While some women had terrifying brush-ups with serial date rapists and other ghouls that haunted the free site Craigslist during its heyday, I famously dated an international explorer and one very lonely celebrity chef. Neither was a good match for me, but I got pretty close to some decent relationships. Francois was an insecure Parisian businessman who convinced himself that I only wanted to date him because he was rich. Au contraire! The sex was as good as his West Village apartment, paid for every month by his firm.
Our first date was on a snowy evening to see "Le Jazz Hot" that I thought boded well for us both. But, soon he was doubting our age difference and language skills (neither true obstacles), and the discrepancy he saw in our looks. He called me a "Petite Modelle" (mannequin) during our first few beers together, astonished that a woman as beautiful as me was single, and therein lies the rub. He was a bit too thin perhaps, with a receding hairline and stained teeth of a European kind, but it was workable enough for me, though his insecurities were not.
At first, he insisted on seeing me more often, which meant I had to hurry home from work to walk my dog and then trek back to Manhattan for our dates. It was a good thing I was in my 30s and more motivated. Then, when that accommodation became intolerable, he said he would pay for my car service rides to-and-from his place, even though technically he had no money. Oh, mon dieu...then, he made a big deal out of taking the subway to see me in "le suburb de Brooklyn". I began questioning his judgment even more. He chipped away at our relationship like a gay man caught kissing a drunk girl for kicks at a soiree. What gives?
He mined the false construct of the Brooklyn 'burbs all the way to calling me "une salope" for my last name (so suburban), then ridiculing his limited palette sexually ("go find a lesbian to do the 'lick lick'. I am macho"!), to finally excluding me from a dinner party for his middle-aged friends because they would only speak French. That was after he accused me of pretending not to be fluent "en francais", so I could get out of reading his bad murder mystery he supposedly wrote on an intercontinental flight while sitting next to a showgirl from "Le Moulin Rouge" who obsessively counted each bite of food she ate because she was paranoid about getting fat.
"So cute!" he said to me, as he pulled a bowl of chips away from me sitting on his piano, while rebuffing my amorous advances, citing that we should have dinner instead. He unraveled the strands of our relationship one-by-one to avoid an entanglement, because he told me the only successful long-term "affaire de coeur" he ever had was with a married woman whose husband didn't care if she slept around. Oh, how droll. I think I was supposed to be impressed by his utter lack of ability in handling a woman full-time, but, sadly, I was not. As I sussed out his neuroses one at a time, he just threw more obstacles in the way, culminating in a date "with a friend" that he suspiciously gave me the street address to after a series of texts, so I could find him with a pretty older woman with dark hair and eyes who was obviously interested in him, then fly into a jealous lover's rage.
We had our final mis-en-scene in the posh MeatPacking district of Manhattan. I dressed him down for encouraging these behaviors deliberately to get my attention, while his co-worker awkwardly waited down the block to see what would happen between us, finally coming up to us as we were walking away to say her "au revoir". Out of all these negatives, came the results of one inconvenient test that was absolutely positive. He told me Frenchmen were deliberately seeking to replenish their dwindling bloodlines outside of the country, then moving back home to retain custody that would actively cut the foreign-born mother out of the picture, and that was the last straw for me. It was preposterously abusive. You can only jerk around a smart New York woman so much before the "wild child" in her comes out, and that really threw him for a loop. When my patient French Catholicism was finally exhausted by all his trying immature antics, this mama did what any sane woman would do: I ended his line of succession forever.
Tell me, where's the sin in that?
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