In a vague attempt at putting myself "out there" to try and meet some interesting new men in Paris, I recently reinstated my lapsed subscriptions to Match.com and Meetic.com. I say "vague attempt" because frankly I've been so busy working lately that I barely have time to even think about having a man in my life (or the lack thereof). But I have to try SOMETHING because when I finally stop working, it's just me and my DVDs of Everybody Loves Raymond and as funny as those are, they ain't gonna keep me warm at night. And online dating is what I have time for right now, and it's better than not looking at all. Some of my single friends here have been meeting some new guys this way, and I've successfully tried internet dating in the past and have no embarrassment whatsoever about admitting it. In fact, my last really serious relationship was with someone I met online, and I've got friends who met their husbands that way, so don't knock it 'til you've tried it.
So far, I've seen a few profiles I kind of liked, and a whole lot more that I didn't. Suffice to say, I'm noticing that when it comes to the French guys on these websites, they don't seem to age well and as such I'm often not finding myself attracted to men who are around my age or a bit older. I don't have a problem dating younger men but they are often looking for younger (than themselves) women. I am also noticing that a lot of these men are either aging REALLY badly or flat out lying about their ages, as evidenced by one man who claimed to be 55 but looked not a day under 75. Who does he think he's kidding? And I'm PAYING for this?
Then a friend told me that the Meetic.fr site is actually free if you go to the one that has .fr instead of .com at the end. I logged in to try that out but before I could even set up an account, I got a second screen popping up for their companion site called Ulteem.fr. I wasn't sure why they had two different dating sites because it implies they are competing with themselves for members, but Ulteem was free too and I thought it wouldn't do any harm to fill out a profile there as well.
So I get through the preliminaries of filling out the information pretty well (and the screens are all in French so I need my trusty Larousse every so often), getting nervous at one point that I might have accidentally checked that I was a "FEMME recherche FEMME" instead of "FEMME recherche HOMME" because one of the questions about what I was looking for in a partner asked "does SHE smoke?" -- until I remembered the gender-specificness of the French language and noticed that the questions pertained to seeking your "l'ame soeur" which means "soul mate" but literally translates to "soul SISTER". (Confused yet?)
All was going well and I was moving from screen to screen, dealing with the French instructions pretty well until... holy merde, there's a PERSONALITY TEST I'm now supposed to take to help them help me find my soul mate. And the test is in French too, naturellement. And suddenly it became clear why there is a Meetic.fr and an Ulteem.fr... the Ulteem is sort of like a French eHarmony where they make matches based on deeper criteria than your vital statistics and whether or not you enjoy tennis and long walks on the beach.
I am now sitting here trying to translate my way through 92 (NINETY-TWO? That's quatre-vingt-douze, right?) questions, I'm only on question 12 so this could take a while, I have no idea if I'm getting the correct translations or not, and I am left to wonder if this is going to result in a flurry of matches with men who are completely wrong for me because I AM STILL NOT FLUENT IN FRENCH YET and I answered all the questions wrong.
Or what if NONE of the choices seem quite right? For example, I take this multiple choice statement -- Lorsque je rencontre un inconnu qui me plait vraiment -- to mean "When I am meeting a stranger who really pleases me...". Well, that just opens up a whole can of worms, doesn't it? Because the available choices in response seemed to be: "I engage naturally in conversation", "I take it upon myself to make the first move", and "It's not in my temperament to approach strangers" plus a 4th choice I didn't get at all but seemed to be something like "I'm not all that hard up for new acquaintances" which seemed a bit sarcastic. But where was the answer for "If he's all that pleasing I might skip the pleasantries and just ask him what he wants for breakfast tomorrow"?
As I struggle through each question (not quite seeing the point of having to choose a picture of which tree I would want to spontaneously "reposer" under but choosing the palm tree on the beach anyway), it does occur to me that casing these French dating websites, answering
French dating questions, and reading French dating profiles of datable (let's hope so, anyway) French
men might just be the incentive I need to spend more time practicing
the language. I'm already being forced to learn useful new vocabulary such as extravertie in describing myself; expressions such as dans un premier temps which is another way of saying "first" when talking about a sequence, and sur le champs which means "on the spot"/immediately; and emballer which definitely doesn't mean what you might think it means at first glance.
So, I continue to trudge through the questions, some of which come surprisingly easy and others leave me scratching my head. At least I'm learning something, though, whilst in the back of my mind wondering: "Is THIS where he is hiding -- the one I'm supposed to meet?" Because you never know unless you try, and anything is possible.
And then, a delightful surprise... I click on another question and learn the most perfect new word of all: téméraire.
Bold.
I'd say that's a good sign.
