Ask Me Out Abroad

I've had some genuinely terrible dates in my life. Men who forgot to mention the girlfriend. The baby. The girlfriend with the baby. I've kissed a truly unfortunate number of frogs, and as far as I can remember, not one of them ever properly asked me out first. It just sort of... happened to me, badly, over and over.

Apparently the fix was simple. Leave the country.

First night in Malaysia, after years of being single, a man asked me out. I posted it on Facebook before I'd even processed it: I just had to travel halfway across the world to get a date. It was a terrible date, for the record. But it happened, and it happened almost immediately, the second I'd landed somewhere new.

Then Rome. I'd taken my mum for her birthday, and we were sat in a café in the middle of a square, coffee and biscoff, minding our own business. A Venezuelan man had clearly been giving me the eye from across the room, and eventually he came over to introduce himself. Sophisticated, suave, absolutely no shared language between us. My mum, delighted, told him he could sit down.

He tried everything he had.

"Francine," he said, "meet me at the Trevi Fountain tomorrow at noon."

I politely declined.

I don't know what it is about being somewhere unfamiliar that apparently makes me irresistible. At home, nothing. Not a single genuine ask in years, just an endless parade of men who weren't available and shouldn't have been trying. Abroad, twice, out of nowhere, men have simply walked over and asked.

Maybe when I was younger I should have moved abroad!