LETTER FROM PARIS #21 - is it intimacy?

Growing up in an essentially reserved, Anglo/Wasp culture one is not accustomed to PDA.* or maybe it’s age, with its failure to tolerate and unwillingness to change. I am looking desperately for the one word (I know it’s there) to describe being conflicted, at sixes-and-sevens, or confused.

I have for years had some difficulty with the level of PDA I see in so many European cities. I haven’t been back to staid and stolid London since it stopped being staid and stolid so I can’t make a judgement. But in Lisbon, in Paris, in Rome in Florence – there seem to be so many people who are not at all disturbed by public eyes. They spend a lot of time hugging and kissing and general body massaging. As I say, I have some trouble with it; trouble partly because of my background, and partly because I can’t reconcile myself to it. I do know that it is very Canadian, when someone sees a lot of public “making out” to call out “Get a room.” Not polite but it camouflages the embarrassment.

So I continue to have trouble understanding, in spite of the slogan is “Paris is for lovers” why so many people in so many public places, take the slogan literally. But today, riding on the metro, I had a “eureka”moment. Sitting a seat near me was a man talking earnestly to a woman whose back was to me. As he talked, he reached for her hand and emphasized what he was saying by seeming to squeeze the hand, all the time looking intently into her face. Then he got up and left. She stayed behind. There is a lot to read into that scenario. The one thing that suddenly occurred to me is that the French, in Paris at least, do not seem to be threatened by intimacy. I am very relieved. It is not me being prudish. It is them being demonstrative. And they are. They kiss when they meet. Lovers (or maybe just “lusters”) engage in various forms of public foreplay. There is a lot of kissing and looking deeply into the eyes and holding hands over a table in a restaurant.

It is much more than what Americans and Canadians refer to as “touchy-feely.” And it is very French. It is not disdain for the decorum of public behaviour. It is natural and easy. When we meet Michele and Henri, Shirley and I both kiss and are kissed (the two-cheek greeting) Henri does hot kiss me, but his handshake is warm, and when he becomes excited I feel his hand reaching to me and touching. The fact is that I do have at least one male friend who always greets me with a kiss. I always kiss my son when we meet. Yet I wonder, especially with the man who is a friend, if people nearby are making judgments about our sexual orientation. But that’s in Canada. In Paris it would not be so.

So perhaps time has let me learn another thing about the Parisian sense of themselves.. They may be, as I have written earlier, conflicted about their lives, their history. their politics, and Muslim women wearing the full veil. They are not, apparently, at all conflicted about intimacy. What they read as natural and desirable, there are still many of my fellow countrymen who think it is promiscuous. I’m not one of them – anymore.

*Public Display of Affection.