Dating in Italy part I

I’ve been living in Florence since the end of April, doing my UK job remotely and dipping a toe in the digital nomad life. Lucky me.

I’ve had a growing infatuation with Italy for several years. I think it was a trip to Sicily in 2018 that tipped me over the edge, and I began to tumble gently down this delightful rabbit hole. Notwithstanding the country’s problems – which I’m getting more exposure too now, a more realistic picture – it is stunningly beautiful, diverse in both the physical and socio-cultural landscape, and (hot take alert, I know) incredibly sexy. Even a café sign typeface can get me going here, but show me a sharply dressed Italian man walking (never rushing) through a train station on his way to work and I swear to god, I’m on fire.

I came for a little adventure, to practice my language skills, and yes, to date. I came to date and shag, and preparatory dating-app activity was planted firmly on my to-do-list alongside the boring stuff like stocking up on medicines and buying travel insurance.

There was even a brief moment when I wondered if I was a sex tourist, but I decided the term probably implies payment, and I’ve never paid for sex. Not with money anyway, perhaps with self-respect.

Early experiences have been disappointing. In all honesty it has been like playing a bingo card of shitty male tendencies. Selfishness – check, entitlement – check, sexist views– check. I could go on.

Here’s a brief highlights reel. If you’re a heterosexual woman coming to Italy with a bag full of dreams and condoms, consider it a little heads up.

Note that these are experiences of meeting people from dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble, also the traveller app Couchsurfing, which I get the impression many guys here use to find hookups. While I’m not suggesting these experiences are representative of all Italian men, I’ve heard enough anecdotally from women who’ve lived here for years to feel confident saying these are common experiences.

Let’s go…!

Lorenzo. An early Tinder date, he said I’d intimidate Italian men. A compliment apparently, but it surprised me. In hindsight it was an early indication that I may not easily find the kind of communication skills I value. It was a pretty good date but he kissed badly (how do people get to 40 still kissing badly?!). When I messaged him to say I had a good time but didn’t think we were a match, he pressured me to go out again until I blocked him.

Francesco had a cool job, had previously lived in Asia and the UK and seemed promising for good conversation. Already a little weary and cautious from the dates I’d had, I gave him a polite heads up that I could stay about an hour for the drink we’d arranged. Very reasonable, I thought, and manages expectations, avoiding potential awkwardness. He was clearly disgruntled and I didn’t like it one bit. Anything other than ‘no problem! look forward to meeting you’ would have been weird in my opinion – isn’t everyone trying to be their best selves ahead of a first date, so if you can’t manage it now, what else might be lurking there…

When I expressed a bit of concern about his response he got angry and defensive. I suggested we take a pause rather than meet that evening as planned and the gaslighting began – ‘you do understand you did this!’.

Ciao, Franceso.

Claudio looked, dressed and moved like a 1940s movie star. But he arrived half-drunk and lunged in for a kiss before we’d even reached the bar. My freeze response kicked in and I went ahead with date, which was the quickest but most excruciating drink I’ve ever had. He asked me to go home with him twice and when I said I wasn’t feeling that kind of connection, he responded with ‘well let’s try to make one’. I went inside bar to pay, contemplating asking the staff to squirrel me out down the back alley, at which point he rushed over with his wallet – ‘oh no no no signora, I might be a sex offender but I’m still a gentleman’.

Marco I met back in 2020 when I first visited Florence and was one the subject of one of my most successful erotic stories. Apparently other women like Italian guys too, who knew? We bumped into each other on Bumble and within days he was fingering me in a secluded corner of a local beauty spot, a rose garden with a spectacular view over Florence. Despite prompts and suggestions (and living in the same small city), Marco didn’t get his act together to meet me again for over a month. He contacted me when I was away on holiday in Naples, started hassling me for nudes and got angry when I postponed a very loose plan for video sex. Reflecting on our face-to-face meetings in which he’d sought to learn next to nothing about me, I concluded I was little more than a sex doll to him and blocked him.

Frederico was nice enough albeit a little one-dimensional. I could see early on I wasn’t able to get much beyond surface-level conversation, chit-chat. But he was attractive, had good manners and early signs showed he respected boundaries – a rare find, I had begun to think! He seemed a bit old-fashioned but I like meeting people with different perspectives from my own.

After a couple of dates I got the sense he wasn’t that keen for another one, so like a functional adult (so I thought), I asked directly.

‘Do you want to go out again?’ was precisely what I said.

His response:

‘I feel good with you, you are a very nice person. But in this period I’m not looking for a relationship, especially a distance relationship’.

