In Marseille, I met a partner in crime, an Italian, mon ami, Giovanni. Giovanni had just started his PhD in Marseille. We took the same beginners French class as I. We also shared the same philosophy about leveraging the power of pastis to improve our speaking skills. Furthermore, Giovanni was in the middle of a new, turbulent, and romantic relationship so we also exchanged deeply on our love lives as well.
Giovanni’s big question was this, was he really in love with his new girlfriend? He had previously been with a woman for six years before leaving the relationship. He said he was never in love with the previous woman. He was just with her because he was afraid to be alone. Now he had found a new relationship but couldn’t sort out what feeling was driving his urge to be with the woman: sexual lust, romantic love (IN love) or deep long-term LOVE. He never figured it out while I was there, but it was great to exchange, as I was trying to sort out my own feelings for Claire months before. I was over her but I wanted to better understand myself.
With some distance, now 6 months later, what was it I had really felt for her? Sex, romantic love or did I love her deeply with long-term force?
Sexual lust was easy to scratch off the list. In bed she was total vanilla ice cream. No chocolate sprinkles on top, no rocky road, no strawberry swirls. Just plain old vanilla. One scoop, please. Nice, but not challenging.
I next marked out long-term LOVE from the list. She had at least one deal breaker I’d discovered while being with her in just the first few weeks. She was not very nice to other people. She was ambivalent (best case) to down right rude (worse case) in treating waiters, flight attendants and hotel staff – people “less” than her. Once we were at her new posh London apartment and a Polish painter came over to give her a quote on painting the flat. All around us were her unpacked boxed. She looked at the painter and asked, “But you aren’t going to steal any of my things, right”? I was mortified at her comment and embarrassed to be standing next to her in that moment.
So in Marseille, I came to the conclusion that it must have been “romantic” love. I’ll call it being “IN love”. I treasured the pet names and gifts and all the fun, flirt stuff that goes with it. The researcher, Helen Fisher, has a great TED talk where she compares romantic love to cocaine. Our brains light up when we are romantically driven. Her description of romantic love fits pretty damn well how I felt around Claire at the time.
“[…] Romantic love is not an emotion. In fact, I had always thought it was a series of emotions, from very high to very low. But actually, it’s a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind. The kind of mind — part of the mind — when you’re reaching for that piece of chocolate, when you want to win that promotion at work. The motor of the brain. It’s a drive.”
I concluded that I was IN love with Claire but I didn’t LOVE her. Cocaine? yes. Deep love with long-term force? No.
Of course, my brain could also just be rationalizing Claire’s rejection by creating this narrative, a la cognitive dissonance (Daniel Kahnemann). To protect my sense of self. It’s safer for me to conclude that I never really LOVED with her than for my ego to accept that she simply wasn’t into me that much.
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” – Daniel Kahneman from Thinking, Fast and Slow
Whatever the case, thinking about it that summer in Marseille, I admitted that I really, really, really loved cocaine (romantic love or being IN love). I also love sexual lust / love, but I was ready for more than the hook ups and short-term romances. I also wanted deep LOVE with long-term force. I wanted all three but without deep LOVE at the core, it would all just be a waste of time.
Confusing? How about a picture!
I felt supremely confident in my body. I’d just cycled over 2000 km and run the Berlin marathon a year before. I also felt masterful in my business abilities. The subsidiary I’d come to Europe to start had – under my leadership – grown from 0 to over $1 million in annual sales by the time I left the company.
But my brain? Was my mind still as sharp as it had been 10 or 20 years before or were the cells in my head starting to die off in kamikaze-like fashion? I put it to a test. I’d learn a new language. French.
I’d already tried learning French a few times in the past, during college in the US and while living in Berlin. Now in Marseille, I’d be totally submerged, which is how I learned German 15 years before. I was quite anxious, bought a dictionary and started making flash cards. In class, I might have been the oldest but I worked 100% harder than anyone else.
One intensive class is not normally enough to really be able to kickstart speaking a new language on a daily basis. You also have to drink loads of booze. I’ll always be eternally grateful to Marseille’s bars for providing enough pastis that learning French was fun. Jokes aside, when I’d first moved to Germany, I discovered that spending time drinking beer with friends was the best way to my practice conversational German. Thus, in Marseille I spent the nights in Cours Julien butchering lovely French verbs such as “etre” and “avoir”. At a maximum, I could conjugate them in the present tense, so I wasn’t talking about much. A typical conversation would be me saying my name, “Je m’appelle Ryan” and where I was from, “Je suis Americaine”. If I was lucky, I’d find someone sufficiently drunk that they only wanted somebody (me) to listen to them. That was fine with me. I’d practice my listening skills.
After a month in Marseille, I was able to hold a very basic conversation in the present tense, but I was clearly the most improved in our class. I knew I’d have to come back to France for part “deux” but the experience, learning intensive French, revealed something new about myself. Not only was I athletic and had great business skills. I also still had a sharp, pliable mind.
I was discovering who I really am.
OXLAEY