What's in your secret garden?
Paris was glorious this past week. Temperatures were mild and the sun was out nearly every day. Unlike New York, where autumn generally ushers in dazzling blue skies, Paris can be a dull gray.
Thankfully, that hasn’t been the case of late. I had lunch earlier this week near the Assemblée nationale with two incredible journalists who were attending the Women’s Forum, France 24’s Annette Young and Francesca Donner, founder of The Persistent.
My bike ride home was so distractingly dazzling that I had to stop at the Place de la Concorde to soak up the beauty. I wanted to get a photo of the fountain there, the colors of which were as intense as I had ever seen them, but risked getting crushed by a car. When I turned the corner onto the Rue de Rivoli, I was surprised to see that La Grande Roue, the big ferris wheel that has been the source of great controversy over the past decade, had been re-installed in the Tuileries gardens. The Christmas market will surely not be far behind.
It is always such a pleasure to hang out with women. There is an unspoken understanding between us that even the most enlightened of men can never fully be part of. As we get older, I notice that my friends and I spend more and more time in all-female company. It’s not a replacement for time spent in mixed company, but it is different. More profound.
The notion of private space takes on a specific form in France. I first noticed it on the dating apps, where men would openly admit that they were married but were looking for their “secret garden”. It’s easy enough to decipher the phrase in and of itself, but after seeing it for what was easily the tenth time, I realized there was probably a cultural origin to it worth digging into. I started googling.
According to Wikipedia, “the secret garden is the reserved domain of intimate feelings or thoughts that we wish to keep exclusively for ourselves and within ourselves.” According to languefrancaise.net, the phrase was first documented in François Rabelais’ Pantagruel in 1532. It was the title of a novel by Marcel Prévost in 1897. The concept became mainstream in the mid-1970s.
To an American eye, the idea that one’s partner would have their own clandestine world doesn’t seem like such a great thing. Mine is not the only marriage that was undone by exactly that. But in France things are seen a little differently. Unlike in American relationships, where complete transparency and total honesty are often seen as the ideal, in France, the idea that each person in a couple has their own secret garden is widely accepted.
Just how widely accepted it is by the women here that their husbands are on dating apps inviting other women into their secret gardens is another matter.
Sometimes, though, a little discretion—secrecy even—is what a girl wants. My friend K learned this the, uh, hard way this week. She’s coming to visit me from the US for Thanksgiving and thought she’d check out the French dating scene, so switched her Bumble location to Paris. She matched with a guy who quickly suggested a video chat. It went well, and it looked as though she’d have a fun date waiting for her when she got here.
Hah.
A short time after their call he messaged her to ask if she’d get back on a video call with him because he had something to ask her. Once virtually face to face, he had a hard time looking at her directly, so she knew something was up. Eventually he managed to spit it out. He wanted to her to watch while he demonstrated the extent of of his desire for her.
She declined.
“Are you upset that I’m laughing?” I asked her between cackles when she called me to relay the encounter, worried that I was being insensitive to what she had just experienced.
“Are you kidding?” she replied. “Why do you think I called you? I’m just waiting for the dick pic.”
To his credit, that didn’t come, though he did follow up with a photo that, thankfully, concealed his “desire," if little else.
“He is very tan,” I observed. “Though not particularly well groomed.”
“He wears a Speedo,” K countered. “I unmatched with him.”
The tan man was undaunted. He reverted to WhatsApp and sent K an exceedingly long message detailing his fantasies about her. Think Penthouse forum meets, yes, you guessed it, Proust. I will spare you the florid prose. Let’s just say that it will be a very long time before I can have a conversation with K without giggling about her “little buttercup”.
I still have no interest in striking up a clandestine relationship with someone who is married, so on the rare occasion that I am on the apps and swiping I will continue to send those profiles to the pile on the left, but I will say that K’s suitor’s unsolicited talk of x-rated frolicking in meadows has given me a newfound appreciation for all the men who keep the details of their secret gardens to themselves.
Brilliant, as always!
Love! As usual. xxx