We moved down from Paris and assumed it would be the same
Posted as down_from_the_capital
- Looking for
- a couple who will be patient with two people learning the local rules
- Experience
- Seven years together, five in this, all of it up north.
- Around
- the 7th, Lyon
We arrived eighteen months ago expecting a smaller version of what we had left, and we were completely wrong. Up there we knew perhaps two hundred people loosely and nobody at all well, and you could be anonymous in a room of forty. Here we have met about twenty five people and every single one of them has turned out to be connected to at least two of the others.
Thirty three and thirty four, the 7th, together seven years, five of them with this in our life. She switches, he is submissive, and we came for one job and stayed for the reasons people stay.
The mistake we made in the first six months was behaving the way we had up north. Open, quick, treating a first meeting as low stakes. It did not go badly exactly. It simply meant that within a season we had a reputation as people who move fast, assembled out of about four conversations, and we have spent a year quietly correcting it.
So we are being slower and much more explanatory, which we are told is how it is done here. What we want is another couple, for friendship, dinners, and possibly more a long way down the line. We can host, we cook, and we are good at arguing about things that do not matter.
Not looking for anyone who wants to hear us compare the two cities, which we have promised each other to stop doing. Not looking for a third. Not looking to be the couple somebody collects because we are new, which happened twice in the first year and which we did not enjoy.