Chapter Thirty-Three: Mystery Men

In which we try to date locally. The first of two installments.

In the deliciously fallow stretch of months after everyone left my house and before the onset of winter, I did what bored single women do the world over: I opened up the dating apps to see what was kicking around.

I should note that over the years, I was a fairly satisfied customer of OKCupid and Bumble and all the rest. When you work out of your home in one of the gayer professions, like I do, and most of your straight friends are married with kids, you have no choice but to ask an algorithm to intervene. I met my ex that way. I met Louis that way. I met Franck that way. I met many others in between. Random blind internet dates were free French lessons back when I first arrived, and a fabulous education in dress and conversational codes.

Now that all dating first got off the ground in writing, I discovered that a man who didn’t know how to text banter with some humor had no chance with me. I refined and whittled down my checklist: most important were articulate and funny. Then a bon vivant without being an out of control alcoholic, a feminist or at least a friendly, not an impatient freak with no boundaries.

The countryside had so far changed a lot in my life, but I wasn’t sure if it would alter the above. I wasn’t sure if it should. I was still very crisp and sooty around the edges after my breakup, but I didn’t think I needed to radically alter my romantic needs just because the last one flamed out painfully. I could be less fussy about hating how a guy dressed, I supposed, because I was certainly less fussy about how I did now.

So I clicked and swiftly learned that while nature in Le Perche was generous, geolocation-based dating apps were not. The day I finally decided to open Tinder, one I usually avoided for its greasy hookup flavor, I was sitting on my bed, the open curtains revealing an unencumbered view of the row houses to my left. I turned from the view to look down at my screen, tapped, and started rifling through. Lots of milquetoast bureaucrats and swingers with headless bodies. No shame to anyone who rolls that way but it’s never been my thing. Swipe left. Swipe left. Wait, what is that? Ew, definitely swipe left.

Then I saw the face of my neighbor Stan, whose front door I had just been staring at, coyly beckoning from the screen. “100 meters away” indeed. It was a greyish mirror selfie with mercifully short text. Thank God he was clothed. At least he admitted he was a smoker. I quit the app immediately, and then I deleted my profile. If I saw him, he saw me. Make it stop.  

Bumble came next, offering a parade of corpulent, sometimes visibly toothless, usually married men seeking “a sensual connection,” for which they had a surprising amount of their own requirements. Swipe left. Swipe left. Screen shot through tears of laughter, share with the text group of your four best girlfriends back in America, then swipe left again. I widened my search parameters to 50 kilometers, then 75, reminding myself that driving longish distances here was normal.

Up popped someone who looked like he had potential, meaning that in his picture, he looked almost exactly like my ex. Grey hair, grey beard, Breton sweater, mildly sarcastic text, posed on a tractor. These were signs from my home planet, but countryfied with some humor. Yes. Yes! A sign of hope. Swipe right. No match. Sigh. However, it was fortifying because it was a sign of possibility. Similar to available taxis, if there’s one, there’s usually another.

Then another one did come: bald, glasses, well built, big smile. Not a lot of info but single, and there was something about him that seemed well-meaning. Was it the relaxed pose? The picture of him mugging with a big fish on a rod? Clues are sometimes hard to nail but you usually can feel if someone is benevolent. (Not that you’re always right, of course. This is the backstory of about 65% of online dating experiences.)

Swipe right. BANG YOU MATCHED. OK. I waited a few hours to write a very generic hello, aware that less effort was expected of women in my adopted country, and mystery was prized. He wrote back quickly. Lived equidistant to me from Saint-Jouin. Would I like a drink? Of course I would.

So what do people wear to blind dates out here? The uniform back in Paris was so formulaic I could do it with my eyes closed: jeans, something colorful and maybe slinky on top, very high heeled shoes because that’s what did the best things to your legs and all the rest, and it lets whoever is on the other side of the table know that you Cared About Fashion and were confident enough to maybe be five inches taller than them and be OK with it.

