Chapter Five

France

Date #12—The Gallic Date
in Paris, France

I love Scandinavia: Like the Netherlands, its people seem liberal and smart without making a big deal about it. In complete contrast, the French national identity has an air of disdainful elegance, like old money at Ascot. But the back-to-back dating disaster in Copenhagen, preceded by William in Stockholm, made me sincerely glad I was heading for the complicated cosmopolitanism of Paris. I needed a complete change of scene and atmosphere.

The last time I had come to Paris was Kelly’s and my four-year anniversary. After extensive nagging, he’d agreed to go to the Buddha Bar. Apparently, the beer was too expensive, the staff too fashionable; it hadn’t been a great success.

If I hadn’t been traveling for the purpose of dating, I think I might have resented that so many cities around the world seemed to contain little Kelly booby traps—painful or irritating memories that exploded out of nowhere. But I was determined not to be one of those people who stayed involved with the bitterness longer than they’d been with the person who’d actually caused it.

And if I step off my martyr’s pedestal for a moment to be honest, Kelly wasn’t the only man I thought of when I came to Paris. Wild, sexy, and dead…I also had a thing going on with Doors singer Jim Morrison. Over the last five years I must have visited his grave, just inside the eastern edge of the Périphérique, half a dozen times, either to make programs or with friends.

I’ve always been fascinated that Jim Morrison—a parallel—Elvis: sexy, iconoclast gone to seed—ended his days in Paris. Erotic and playful as he, Paris was also cultured and subtle. As the Lizard King became the Lard King and tired of himself, maybe that was what drew him here.

I suspect that as a boyfriend, Jim Morrison would have been an absolute nightmare: unfaithful, self-indulgent, and often cruel. But he was also a lithe sex god who created the sound-track to my teen years, and the affinity I felt with him ran deep. I decided to spend the day with him at his grave in the stately Père Lachaise cemetery, to try to pinpoint the attraction.

Date #11: Jim Morrison, The Doors—Cimetière du Père Lachaise, Paris, France

Père Lachaise was the most visited cemetery in the world and had been a fashionable address for the afterlife since its inception in 1804. It was Napoleon who converted what was originally a slum neighborhood into a vast cemetery, arranging to have Molière reburied here at the “launch party.” Its reputation as the in place for the over crowd thus established, its million residents now included Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Pisarro, and Proust. But as you made your way up from the metro, the proliferation of signs, maps, and memorabilia overwhelmingly pointed to Jim Morrison being the grave célèbre here.

Finding Jim Morrison’s grave was quite tricky: Père Lachaise still had all the winding avenues and tree-lined boulevards from the days when people lived (rather than died) here, and it was easy to get lost. Getting lost wasn’t such a hardship, though, as the cemetery was a moving and beautiful site: Tombs varied from Art Deco Egyptian pharaohs and larger-than-life muscular bronze angels to austere black granite obelisks, painstakingly scrubbed mirror-clean by stooped middle-aged women every single day.

Like Cemetery Number 1 in New Orleans, this was a place where the living had an ongoing relationship with their dead. And nowhere was this more true than at Jim Morrison’s grave.

I was grateful for the short shadows cast by the broad trees as I walked through the cemetery looking for Jim Morrison. It was only 10 a.m. but the sun already probed like a dentist’s drill, burrowing ruthlessly into the top of my head. The air was hot and still; a raven perched on the marble head of a weeping Madonna watched me balefully as I marched by full of purpose. My backpack was heavy with bottled water, the Doors biography my sister Mandy bought me when I was fifteen, sunblock, and other bits to get me through the day. The bag bunched my cotton skirt up at the back, but sweat glued it to my legs, preserving my modesty in this place of rest.

Around the corner of a wide boulevard, in a spot hidden among the headstones and next to a large tree trunk, I found Jim. Or, rather, the crowd around Jim.

Three nineteen-year-old boys were camped on one of the tombs, the ubiquitous backpackers’ banquet of plain French bread and Orangina spread before them, plus an assortment of boxed CDs and Walkmans. Two were baseball-capped, fresh-faced Americans, the other a baggy-sweatered, straggly-haired Frenchman. They had one set of headphones between them and were taking turns, passing it around like a joint.

