By Stephanie Sellars

The changing weather makes me nostalgic for quondam sexual adventures. About a year ago, I met a Swedish bass player at a party. We flirted throughout the evening and he taught me a few phrases in Swedish, such as “Ska vi knulla?” (how are you?). He repeated the phrase throughout the night … Ska vi knulla as we chatted over cocktails, Ska vi knulla as we danced the tango and Ska vi knulla as we progressed beyond linguistic foreplay and in to my bed. Suddenly, he stopped and said, “I can’t.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “I have a girlfriend,” he said sheepishly. I understood his conflict, but did I care? No. Would I ever see him again? Probably not. “Well,” I said, at the end of our awkward intermission, “You may as well finish what you started.” He finished all right. Then he left like a sulky puppy in a sheepskin, apologizing and failing terribly at convincing me he had no regrets. He gave me a Swedish lesson, an orgasm and a story. What more could I want from a one-night stand?

My flings with foreigners have always been interesting, if not exceptionally erotic. The initial attraction is obvious: We are naturally drawn to the unknown. There’s an element of the unfamiliar in every new person we date, but if that person is from a different culture, there are more exotic aspects waiting to be discovered. You may find the thing that attracts you most is a sexy accent or a romantic attentiveness that makes you wonder why you ever dated an American. Cultural stereotypes have a powerful allure, a certain je ne sais quoi that colors our ideas of romance.

My first great love was French. He was everything my adolescent heart had dreamed about in a lover—passionate, poetic, romantic and sensual, nothing at all like the aggressively seductive Pepé Le Pew-type character Americans love to mock. Although this grand amour did not have a happy ending, my French certainly improved. I learned useful expressions like “grand nez, grosse bite” (big nose, fat cock). Linguistic differences can be fun in a fling; they open up the creative portals of communication. Body language becomes a priority. If the lovers know enough not to require a dictionary for basic conversation, they may have playful and erotic tutoring sessions. On the other hand, if you can’t understand a word your Japanese hottie is saying, you can just kiss her and smile and shrug in that irresistibly cute “I don’t have a clue, but I really like you” way. However, sex and charades are no substitute for stimulating conversation. The “language of love” may be universal, but it’s not so helpful when you have to communicate about a serious topic like birth control.

Although a language barrier is a major impediment to a long-term relationship, many culture hounds find that the benefits of a cross-cultural partnership are far greater than the frustrations. American men increasingly tend to prefer foreign women who supposedly aren’t demanding particularly in marriage or cohabitation. The website NoMarriage.com describes the modern American woman as “having several fundamental problems that will never go away and that will get much worse a few years after she is married.” The site lists anti-male bias, self-centeredness, sense of entitlement, “princess” syndrome and general mental instability among the problems of modern American women, and thus encourages men to travel abroad to find the ideal wife, highlighting Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. “Foreign women generally don’t have any of these problems,” the site says. Any man who spent a few months in Brazil or Russia will not even look at American women again.” A bit extreme perhaps, but the site has a point: Foreign women are in high demand, spawning businesses like RussianBrides.com and ForeignWomenMegasite.com, which connecting gorgeous foreign women with jaded American men. One satisfied client of RussianBrides.com says, “It’s much easier to teach English to a Russian lady, than to teach an American woman how to be a good wife.” As for my Swede—A few weeks after the incident, I told our story to my American friend who speaks fluent Swedish. He laughed hysterically. “Ska vi knulla doesn’t mean ‘how are you,’ ” he said. “It means ‘shall we fuck’!” Deceit, I suppose, is a universal language.