In which I give vent to overweening emotional racism

Rodelinda and her fiancé have gone ppphhhht. They'd been facing a bit of a doozy of a situation, nothing worse than millions of other couples face, but quite aside from the wierd alchemy of personalities whose explosions and transformations are so unpredictable, it's my personal opinion they ran into some cultural problems, him being a limey and her being Canadian. Europeans are really hard to have relationships with, in my experience, and thinking back over all of my newworlders who have tried, they've failed spectacularly. Me included, and not even particularly, and mine failed fucking ferociously*.

When it comes to love Europeans seem to have such set ideas about how things are done, about the patterns of existence, and that causes the biggest problems when they try to make it with newworlders, who seem to have a greater tendency - romantic, unrealistic maybe, but certainly there, and quite frankly I wouldn't want to feel any other way - that every new relationship is like a special and unique snowflake that could lead in fascinating new directions that have never been explored before.

Maybe my feeling that way is like accent-deafness (when you can hear how weird everyone else is talking, but can't comprehend that the way you're talking is also quite weird). Maybe it's down to the friends who I'm able to have in-depth emotional talks with being like me, so I have a skewed view of my own background. Or maybe it's part and parcel of how hostile I feel these days about all the negative implications of culture and tradition - because I do see European gender dynamics west and south of here, in Belgium, as impossibly fucking sexist.

So sexist that newworld men get alienated. The behavioural expectations placed on them by French or Italian chicks that I've witnessed, for example, are just fucking ridiculous. Living in those two countries for a few years really made me realize the degree to which the new worlds' women's liberation movements were general liberation movements that have benefitted men enormously. Try telling them that though. Some of them just don't get it until they've been well and truly smothered by a couple of years of cohabitation with some perpetually angry French chick.

Speaking of guys not getting it but on a different topic altogether, here's one who does. I stumbled across this while I was looking at a bunch of things on a fat-acceptance website a nutritionist friend who's not fat posted on Facebook. I wish I had know there were fat-acceptance websites back when I was fat. As it is, I'm bookmarking it for after I have children, when I expect to get enormous, and in the meantime it's nice to read a fairly militant slice of pop-feminism. Anyways, that particular thing by Chris Clarke struck a chord because I've had so many conversations with nice men about why women who don't know them treat them like dangerous scum. I understand it hurts. But, you know. Other things hurt worse.

*I should point out my experience, while embarassingly broad, doesn't encompass the Iberian peninsula, nor Scandinavia, Germany, or points east. Until you get well into Asia.