Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Walks along the Seine, Laughing in the Rain...

Okay, so I'm not in Mama Mia, and it's not summer (and P.S., I hate the terrible rhyme in that part of the song. Just for the record, the Seine rhymes with TEN, not with RAIN).


But I did walk along the Seine today with my Egyptian friend. It was beautiful and picturesque. The conversation was... interesting, to say the very least.


We talked about love. For him, this naturally led to talking about sex. Which for me, naturally led to talking about the Church.


My stance on pre-marital sex is really a difficult concept to explain in my limited French. Specifically, it's challenging to really explain the motivation in clear enough terms. Saying I won't have sex before marriage is simple enough. It's answering the follow-up "Why?" and "What?! WHY???!!" questions that requires more vocabulary than I've got in my arsenal. In English, no problem. But in French, uh... yeah. Problems.


He has a pretty typical view of love and sex, and he was verrrrry confused and a bit surprised by my position on the matter. My inability to clearly express myself didn't help the situation, I'm sure.





After recovering from the shock, he was actually really respectful about it. He just kept asking questions to get a feel for the "boundaries," if you will. And he kept shaking his head, not understanding how I could live 28 years... without. Ha. I just told him it's easy to go without something when you don't know what you're missing.
picture from Flickr creative commons

1 comment:

Erin said...

Ah yes. I can only imagine trying to have that conversation in French. And I can imagine his head shaking.