One of the things that intrigued me most about Canada was…Canadian women. Yes, yes, despite a wealth of experience in France, I have always found French women to be distrustful and to have a closed and wait-and-see attitude. I was anxious to meet their sisters from across the Atlantic. After all, it’s the time of year to talk about love, isn’t it?
When you know you are going to be living elsewhere you develop fantasies built around urban legends and hearsay: “Canadian women are more open, warm-hearted and it even seems that over there they know how to take the initiative!” As a Frenchman, I remained skeptical. So I made it a point to see if all of this was true.
The first thing I noticed was that Vancouver women knew how to make themselves look sexy – very sexy. They dared to dress themselves scantily and provocatively, even when temperatures were approaching the freezing point, to the great displeasure of French women who find a certain vulgarity in them, an opinion that I do not share. Not all French women dress in the Paris fashion, do they?
But what about Vancouver women’s behaviour? I must certainly admit that to be hit on from A to Z was a first for me. I had to wait 35 years and be 8000 km from France to experience it.
A classic encounter occurred with friends in a bar. You have to trust me when I say that this Vancouver woman played the grand game of seduction, step by step. I was agreeably surprised and much amused. I let her do her thing while trying to guess what her next manoeuvre would be. The evening turned out to be very pleasant. I didn’t hear anything more from her until weeks later, but she only contacted me to promote her hair salon. I had been unlucky. It happens to everyone. I shouldn’t get discouraged. Still, I found this first experience very interesting: a concrete example of what I had heard about Canadian women.
Pursuing my life here I realized that Vancouver women were much more approachable than French women for whom each encounter is often considered an attempt at seduction. Here the situation is not as clear cut.
Once again I found myself pleasantly surprised. As well as being sexy, Vancouver women were capable of being enterprising and sociable. In every situation I encountered courteous and communicative ladies: Skytrain, bar, café, street, club – everywhere. But I’m a man who is not satisfied by scratching the surface, be it of objects or people. I like to probe deeper, to know, to understand. So I continued my studies.
And the more contact I had with Vancouver women the more I realized that my picture of them wasn’t nearly as idyllic as my first impressions. Rather, they were relatively superficial, hooked on their phones, inconsistent, and lacking in humour and conversational ability. What struck me most about them was their independence, that is to say, their inability to become fully involved in anything other than themselves or anything longer than a one-night stand. This finding was valid mostly for those women born on the West Coast or those who had lived there long enough for social mimicry to have taken hold.
In a society where one tries to avoid making waves it appears difficult to stand out. Still, it appears presumptuous of me to generalize given Vancouver’s broad multiculturalism. Ironically it is French women that have pleased me the most. Despite their initial aloofness, their sense of humour, their repartee and their desire to commit to a relationship have convinced me that I prefer them to their local Vancouver counterparts.