Ignoring the initial pull to reply this bizarre message a kneejerk ego-driven response, I took a breath and hand-held him through an adult conversation about desires and expectations.

I continued seeing him until I got a fuller picture of his views, beginning to notice a deeply-held belief about hard-wired differences between the sexes and a refusal to acknowledge the influence of social factors in shaping behaviour. This was already enough of a turn-off for me, a social scientist, but when I reflected on how he’d dismissed my opinions on subjects I clearly knew a lot more about than him, versus the disproportionate attention I’d seen him pay to the biggest male dullards in social situations, I was out.

Worse was to come in Naples, where I began to use the traveller app Couchsurfing to meet locals. These weren’t dates as such but are worth mentioning.

Guiseppe whisked me around for a walking tour which was admittedly interesting, if a little brisk and the narrator a little negative about the city (a bit odd for someone proactively contacting travellers and offering to show them around, but okay…). For his first trick he sprung another Couchsurfer woman on me with no warning, assuming I would be okay someone else joining us. I had already been with this guy a couple of hours and couldn’t face meeting another new person at that point, so I made a polite excuse and left them to it. Later when I messaged to thank him for the tour he was clearly annoyed about me hopping off his strange little tour bus, saying ‘I don’t know why you left’ – and not actually asking.

At this point I’m thinking – ‘does no one ask each other questions here?!’ Does no one talk about things…?!’

And they say British people are repressed…

For his next trick,Guiseppe messaged to say he was learning massage and to offer me one. This was proffered as casually as though he was learning guitar and offering to play me a song, not get me in a private room in a state of undress and touch my body. He played dumb when I asked if he was offering massages to his male friends.

Mirko was a Couchsurfer I actually stayed with. He’d hit me up two months before I left London, and we struck up a rapport. I stayed with him five days and we quickly started hanging out a lot and hooking up. We had interests things in common and he did a convincing turn as a decent man. Honestly I quite liked him and things felt intimate, or at least he was able to cos-play intimacy. I had no expectation of anything long-lasting but from my perspective things can be very short and still be special and I’d got the mistaken impression he could communicate in a healthy adult way.  

And so I initiated what I thought was a normal adult check-in, a little temperature check along the lines of ‘are you feeling this too’ – and mainly with a view to keeping a bit of a lid on my feelings if appropriate. Honestly not much of a big deal from my perspective and proportionate to what had passed between us, despite the limited timespan on it.

Forget ‘I’m not looking for a relationship’ – this guy fucking flipped. By which I mean he went in an instant from warm and attentive, to defensive, cold and mean. Incredibly mean. It was liked I’d asked to piss on his mother’s grave, not gently expressed some warm fuzzy feelings.

This was a whole saga I will perhaps deep-dive into another time, because it was wild and there was some good learning there.

Finally, a shout-out to Giovanni, another Couchsurfer. He seemed a lot of fun, a bit cheeky, and we got a little flirty arranging to meet for a drink, then *boom*, he made a rape joke, something along the lines of ‘you’re so hot I might drug your drink’. I said I didn’t like it and he started gaslighting me (more… really!) – ‘you’re being uptight’ type of thing. Blocked.

I blocked him and hung up my hat, abandoning the apps to digest what I’d observed, which extends beyond the above, but I’d have to chain myself to my desk for a week to capture it all.   

The key themes I’m seeing:

• Sexual pressure / poor understanding of consent
• Low/ weak communication and emotional regulation skills
• Gaslighting deployed to try to ‘win’ conversations and situations, rather than talking about needs, wants, expectations, showing vulnerability and empathising with others
• The spectre of the ‘lone wolf’ (yawn) – the guy who sees himself as a prize and thinks every woman is trying to tie him down
• Fragile egos – sense of self dependent on notions of virility, manifests sometimes as a need to ‘do the chasing’ and ‘convince’ women to sleep with them, plus angry reactions to even minor perceived rejections
• Entitlement – men who are really thrown off when you assert your needs and desires where this disrupts their plans or their ‘moves’

Underneath all this I can’t help feeling it is basically it is the usual suspect – women not being seen as fully human. You are playing a part in their show and only seen in relation to their own wants and needs, often with zero interest shown in your inner world, let alone the skills to navigate and marry your two perspectives. And toxic masculinity of course, that too.

While I must admit there is a ‘chivalry’ aspect that is noticeably stronger here than in London and sometimes feels good in the moment – who doesn’t like a door held open or a freebie in a shop? – I’ve let go of any notion that old-fashioned views might be cute and inoffensive like an Isle-of-Wight tearoom. I’ve started to notice the flies in the soup and the rats in the kitchen.