“ ‘L.A. Woman’…that’s my favorite song. Maaan, this song is amazing,” said the first young American, transported by the music in his headset. Suddenly a furious Frenchman burst from between the trees and marched over: “Ce que faites-vous ici?” he bellowed. “What is wrong with you that you are sitting on the burial place of the dead eating your lunch? Have you no respect?”

The boys quailed and looked uncomfortable. The Frenchman, too agitated to remain still, angrily paced on the path a few feet away. The two Americans turned frowning to the French boy. “Man, was he talking to us? What did he say?”

The French boy shrugged sullenly.

Back on the path, the Frenchman became incandescent. “Ah,” he snorted in disgusted English. “Tourists! What do you know?” and he stormed off, leaving clouds of dust hanging over the gravel path in his wake. The teenage boys left maybe half an hour later.

In the five hours I stayed by or near the grave, around a hundred people visited. The Frenchman was right to say that the tourists were insensitive, but he was wrong to say they lacked respect. It was the very reason they were here: out of love and respect.

Jim Morrison’s grave was unimposing. A plain, squat headstone stated without fuss that James Douglas Morrison lived from 1943 to 1971. The grave itself was a shallow granite frame around a sandy pit, maybe three by six feet.

Every mourner stepped up to the grave with a sense of the theatrical, individual players each featuring in his or her own one-act drama. A group of Latino boys in gang insignia silently regarded the grave, their heads bowed in fresh grief as if Jim Morrison had died yesterday, not thirty years ago. The tallest of the group took a bottle of bourbon from his bag. Passing it between them, they each took a swallow. Taking an extra swallow, the leader then poured a measure directly onto the grave before placing the bottle gently on the headstone. Standing straight, he touched two fingers to his heart, his lips, then the headstone. One by one each of the gang repeated the sequence. Ritual completed, without a word they turned and walked away.

A midwestern couple in their forties pointed to the grave and poignantly told their three teenage children: “When we were your age, he meant everything to us. We wanted you to meet him.”

Finding a lull in mourners, I put down my bag and walked over to the grave myself. It wasn’t just bourbon bottles, half-smoked joints, and cigarettes; the grave was full of poems and dedications. As I read the dedications, I wondered why I—and all these other people—nurtured such enduring love for Jim Morrison. The Love Professor had described successful, healthy relationships as ones in which our positive traits are reflected back by our chosen partner. By choosing Jim Morrison, were we claiming some part of his creative, sexual vitality as our own? By liking Jim, were we saying we were like Jim?

Or could it simply be that we didn’t want to forget how good it felt to be young, passionate, misunderstood, and alive? Music is a powerful memory and mood trigger, and Jim Morrison was a Door that took us back to that time and state.

There was also the fantasy element. The Love Professor said we all had to know and nurture the real me to be truly happy. But I loved fantazising about the imaginary me, the person I could but never would be. Apart from traveling, the best time for this is at the start of a relationship: Unhindered by routine or too much information about the other person, you imagine both of you doing all the things you’ve always dreamed of. You see yourself going horse riding every weekend (you’ve never been on a horse in your life) or taking a Spanish evening class together (you miss enrollment). Fine, what does it hurt to savor the thought you’ll get a chance to do all these things, whether you actually do them or not?

And if I was shacked up with someone as crazy and unstructured as Jim Morrison, surely the conversation would be elevated above whose turn it was to put the kettle on, or how bad Saturday night TV was these days. His energy would inspire and stretch me.

Yes, yes, I’m a feminist, too: I know I shouldn’t need to be in a relationship to do these things, but it makes it easier.

So, how much of my love was about Jim Morrison and how much was about me? Did I imagine a relationship with Jim’s juju would allow my as-yet untapped potential to be the coolest, smartest, sexiest person on earth to be realized? Was I interested in him as a person or just for what he could do for me?

But I was pulled from my introspection by two Australian women walking over to where I was sitting. “Aww, I’m really sorry to disturb you,” one asked awkwardly, “but would you mind taking our photo? We want to see what we look like post-Jim.”

I smiled as I took the camera: Whatever ego issues I was suffering from, I was clearly not suffering alone. The girls stood on either side of the grave and smiled into the camera as I took their picture.

