I move between two crowds in this city with completely different manners
Posted as two_etiquettes
- Looking for
- somebody comfortable in either half of this city
- Experience
- Nine years, both directions, in two languages at once.
- Around
- the 19th, Paris
I arrived here from abroad and I have spent nine years moving between the foreign crowd in this city and the French one, and discovering that the two have almost nothing in common except the subject. In one, people say what they want in four sentences and propose a meeting in the first exchange. In the other that reads as crude, and the same conversation takes three weeks and four long messages.
Thirty seven, Paris, switch, nine years. Neither approach is better. I have been happy in both and I have been baffled by both. What I have become is a person who can translate between them, which is genuinely useful and has never once helped me find a partner.
The practical problem is that I am half in each pool and fully in neither. The foreign half assume I am not serious because I write too much before proposing anything. The French half assume I am blunt to the point of rudeness because I have picked up the habit of stating limits in the first message.
What I want is one person, either direction, over a long time. I lead a bit more than I follow. I am interested in restraint and protocol and I am not interested in pain.
I speak both languages properly and I am content to run a dynamic in either, and I would want to settle which one early because switching mid conversation gets strange. If you also arrived here from somewhere else and never quite landed in one crowd or the other, you already understand every paragraph above and I would very much like to hear from you.