Mr. Louvre Lurker

Every first Sunday of the month, museums all over Paris open their doors, free of charge, to the public.  And on one such Sunday at the Louvre, I was checking out the decorative arts section when I noticed that the one other guy in the room with me was kind of cute.

I thought no more of him until I realized, five rooms later, that he was still there.

Was he following me?  Should I be creeped out?

http://www.nataliedee.com

I decided that I would not be creeped out and that I’d give him the benefit of the doubt since he was “kind of cute”.  (Yes, I know, I’m superficial and I’m okay with it.)

However, I wanted to make sure that he was following ME, and not just following the prescribed route through the ceramics section and reading the captions in the tapestry rooms at the exact same rate as me.

So I decided to conduct a test.

I abruptly left the Objets d’Art section, went up several escalators, and traversed the length of the wing to get to the French Paintings section.  When I checked behind me, he was still there!

Yay!  He totally digs me.  I wasn’t imagining things!

But then I thought to myself, why hasn’t he made a move?

Pansy-ass french man.

He eventually ran out of time, since the museum staff herded the crowds out the door at closing time.  No surprise, but we “magically” ended up in the same metro train car.

Yet he still hadn’t sacked up to chat me up.

I was fed up with his pansy-ass pansiness, so I decided to be ballsy.

I wrote my number on the back of my ballet ticket from the night before, and I handed it to him as I was getting out at my stop.  I blasted him with my most winning smile and pranced away — my heart beating wildly from the adrenaline rush of doing something so ballsy.

Now you’re probably thinking, this story sounds like a fantastic when-we-first-met story that happily married couples have.

Yeah.  Right.  Come on, stuff like that doesn’t happen in the world of Manshopping in Paris.

http://www.nataliedee.com

Things went awry when we arranged a date.  It was the date the launched my illustrious full-time career of painful dating in Paris.

He had this high-pitched voice and barely-above-a-whisper mumble, which I found unbearable and impossible to understand.  But most importantly, his personality was just flat.  If I stared long enough, I could swear that he was actually one-dimensional.

My boredom was so severe that I’m scared that it may have caused some brain hemorrhaging at the time.

The worst of it was that I couldn’t seem to get out of the date!  He managed to cling to me all the way from the restaurant to my door (it was a 40 minute walk!), and the whole experience was very unpleasant, to put it mildly.

The next day I told him that it wasn’t going to work for us romantically.  In other words, I told him to bugger off and leave me alone.

And a normal guy would have, right?

But of course, I’m incapable of finding a normal parisian man to date.

He wouldn’t stop asking me out.

He asked me out to dinner to introduce me to his friends.

He asked me to accompany him to work functions.

Three months later, when he moved to India, he sent me weekly updates and demanded to know why I wasn’t responding.

http://www.nataliedee.com

Three months after that, when he moved back to France, he continued to pester me.

And now, two and a half years later, gmail is still filtering his emails directly into my trash bin.

Apparently this guy has nobody else to bother except some random woman who gave him her number on the metro two and half years ago.

I have concluded that he has no friends.

Of course, out of all the men in Paris, I picked THIS winner to hit on.

And I’ve been saying “Next!” for the past two and a half years.

Ms. Fading Failure

Oh boy.  “The Fade.”

The infamous Fade has been a staple of human dating rituals since… gosh, it doesn’t really matter.  You know what I’m talking about.  Boy meets girl.  Boy goes on date(s) with girl.  Boy realizes that he is not into girl.  Boy doesn’t call girl.  Girl may attempt contact with boy.  Boy ignores and fades into nothing.  Girl eats caramels and moves on.  The end.

http://www.nataliedee.com

I’ve been faded many a time in my life.  I’ve even done some fading myself.  The Fade is an established social convention indicating at least one party’s lack of interest in the other.

However, I’m not sure that all Parisian men are as familiar with the Fade as we are in the anglophone dating world.

I have attempted, on multiple occasions, to fade my way out of undesirable entanglements here.  According to past experiences on American soil, this should have gone off without a hitch.

But, of course, upon arrival in Paris, hitches abounded, and the most illustrative example is someone to whom I refer as Mr. Gym Stalker.