Amanda and Luciana were both in their late twenties and spending the summer visiting France and the U.K. When I told them I was here to date Jim and why, they both squealed their approval. “Oh, I know why you would want to do that,” Amanda burst out, squeezing my arm in emphasis, “he was really gorgeous, really wild, too. Sexy and crazy.”

Luciana sounded far more downbeat. “Men aren’t like that anymore,” she observed ruefully.

They asked me some questions about my journey. Was I going to Sydney? I confirmed I had several dates lined up there. “Oh, good luck,” Luciana said bitterly. “And trust me, you’ll need it finding a man there.”

This shocked me a little, as Luciana was gorgeous: a voluptuous, curvaceous “Italian” figure topped with a glossy cloud of curly brown hair and fantastically trashy earrings. She saw me noticing her figure and looking surprised. “I dressed up for Jim,” she said with a sly smile. Amanda laughed, picking up on my you get more attention away from home theory: “You know, you’re so right,” she agreed. “It is just incredible how much more the guys notice you here. And in a good, fun way, not sleazy.”

Luciana chipped in. “Like those guys last night,” she said excitedly, nudging Amanda. “We were walking past some steps and these guys were just hanging out. Anyway…” Luciana and Amanda were both in fits of giggles by now. “…when they saw us, they called out, ‘You are beautiful, come and kiss us.’ It was so nice, so cheeky and flattering. It’d never be that way at home.”

We all sighed together, thinking about how much fun cheeky guys could be.

And that made me realize: As much as I enjoyed the fantasy of Jim and the life I’d have with him (if, you know, he wasn’t dead), I actually liked the life I already had. I had fun being me; I didn’t want to morph or be molded into someone else. What I needed was to find someone else like me: a Soul Mate I could relate to.

And I wanted fun with cheeky guys. I wanted to laugh and feel sexy. It was time to bury my dead and make a date with the living.

Date #12: Olivier—Paris, France

I was booked into a hotel in the Marais, my favorite Parisian neighborhood. Touristy in parts, the area was mostly elegant and couture but, thankfully, its relentless chicness was softened by pockets of pretty squares fringed with pungent fromageries and cafés stocked with casually fantastic pastries.

I rushed back and changed in a hurry: I had an hour before my next date.

Showered and dressed in my new baby-blue linen top (I had spotted a gorgeous boutique on the corner of my street and raced in on the way back from the metro), I took the short walk from my hotel to the Place des Vosges. This elegant square of houses dated back to 1612, and among its former residents were Richelieu and Victor Hugo. The park at its center was once used for dueling; tonight it would be used for dating. This was where I was to meet Olivier, Date #12.

 

I was very curious about Olivier. He seemed extremely French: flawlessly educated and virulently contemptuous. He worked in the French film industry and would leave long gaps between emails since he (and he described it with pulling-teeth loathing) had to be at meetings everywhere from Brussels to Cannes. His emailed photos were taken from about five hundred yards away, the only discernible features a crazy mop of dark hair and severe horn-rimmed glasses.

I was curious about him, but didn’t feel I knew or had developed much of a rapport with him. He admitted in one email he could “stay mute and prostrated for hours, not even noticing someone is sitting by my side…depends on my mood.”

This might have made me nervous but for the fact that the date had been set up by my friend Muriel, a smart, exuberant Frenchwoman living in London. I knew any friend of hers was going to be worth meeting.

It was a warm early summer’s evening and the pavement cafés were already full of loquacious Parisians enjoying the sunshine and unhurriedly sipping glasses of red wine (the French were restrained enough to order wine by the glass—to the binge-drinking Brits, this felt about as logical as buying a house by the room).

I spotted Olivier as soon as I walked into the park, but skirted around a statue so I could check him out before he saw me. First impression: tall, slim without being skinny, but glasses and hair—as in the photos—the dominant features. Was an evening with Olivier going to be hard work? I took a deep breath and stepped out from behind the statue to introduce myself.

As he turned to greet me, I was shocked by something I had not prepared myself for.

He was cute.

Under that mop of dark-brown curly hair and the severe glasses, Olivier had gorgeous green eyes, clear, freckled skin, and a fine nose. I smiled instinctively. I’d been prepared for an interesting, possibly argumentative date; I was quick to revise my opinion and put my “flirt face” on.

“Hi, I’m Jennifer,” I said unnecessarily (we’d both seen each other’s photos), holding my hand out to shake his. Olivier’s hand was warm and firm in mine.

