This section shall be dedicated to the adventures that is love and dating in France.
Conducting interviews.
Romantic stories apart from the ones below, including my own will mostly be anonymous for confidentiality reasons.
Love can be complicated at the best of times. Sometimes this is made more difficult by distance. But when there are two different countries in the mix. When I met my first partner, many people ooh'ed and ahh'ed over him being French and that he was moving to Australia to be together.
However, it is more complicated than romance and love. One of you has to give up your country, which also means giving up your family, friends, routines, and employment.
Love stories and tales of romance:
- Currently working on the Story of *Emily and Pierre: Moving for Love
* Not their real names
- Melissa and Louis
Ah, l'amour...
Un coup de foudre or love at first sight in English. In French, it translates literally to a flash of lightening.
Most doubt its existence.
Or perhaps these people, are arguably the unfortunate ones who have never experienced it. But I would never settle for anything less... than the fire that reaches the depth of the soul.
As the poet, John Keats said;
Nothing is ever real until it is experienced
Have I experienced love at first sight? Yes, I have. A lot of people I know have.
I have felt as though I would not be able to live without them. That I would die without them at my side. I do not care if it sounds corny but I would rather spend the rest of my life alone than be with someone who does not make my heart beat faster. Every serious adult relationship I have had, I have felt tingles and run to the door when they are coming home. For years. I have not experienced a honeymoon period as they call it because that is what happens when I get into a relationship. So I am usually single and very happy about it unless I find someone that special. I will never settle. Never. Single for life and I would be perfectly content.
Frankly, I have had enough romance and big gestures for a lifetime and I'm really, really ok with no more.
From little gestures like notes and one of my most treasured objects was a post-it left on my jacket at work saying "Je t'aime" after leaving me lunch that I had forgotten at home, love letters (snail mail), stuffed animals, not buying my own flowers for over 2 years, a surprise seaplane over the Great Barrier Reef, handwritten notes left in obvious and not obvious places.
I am SO ok! And none of this is to brag but looking back, it is quite extreme. I only listed some but hence the title of my blog, "The Adventurous Life". My life has always been interessant for some reason or other. I am at the moment still in recovery from my last relationship because I am tired, lol. It's been maybe 18 months and whatever. I'm doing me.
It is more than passion. It is a cerebral connection as well as a physical one. There is a stark difference between lust and love. There is also a difference between love and the love at first sight type of love.
Love endures. The way I felt remained for years and I will always love them for what we had together.
Take Shakespeare for example in my favourite sonnet:
SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of two minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love is not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Shakespeare clearly experienced love of the highest intensity and the reason that this particular sonnet touches me so deeply is because it describes my own idea of love. It is not something that changes and if it does, perhaps it is not real love after all.
There may just be something very, how should we describe it... "unique" about love and dating the French.