I had a drink with an Irish friend about three weeks into my stay in New York, and he shared a theory with me. He’d heard it from a German acquaintance of his, who’d also spent time living in America. We can call it the “peach/coconut conundrum”.
If you are from Europe and move to the US for a spell, your first impression is likely to be that Americans are friendlier than our countrymen. They’re more open and always happy to talk to strangers. They’ll invite you out for a drink and they’ll mean it.
You will, at this stage, be thrilled by this new life of yours, spent surrounded by people who clearly delight in your company. After a while, however, you will realise that you are pedalling but staying still. All those pals you thought you’d been making will still feel like just that; loose connections, who will happily go for an occasional drink but remain altogether quite distant.
There won’t be any great heart-to-hearts, or idle texting of the sort usually done by people getting closer to one another. At this point, you may wonder what is going on, and start asking yourself if you are the problem. As my Irish friend explained: it’s not you, it’s them.
Northern Europeans, the theory goes, are like coconuts: they’re tough on the outside but once you’re in you’re in, and there is a lot of softness to be found underneath that hard exterior. Americans, on the other hand, are peaches: all juicy and soft on the outside, but there is a core in the middle that is essentially impossible to crack.
Of course, I was only there for just over a month. That isn’t quite enough time to make lifelong friendships, on either side of the pond.
Still, speaking to longer-term expats yielded worrying results; according to them, I could move to New York permanently and still spend a long time trying and often failing to build genuine friendships.
That is, I suppose, one of the reasons why I would find it hard to turn the Big Apple into my forever home. Another one is that Americans work too damn hard.
As a proud layabout – a dilettante, even, hence the name of this column – I (ironically?) worked very hard to build myself a life in London where, if needed, I will always be able to find someone to have a drink with in the middle of the day, if that is what I fancy. Maybe I don’t have a lot on that week; maybe it is finally getting sunny and warm. In any case, a handful of texts will usually result in finding a pub companion.
It isn’t that my friends and I don’t care about our careers, or live like teenagers. We simply recognise that life isn’t wholly about work, and sometimes we act accordingly. Do some New Yorkers believe that? Perhaps, but I am yet to encounter them. I am glad to be back among my people.
Or am I? I could list another hundred reasons why I love London so dearly, and why I missed my Brits during those five weeks. That doesn’t mean that I can’t hear that niggling sound at the back of my head, endlessly going: “But what if? What if…?”
New York is a city with rough edges, where people work hard and keep their cards close to their chests, even if they don’t seem to at first. It’s expensive and subway platforms are filthy, and somehow every food item you can purchase has sugar in it.
That doesn’t mean its pull can be ignored. Like a dalliance that ended a bit too soon, my trip is still haunting me more than I’d care to admit. Americans aren’t exactly my people, but I loved being among them for a little while.
Like a dalliance, it was always going to end, but there is no great shame in yearning to go for another round.