A middle-aged man a few feet away waited patiently for his dog to finish adding yet more crap to the park. He whiled away the time watching us with a neutral expression. We were clearly on a blind date; maybe he was glad he was beyond all that. Maybe he was sad that on such a beautiful evening his only companion was a crapping dog.

I tended not to get too nervous about the dates (apart from Anders, of course), as I knew it was actually harder on the Dates than it was on me. Up until they met me, the Dates treated the occasion as a sort of community challenge, as they, their Date Wranglers, and gradually most of their friends became involved in designing the Perfect Date. My date-a-thon was like a street carnival where each Date and his group wanted to make and show off the best float.

My date-a-thon also revealed the competitiveness of men: They were so concerned with imagining what the other seventy-nine might have arranged and whether they could do better, they quite forgot that when the time came they’d be on their own dating a real live woman (me). As a result, during the first thirty minutes of the date, the guys tended to suffer from DRI (Dating Reality Impact) and all my energies were focused on getting them safely through the transition period until they felt normal enough to be normal.

However, because I hadn’t expected Olivier to be good-looking—plus he was French, so he didn’t care what I thought anyway—I was caught off guard and went straight into full-blown DRI myself. I launched into a manic account of how my mother and sister used to live in Paris and wasn’t the weather great and wasn’t Paris better than London because it was so much smaller and oh, I love the Marais, there are so many cute shops…I listened with horror as the anecdotes and opinions poured uncontrollably out of me at top speed. Olivier studied me with an amused expression, which was all he could do as my jabbering made it impossible for him to get a word in.

But suddenly, just as I’d launched into an excruciatingly superfluous story about bees, the wise words of the Love Professor floated—Obi-Wan Kenobi–esque—into my head: “Jennifer…Jennifer…just let it happen. Use all your senses…take in whatever comes….”

And I stopped talking.

Olivier waited to see if I would start again. I didn’t. So he smiled and asked, “Would you like a drink?”

I nodded gratefully, and we left the park and began our date.

 

It was a wonderful evening. Olivier and I wandered along the banks of the Seine, stopping for glasses of wine, dinner in a little bistro, coffee in a café by now lit by moonlight, whiskey in a crowded after-hours bar…. We walked and talked through the romantic streets of the Marais; crossed the Seine to the touristy twists and turns of the Latin Quarter and back again through the crowded club-land of rue de Lappe and Bastille.

Olivier was every bit as challenging as I’d imagined and ten times as interesting. He had lived and studied all over Europe and was passionate about art and films. His personality was like a medieval city of switchback streets opening up into beautiful courtyards: impenetrable and magical by turns. And as he opened up, he became more tactile, touching my hand to make a point or standing close behind me and reaching over my shoulder to show me something fascinating and obscure about a building.

I had decided after Denmark that I was only going to stay out late or agree to see the Date again if I felt he was a genuine prospect. It was now after 3 a.m. and I still felt intrigued and utterly entertained by Olivier. I was also attracted to him and felt comfortable enough with the pace at which things were progressing to anticipate with pleasure the French Kiss that I was confident would come at the end of the date.

By 3:30 a.m., we were both completely talked out and I was glad when Olivier offered to walk me back to my hotel. I’d had a wonderful evening and felt really good about seeing him the next day if he asked. It was the perfect time to end the date.

Thirty minutes later, we stood together outside my hotel, our faces gently lit by the fading streetlights and the approaching dawn that now warmed the sky.

Olivier admitted, “I really did not know what to expect from this evening, Jennifer, but it has been extremely enjoyable. It is unlike me to talk of myself so much; you are charming and very good company.” Studying me through his glasses, his eyes were dark and intent. He was about four inches taller than me, so when I told him how much I had enjoyed the evening, too, I had to tilt my face up toward his to answer, smiling warmly into his eyes.

I watched his mouth as he talked; I was going to get kissed and I was feeling really good about it.

“If you have time, I would very much like to see you again tomorrow,” Olivier said.

“I would like that too,” I replied simply.

Olivier smiled. “It is agreed then.”

I relaxed. He smiled at me, I smiled at him. I waited happily; I was in no rush.

“Umm, okay, then I shall see you tomorrow,” Olivier suddenly blurted, and with an awkward half-shrug he turned and walked off down the street.

