Je T'aime: French Loser

Yesterday night she told me she would leave me if I published the text I wrote about the “French Lover” for a special issue of an American magazine. So… my article is gone, and I think she was so right about the reason that makes this text horrible. I couldn’t sleep. It was a succession of names, my vision of love which was supposed to be the vision of the French lover. Bullshit! It was pure hatred, my deception and my frustrations. I was trying to explain that a French lover is someone who is always in love, and the reason why he was always in love - which is that he couldn’t find the girl he liked because French women are pure bitches. In a way it is true, but if women are bitches, men are pigs, and it is not even about that, it is about human relations.

“In France everyone cheats on everyone, is friends with their ex (just in case, you know)” – I wrote that also – “and making love to the girlfriend of your best friend is not only a French cliché, but also an awful thing to do” (I know, I went through this a couple of times). I was also saying that, “the most beautiful women were in France but are not French and that was why the French lover was so dangerous, with his French / English accent and his weird French habits,” and that “it was even worse when he was married because then he has nothing to lose”. I was also talking about the French kiss, the lingerie, the men in their stinky 12 square meters, with no shower, they only use for fucking, la “fameuse garçonnière Française”, but I was mainly talking about the rotten me.

One says that love in France is pure anarchy. It is maybe right, but what would I know about it, maybe I was only in love once after all, or twice, or three times… Even if for me it is not about numbers but persons. When I hear someone in a night club saying, “I should not have come with my girlfriend tonight”, when she is the mother of his children, I feel weird. Same when I realize that a friend of mine is flirting with my girlfriend or someone else’s girlfriend, without any respect for his feelings, I mean for the feelings of everyone - his own, just like his friend’s or the girl’s feelings. Flirting, flirting around. Having sex is the best way to meet someone, to meet the real person behind the body and the spirit; Christians call it “knowing”. As in, and then he “knew” his wife, but can we really know someone? I think it is all about trust, and I am not only getting romantic here…

The Swedish girl is now eating her breakfast in my bed, she is amazing, a pure beauty really, mind and spirit. Actually I don’t know anything about French lovers. Is it a way to kiss, to make love? But do you kiss or make love to all the girls in the same way? Maybe the French lover does, but we are not machines. I was a machine for a while, going from one love to another love, from one work to another, with passion, feelings, with all of my French love. But that was such a mistake. Once you meet someone you really care about, and there is no “one more” anymore. Well that is what I hope, even if hope is for me an awful word. I’d rather have faith. “Faith is not a grandmother’s dog”, like I wrote before, and, “true love no ultra violence”. Friendship and trust are not only a dream, and French lovers are not the best lovers in the world because they go from one woman to another one endlessly, or because of their weird strong French accent, or even because of the so sophisticated French women they fuck once in a while to add to the myth, neither because… Well… they are always… in love. French lovers are French lovers because they are French, and it is our culture to be free in love, that doesn’t mean being a machine or having a list of the girls they fucked, but still having the ability to love.

I don’t believe in cheaters, neither in the people who think that they can flirt no matter what, but I don’t judge, I just know that it is wrong, because I was.

The girl in my bed is asking “What is the conclusion?” I hope she can help me to find it; I have faith, like I always had. I am no French lover, just a French loser on his way to love.

But am I really a loser?

Maybe not.


- Artus, Mardi 3 Octobre 2006, à Paris.