“You will probably meet an attractive French guy and never come home,” said everyone to me when I told them I was going to live in Paris for a year.

Well, today I am here to prove you all wrong.

Paris, the city of romance, is not as romantic as everyone thinks and here’s why: it’s a city. A city that smells like urine most of the time (unless you’re walking next to a particularly fragrant boulangerie.)

I don’t want to crush your hopes about the beauty of the city. Despite the occasional urine smell, Paris is still really lovely. But I would like to crush your hopes about the romanticism of the French man.

(Although first I would like to provide a disclaimer that due to being an introvert and having very poor French speaking skills, I don’t exactly have that much experience talking to any men. This is all from my observations.)

First of all, not all the men are attractive. It’s true that when I do see an attractive man on the metro or walking about, he is usually one of the most attractive men I have ever seen, but this specimen is not as abundant as most people think. Most men here are just normal looking.

I think that the attractive French man myth comes from the fact that most of them, attractive or not, are incredibly well dressed. French people in general dress really nicely, but the men especially know how to put an outfit together, from the suit to the scarf to the messenger bag.

Secondly, most men in Paris are expertly busy. They don’t have time to be romantic because they already have lives, with a fancy job, a fancy apartment, and a fancy girlfriend.

To be quite frank, most French men are quite similar to the hooligans at home. They don’t carry around flowers or wine and offer to take you for a ride on their vespas (but maybe that’s just in Italy like in “The Lizzy McGuire Movie”) and if they do offer to take you for a ride on their vespa, you should say no because that’s a prime example of stranger danger.

Instead, they’ll whistle at you walking down the street, stare at you in the metro, or sit in le jardin de Tuileries eating large amounts of McDonalds while playing Macklemore at a volume level that the whole park can hear. (Okay, that was only one time, but still I was appalled.)

So let’s just be completely honest here: it’s never going to happen, and I never thought it would.

I don’t mean to be cynical, except that I do.

XOLily