Huh?

I watched in astonishment as my cheeky-guy fun vanished around the corner. What had just happened? Why hadn’t he kissed me? I shook my head vigorously, as if trying to shake some sense into it. I didn’t understand: Why hadn’t he kissed me? We’d liked each other. He’d asked me out again. Why didn’t he want to kiss me? Why?

I suddenly felt furious with him: How could he do this? I’d stayed out most of the night with him and would now undoubtedly spend the rest of the night wide awake, agonizing over why he hadn’t wanted to kiss me. I mean, I knew he didn’t have to, but I was really sure he’d wanted to. What terrible thing had I said or done that had made him change his mind? Could I isolate the thing which had made me an Unkissable?

One thing was certain: I had no intention of ever seeing him again. I know that sounds harsh, but I have absolutely served my time dating men who are hard work and take tons of understanding. I was here on my Soul Mate Mission, and that did not include second dates with men who disturbed my self-confidence and peace of mind by treating me as an Unkissable.

 

I said all this over breakfast the next morning to my friends Jilly and Stevie, who were over from London for the weekend.

“Oh, Jen, that’s not fair,” Jilly remonstrated as we divided up the last buttery flakes of croissant, trying to catch the eye of the waitress so we could order some more. “He sounds lovely, you must see him again.”

“Bugger that, why must I?” I protested indignantly. “The whole point of what I’m doing is to find someone who’ll make me happy and not invest time in guys who don’t anymore.”

“Maybe he’s a slow starter?” Stevie observed reasonably, while attempting unsuccessfully to flag down the waitress.

They were being sweet and lovely. I knew they wanted the best for me, to see me happy and with a boyfriend again. But if I was going to ignore my instincts and make excuses for someone from the first date, I might as well have saved myself all this effort and settled for the first (“you’ve got”) male who came along. I knew from personal experience that to give him another chance was just courting trouble and disappointment.

“Stevie,” I said firmly, licking the delicious pear confiture from my fingers and pouring out more coffee, “I really appreciate you saying that and maybe you’re right, but it’s not like I’m upset because he didn’t propose to me. It’s a kiss we’re talking about here. It was a date, we liked each other. It shouldn’t have been that difficult.”

But none of us had had much sleep the night before and the task of getting the waitress to serve us turned into a major production. Soon the topic of whether I should see Olivier again or not was forgotten by everyone.

Except me. When my phone rang, I pushed it deeper into my handbag and nudged my bag under the table with my foot until the ringing stopped.

Date #13: Max—Paris, France

I would have dearly loved to have gone shopping that afternoon, or even to have popped back to the hotel for a quick nap, but I had a date in a few hours with Max, an old friend of Clare, one of my neighbors from home.

Max was a lecturer in art history at one of our neighborhood schools and Clare had been trying to orchestrate a meeting for months. He was spending the school break taking a school group around Paris, and when Clare heard I would be there the same week she nearly broke her fingers trying to dial his number and lock us into a date before I could come up with a reason why it wasn’t possible.

It wasn’t that I hated the thought of meeting Max; he just didn’t particularly sound my type, a little too earnest and proper. But Clare was determined we should meet and I had run out of energy to keep persuading her otherwise.

Max had an afternoon off from the kids, so we had arranged to meet outside Varenne metro station at 2:30 p.m. He was easy to spot: around six feet five (“You can’t say he’s too short for you,” Clare boasted triumphantly) and extremely thin with a long, pale, but boyishly eager face, crowned with an explosion of curly red hair. There was a Cambridge University scarf wrapped tightly around Max’s neck (even though the temperature must have been about seventy degrees) and he was sniffing vigorously.

He beamed as soon as he saw me and stalked straight over. “Ah, Jennifer, what a pleasure, what an absolute pleasure to meet you.” He smiled and sniffed, nervous and excited in equal measures. Towering over me like a huge praying mantis, he bent his upper body down to kiss me “hello.” I wasn’t prepared, he misjudged my height, and at the last minute I overcompensated and stretched up to meet his kiss.

It was an awkward mess: I got a mouthful of shirt as I ended up kissing his collar; he missed my head altogether, his mouth sucking the air two inches right of my cheek. He sniffed and laughed in embarrassment, but as he pulled his head self-consciously away, he caught one of my big silver hoop earrings in his hair and ripped it clean out.