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Mr. Gym Stalker worked the front desk at my gym.  While I didn’t pay much attention to the front desk staff at the time, my gym buddy, the Irish Parisienne, pointed out to me that Mr. Gym Stalker had developed a little crush on me.

I laughed it off and just continued along my merry little way.

But one day, as I was on my way out, he summoned me over and told me that he needed to ask me about something.

Mr. G.S. : “I noticed that you don’t come here as often as you used to.”

Man-shopper : “Yeah, I moved.  I only work out here if I’m in the neighborhood.  I go to a different location now.”

Mr. G.S. : “Here’s the thing.  I’ve been working here for two years now, and I can’t work out here anymore because people recognize me while I’m working out, assume that I’m on duty, and bother me.”

Man-shopper : “Uhhh, okay….”

Mr. G.S. : “It’s really difficult for me to motivate myself to work out at other locations, so I was wondering if you’d like to work out sometime at the location that you go to now.  Planning to meet up with people motivates me more than if I were to just go by myself.”

http://www.nataliedee.com

Man-shopper : “Oh, ok, gym buddies are cool.  Well, I go to spin class, you’re welcome to join me.”

And I thought that’d be it.  I didn’t think that it would be a big deal, since I didn’t intend on returning to this gym location anymore.  My move was finally official, and it was no longer convenient for me to trek out there.  So, in my mind, this wasn’t a date, and I didn’t give him my number.  This was just a… a nothing.

But then the phone calls started.

I had that gym’s phone number programmed into my phone, and I noticed that the gym would be calling me everyday, but nobody ever left a message.  I didn’t bother call back, as I figured that if the gym had official business with me, they’d leave a message.

After a few weeks of this, I began to get lots of calls from a mobile number that I didn’t recognize, and sometimes from a masked phone number.  Again, I don’t answer or return calls unless I know the number or if I’m expecting a call.  These calls were really starting to concern me, as they would occur at least several times per day, sometimes as late as 11 at night.

I decided to approach this matter as if the caller were an undesirable and clueless suitor.  I figured, the Fade should work eventually, right?  I’ll just sit tight and be unresponsive until he gets the point and goes away.

A couple of months later of these persistent phone calls, I began to think that my phone was possessed.  Who the hell would keep calling me like this without leaving a message??

http://www.nataliedee.com

I lived in fear of my phone.

I turned off its ringer.

One fateful day — my birthday, actually — I get a text message from the mystery mobile number.

“Hi, I just wanted to wish you a happy 27th birthday.  All the best, Mr. G.C.”

So let’s recap the horribleness of this situation:

Mr. G.C. pulled my mobile number from the gym’s client files and proceeded to harass me for months without leaving a voicemail.

Mr. G.C. then pulled MY BIRTHDAY from my file and used the number acquired by inappropriate channels in order to harass me further.

My Fade failed miserably.

It had nothing to do with my technique.  It is physically impossible to botch a Fade.  Non-response is the easiest cop-out thing to do in the world.

But some creeptastic, stalkerish, dodgy Parisian men simply refuse to be Faded.

However, this is not to say that the Fade doesn’t have its uses on the Parisian scene.  Even if the Fade fails miserably as a suitor-ditching technique, it is, however, a great way to determine whether one needs to consider taking out a restraining order.

The Insomniac’s Club says:

Don’t Say Hello by Simone Grant

Sometimes Silence is the Best Closure by MetAnotherFrog

Fade To Black by The Urban Dater

The Fade by Miss Melisa Mae

You Say Fade? I Say Cop-Out by Women Are From Mars

To Fade or Not to Fade by Jess Downey

Fadeaway and Forget-Me-Not by FeistyWoman

Eyes Open By Totally Tyler

Where The Hell Did You Go by SingleMuch

Fading Into the Shadows by Miss Taylor Cast

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover by F*cking in Brooklyn

Da Fade, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Thank You For Your Sex™

Mr. Denial

Since my last post from Boston, I’ve relocated to Ithaca, NY for my sister’s graduation.  While I am thrilled to be here for her commencement activities, all this family stuff has temporarily put a stop to my man-shopping until I leave for New York City tomorrow morning.  So until my NYC adventures begin, I’ll try to amuse you with more ramblings about the Parisian scene.