Except I didn’t really clock fashion anymore. Stilettos pierced muddy ground the fastest, which I had to walk through just to get to my car. They’d be caked, and incongruous. Under wellies and puffer jacket conditions, I compromised with a pair of block heeled Chelsea boots, and a black silk blouse from the House of Monoprix under the windbreaker.

The fellow’s name was Loic, and he grew up around there. He was polite, enthusiastic, several years-divorced and had a curiosity for woo-woo therapies without being overly identified with them. He seemed thoughtful and circumspect in conversation about his children, insightful about living in the countryside, and curious about my decision to be there.

After two glasses of decent Côtes du Rhône blanc, I felt very comfortable with him but not especially attracted to him. Why not? Because that thing was missing.

Sigh. Here is where a frequently single woman’s compass comes into question. I spent a lot of time in my adult life as a dater berating myself for making horrible choices, falling for the unavailable ones, or the incurable saddos. Due to all that, I had talked myself out of trusting myself so long ago I couldn’t remember what it felt like not to have a red flag waving somewhere around me at all times.

At the same time, now that I had lived with someone and made a blended family, there was a part of me that was starting to believe I wasn’t a completely lost cause. In retrospect, everything that went wrong between me and my ex, everything that ended up being unfixable—our failed intimacy, our shitty communication—was the very same territory where I told myself to just shut up and hope for the best rather than insist that we take it on together. It was a lesson in realizing that if something didn’t feel good, it probably just wasn’t good, and maybe even a dealbreaker.

Over the course of an hour and a half, without being undignified, Loic was a little too eager and smelled a little too strongly of emotional need. Ten years of psychoanalysis taught me that I hated my own neediness so much, there was no way I could accept it in someone else. (Analysis is great for learning, and not great at solving.) But I agreed to see him again because of my second-guessing nature, and also because I believe that everyone deserves one more bite at the apple. Let’s not be hasty.

So I invited him over for dinner the following week, because there aren’t a lot of decent restaurant options at night out here. He pulled up in a big panel van and knocked on my front door bearing really good artisanal chocolates and a curved Opinel knife with a brush, a type that I had never seen before. He explained it was a mushroom harvesting knife, and I thought, God damn it, I wish I wanted to jump you.

These were harvested with Loic’s knife.

I thanked him profusely, and probably fed him fried chicken, and he was so gaga during dinner that he kind of lost the plot. He told me he thought that “we should spend much more time together,” and I felt my throat close up. I was so much different from his ex-wife, he said, and she did sound like an absolute lunatic, but that had nothing to do with me.

He offered to help me stack the next one-ton delivery of wood pellets, and even went down to inspect the furnace before dessert, shaking his head at the idiocy of the setup. “That silo should be way bigger,” he said, “so that a truck bearing a ton of pellets in bulk can set up a hose and shoot them directly into the storage.” Too late for that. And then I started yawning, and did the dishes, and when he tried to kiss me goodnight, I couldn’t really return it.

I cursed my skittishness, but it was what it was. I told him I was sorry, but I just wasn’t sure I felt it, and he said he would keep trying if I would let him, but that it if not, that was OK too. I told him I really liked him but just didn’t know what I could offer. He said he would be happy to be friends, but I knew that was probably not technically true because it usually isn’t.

And so out the door walked the proverbial nice local guy with the big, capable hands who understood foraging and local animals, whom the Diane Lane character was supposed to fall for. The one she had to get over herself to love, but once she did, she found herself fulfilled and able to live in the present and take in the beauty all around her, and sigh and laugh and shrug at the silliness of life.

I wished I had Diane’s number, because she might really like Loic, but he was not for me, and I knew that, and in some ways, that was a victory in itself. And when my basement caught on fire, I called Loic. He was in the area, and stopped by to check out the scene after the firemen left, and had a ton of good advice. He hooked me up with the right person to get the new system set up, and thanks to his recommendation I may have even skipped the line a few places.

And that was as far as it ever got.

Next week we shall meet some more hapless swains, as well as some much more promising fellows, who live practically next door, but unfortunately play for the wrong team.