I let out a high-pitched yelp of pain and surprise. Max frowned in alarm; he had no idea why I was shrieking, and he also had no idea that one of my earrings was dangling incongruously from his tight red curls.

Following my astonished stare, he gingerly reached into his hair and found my earring. He beamed in confusion, now sniffing furiously, like a beagle at customs angling for a promotion. “Ah, well, yes,” he stammered, “I, ermm, well, but…this must be yours….” Max pulled the earring from his hair and plummeted from his great height back down toward me. I realized with horror he intended to try to put it back in.

“No,” I shrieked automatically, taking a sharp step backward, my hand clamped protectively over my throbbing ear. “I mean…please don’t worry,” I managed to say, slightly less dramatically. “I’ll take it, it’s fine.” And I took the earring from between his long, outstretched fingers and dropped it out of sight into my handbag.

Words didn’t exist to describe how much I was hating today. I mean really, really, really hating it. It wasn’t really poor Max’s fault, and it was important that I didn’t make him feel it was. You can’t blame someone for not being your type; it was myself I blamed for giving in to Clare—she had the married person’s compulsion to match up singles, the way some tuck in a stranger’s sticking-out shirt label on buses: The desire for neatness is greater than their sense of tact.

But this wasn’t working. In fact, at that moment, it seemed the whole premise my Odyssey was based on wasn’t working. Clearly, there were far more “wrongs” than Mr. Rights out there. And I was wrong about the ones I thought were “rights,” as they all turned out to have something wrong with them in the end. Was I wasting my time? Should I be back in London, either trying harder or accepting my single life? Did this mission have any chance of success at all?

At school when I was about five, I picked up someone else’s sweater by accident. One of the teachers noticed and asked me to give it back. Perversely, I insisted it was mine, and before anyone could take it away I tried to put it on. It belonged to a girl half my size, though, and the sweater got stuck over my head. Embarrassed at being caught out, enraged at not having pulled off the bluff, and very, very agitated at having my head trapped in someone else’s sweater, I had the kind of whirling-dervish, feet-stamping, screaming-my-head-off meltdown that on a slower day would have made it into every single textbook ever written on behavioral difficulties.

The same kind of impotent rage was rising up dangerously in me now. I was trying on and getting stuck in ill-fitting Soul Mates; I’d nearly lost an ear in this one. It was really starting to get on my nerves.

As I furiously debated these points in my head, outside in the real world I was still standing with one hand clamped to my ear, staring murderously at Max. His sniffing long stopped, he stood mute with anxiety and embarrassment. God, I was being a total bitch to poor Max.

“Max, I am being rude, I am so sorry,” I apologized gently. “I’m just feeling a bit all over the place at the moment.” My heart went out to him as he gave a wobbly smile, like a little kid whose ice cream just fell in the sand and was trying to be brave about it. He gave an exploratory sniff, as if testing the waters, then another. “Ah, please don’t…that’s to say…umm, well, then I really do hope you like sculpture, Jennifer,” he said, gradually regaining confidence and enthusiasm. “Because I am going to take you to see one of my absolute favorites. It’s at the Musée Rodin. I’m sure you’ll know it.” His face lit up happily. “It’s called The Kiss.”

I could have killed him.

 

Actually, it turned out to be a fascinating visit. Rodin’s impressive eighteenth-century house now houses his work, and I enjoyed hearing Max talk about the artist as we walked around the museum and gorgeous landscaped grounds (where we bought equally gorgeous glaces).

Rodin sounded difficult as hell, and his muse and lover Camille Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum as a result. There were too many tourists around The Kiss to get a good look at it, so instead Max and I inspected the clay working-model prototype next to it. Although the lovers were passionately entwined, their mouths were actually a good inch apart. The most famous kissers in the world did not actually kiss at all. Maybe Olivier wasn’t the only faux French Kisser. And no wonder poor Camille ended up bonkers.

Date #14: Nick, Skate Date—Paris, France

It was raining when I said good-bye to Max back at the metro, which was a shame as I needed good weather for my next encounter: the Skate Date.

