France… REALLY!!! 

By Dale Gershwin

Updated June 7, 2004 - From the chapter on MARRIAGE:

            “I’d like to thank the Academy, my director, my producer, my writer, my co-stars, my mother, my father, my kid brother who should get his ass a job and stop filching off the rest of us, and, of course, my best friend in the whole world: my wife Patty.”

            Look—marriages in Anglo-Saxon countries aren’t breakin’ any durability records either.  No one says they are.  But the screaming difference between marriage in, say, North America and marriage in France (and most other so-called “Latin” countries and cultures)—and possibly the reason for the survival and thrival of the pitifully few North American marriages that do make it through alive—are those magic words: best friend.  To the French, the thought that your spouse should or even could be first and foremost your best friend—or even last and aftmost—or even a glancing acquaintance—is as acceptable or even believable as the thought that your garage mechanic should be first and foremost your neurologist.

            For a French man, a wife comes with the territory—the general territory of adult life which happens to include such other accessories as a sofa, a car, season tickets to the local soccer-association matches, some land that aunt Georgette left him last year, and the various utensils in the top left drawer under the sink which facilitate the preparation of the evening meal.  Ask a French man who’s trying to come to terms with a life-altering dilemma if he’s shared his ruminations with his wife, and he’ll guffaw into his escargot.  “Why on Earth,” he will react, “would I ask my Peugeot repairman to give me his take on my dizzy spells?!”

            For a French woman, a spouse provides the missing appendage—the appendage without which she was most lamentably born, and the urgent locating and attachment of which has been the focal point of her upbringing from the time she was old enough to know the difference between Lalique and Baccarat.  Ask a French woman who’s trying to come to terms with a life-altering dilemma if she’s shared her ruminations with her husband, and she’ll be shamed into saying “YES!” even if she doesn’t have one.