According to my personal field research, many anglophone women — particularly American women — will have trouble communicating certain things to their Parisian suitors.  This kind of miscommunication primarily revolves around the idea that anglophone women spend most of their waking hours turning down Parisian creeps, and said Parisian creeps spend most of their time in denial of this fact.

The best way to illustrate this particular anthropological phenomenon is with this handy chart that I’ve drawn up for you.

As you can see, dating in Paris can be fraught with misunderstandings.

A while back, I speculated that my lack of success on the Parisian dating scene could be due in part to an inherent language problem.  But after the epiphany that resulted in the above chart, I now also believe that liaisons between anglophones and francophones could potentially be doomed for reasons that have nothing to do with language.

Simply put, Houston, we have a cultural problem.

For whatever reason, dating rituals here require the men to act like ass-hats and, unfortunately, the women seem to put up with them or egg them on.

I haven’t been able to figure out how to beat the system, so to speak, but I’ve a number of friends who have offered their advice on the matter.  My buddy, Martin, who has long been baffled and concerned by the absurdity that is my love life in Paris, only had four words for me:

“Stop dating French guys.”

However, even though I agree with him in principle, in practice, I’m not going to stop dating Frenchmen.

It’s not that I’m determined to have a relationship with a Frenchman.

It’s just that I’m having so much fun with this blog.

And come on, you know that you love reading about these Parisian ass-clowns* that I meet.

So when I return to Paris next month, it’s on to the next…

…French-tard!

*This great new addition to my vocabulary has come by way of my friend, Iroquois Pliskin.  He has quite a way with words, and he and his brother have introduced me to wonderfully useful terms like “skank-pronging” and “schmo-hawk.”  I tip my hat to their skilled wordsmithing.

Mr. Crazy

I went on a date with Mr. Crazy a couple of weeks ago, and it did not go well.  He actually contributed some of the lines from my post about Mr. Asian Fetish.  He also tried to follow me home despite my protests, and I had to flee in heels and squeeze through closing metro doors in order to get away from him.

So, obviously, not a good date.

I shot off a quick email when I got home, saying what roughly translates into:  “We both know that we aren’t compatible and that this isn’t going to work out, so I wish you the best of luck with your future endeavors.”

I thought that the matter was closed and that I would never hear from him again.

Wrong.

His text ten minutes later seemed to imply that he had either ignored my previous message or had not received it:

“I am so happy to have finally met you.  I think that you’re super cute and really cool.”

I double-checked my sent mail.

Yup.  Sent.  So what was the deal?  Just in case, I sent my shut-down email again via text.

Mr. Crazy just refused to get the point.  Here are all the messages that he sent me afterward, in the order that I received them:

• “Just wanted to say hey.  I hope that you are doing well and that you slept well last night “  (The winky face made the whole message seem a little creepy…)

• “You’re no longer speaking to me?  I didn’t please you, is that it?”  (I replied, “No.  You did not please me.  Leave me alone.”)

• “I hope that you had a good weekend.  How are you?”  (At this point, I was beginning to think that this guy may be mentally unhinged.)

• “Hello, how are you doing?  Why are you not talking to your boyfriend anymore?”  (Boyfriend?!  Oh god, Houston, we have a big-ass problem.)

• “You have totally disappeared.”  (This was sent two minutes after the previous message when I didn’t respond.)

• “Come baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!”  (Seriously.  He actually wrote, “reviensssssssssssss”)

• “When am I seeing you again?”  (What?!)

• “I don’t understand.  Are you dumping me?”  (Wow.)

• “I really thought that we had something beautiful.  I don’t know why you’re mad at me, but how about I come over and we work it out?  Where do you live?”  (Eek.)

I went on one date with this guy.

ONE date.

I suppose that it could be worse.  Statistically speaking, I was bound to run into a nutjob at some point during this online dating experiment.

At least I’m alive, right?

But if my body is found beaten to death and floating in the Seine later, you’ll know who did it…

NEXT!