whomever will listen and more time checking plus one on our social invitations.
Valentine's Day is overblown, even more than Christmas I think, it has lost the plot. For me, I wanted to do something nice for Sylvain and I wanted him to do something nice for me. I wanted to be good to each other, to appreciate each other. But being cynical about it is sad, feeling like if you're single your a loser is missing the point, having expectations is setting yourself up for disappointment. Someday, one day it'd be great if Sylvain brought some daisies home to brighten our house, but not on Valentine's day, not because "that's what you do", it's so much better to have a surprise, a gift when it's the least expected.
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