Every Friday night in Paris, up to 28,000 people took part in the Pari Roller: three hours spent whizzing twenty-five kilometers round the closed-off streets on in-line skates. I’d made a program about it a couple of years earlier and thought the atmosphere was so incredible—retirees blowing whistles, kids zipping in and out between their parents’ legs—I wanted to take part myself. I also thought this would make a perfect date.

I’d spent six weeks wobbling round Fountains Leisure Centre in west London, being shown not so much the ropes as the wheels by Citiskate, the people who organize something similar to the Paris event in London.

My class was just the nicest bunch of people, and—all as hopeless as each other—we quickly bonded as we encouraged each other to make it through the embarrassing, painful learning curve. A group of about twelve of us had vowed we’d all get good enough to do the Pari Roller together. And one of the group, Nick, had shyly asked if he could be my Skate Date, even though our conversations had rarely consisted of more than “Oohh, that had to hurt” or “Waaaatch ooooout” as one of us smacked into a wall or body-checked an oncoming skater.

Well, tonight was the night. I ran through a curtain of rain back to my hotel. I needed to quickly check my emails, then change and pick up my skating gear (kindly delivered and being taken back by Jilly and Stevie). As I dumped my bags on the bed, I noticed the voice mail light flashing. It was from Nick: “Hey, Jennifer, hope you’re doing okay. How f**d is this rain? I just spoke to Marianne and she said it’s probably off tonight. We’re meeting at Bastille anyway, see you there—and, hey, get your skates on or you’ll be late!”

He never tired of that joke.

If tonight was canceled, it would be disappointing though no great surprise. Actually, it was probably a good thing: My skating skills were a triumph of enthusiasm over ability. Speed-skating the wet, cobbled, hilly streets would invariably result in me completing the rest of my dating tour on crutches.

I got stuck on the computer trying to finalize a soccer date in Barcelona and writing another pleading email to the Date Wranglers to help me out on the U.S. leg, which was proving to be a nightmare. When I rushed out of the metro at Bastille, wearing an old pair of jeans and clutching a bag with my skates, helmet, and padding, there were only a few skaters around. Clearly the efficient website had spread the word that the skate was off.

I couldn’t see Nick but spotted Marianne from our class, with Anne, Russell, Lisa, and about five others. They were huddled under a café awning looking very wet. Marianne waved happily as she saw me sprinting over. “Jennifer, can you believe this bloody weather?” she shouted over the din of the rain. “All that work and now we won’t get to skate.” I smiled sympathetically: She was the best skater in the group and had been itching to do this since we started.

“So what’s happening?” I asked, hugging her and the rest of the group. “Is Nick here yet?”

“Oh you just missed him.” She shrugged. “He wasn’t sure if you were coming so he went off with some of the others to some Irish pub.” We both rolled our eyes: Irish pubs—the McDonald’s of the new millennium.

I shrugged too. It was fine: no skate, no date. There was almost a logic to it. But just then, Nick and the rest of our group careened around the corner, running from canopy to canopy, yelling madly as they got increasingly drenched. Nick saw me with Marianne and came straight over, giving me a big hug. “Hey, Skater Dater, I thought you weren’t coming.”

I laughed as he flicked his wet coat at me. “Sorry, I got held up. Hey, I thought you guys had gone Oirish?”

“That we did,” he replied. “But we thought we’d better come back for the rest of you Roller Rookies.”

We all laughed at this, then trooped into the café and found tables at the back big enough to fit the whole group around and dump our gear under. Nick sat next to me, and for about twenty minutes we chatted about my date-a-thon and life in general. But soon the rest of the group joined in, and our gossiping, teasing, and storytelling was still going strong when closing time came hours later.

And not only was that fine—it was wonderful. I realized that, in a way, my date was with the whole group. Together we’d worked really hard to get to the point where we could attempt the Pari Roller. And okay, after all that work, here we were, unable to skate because of the weather, but we’d all made it this far, hadn’t we? That was surely something worth celebrating.

Kicked out onto the street, we hugged and shouted our goodbyes. I felt comforted and rejuvenated by the camaraderie of the evening. Our joint failure had turned into something lovely and reassuring, which instinctively gave me courage and hope for my own journey. I realized I had to make the time to celebrate the little triumphs, taking pride in how far I had come, rather than getting bogged down in one or two bad days and dates, believing they set the tone for the rest of my life.