I Want to Fall in Love Again--This Time With a House

I spend way too much time looking online at houses for sale in France. Something about it feels like online dating. You keep scrolling, looking for the perfect one, and start to despair of ever finding it.

Many that look good in the first couple of pictures disappoint in the details. There’s only one bathroom. Or the kitchen is dark and needs renovating. The bedrooms are tiny and crammed under sloping roofs. There is no garden, only a dingy courtyard.

‘Figure out what your few non-negotiables are,’ my daughter said when I told her of my ever-expanding list of desired features in my dream home. ‘You can’t have everything.’

True. Just like swiping through pictures of men in a dating app, you remind yourself that the perfect man/house just doesn’t exist. Best to lower your expectations.

But isn’t that what led me down the path of my old life to begin with? I think of all the times I told myself, ‘What you want doesn’t exist, it’s a fantasy, just settle for what’s here.’

I left because I wanted more out of life. I want to feel optimistic that I can find my dream home. Sometimes I’m even adamant even that, damn it, I won’t settle for less.

I want to find that place that makes me yell ‘Stop the bus!’ like Diane Lane did in Under the Tuscan Sun.

Have you seen the film? I watched it again recently on my flight back from the U.S. I love that moment in the film, where she is on a tour of Italy and jumps up to stop the bus when she sees the For Sale sign of a villa she had been admiring in an estate agent’s window in town. It encapsulates that feeling of being shot through the heart—love at first sight, ‘coup de foudre’ in French (literally a bolt of lightning—they say that phrase a lot on ‘The Parisian Agency,’ if you’ve watched that show.)

Diane Lane throws all caution to the wind, acting purely on feeling, and goes for it!

But once again Hollywood has gotten into my head, just like it did with men. All those happy endings make real life pale in comparison.

Diane Lane doesn’t find a ‘perfect’ house, though. It’s a mess, in fact. It’s old and crumbling, and it takes a lot of work and discomfort to make habitable.

What makes her stop the bus is, in fact, not the house itself, or not only the house. She hasn’t even seen it yet, just a few pictures in the window. (And it’s not visible from the road.) It’s the idea of the house and the environment in which it sits. It’s Italy and the woman she sees in town sensually eating her gelato and refreshing herself in the fountain. She wants what she’s having—living la dolce vita in Italy.

Of course, the real story behind the film, in the memoir by Frances Mayes, is nothing like the film. Mayes and her partner (she wasn’t single!) spent four summers in Italy looking at houses. They saw a lot of duds and went down a lot of dead-ends before they found the right one.

At the end of their fourth summer, they zero in on a town they love, Cortona, and spend a few days looking at houses in the area. None of them are right. Then the agent calls to say there is one more that might be up for sale. They see it and fall in love, but they walk away when they hear the asking price. It’s just too much. The next days they get on a plane back to San Francisco.

All through the winter they dream about this house. And they decide ultimately that they want it, the price be damned. So when they go back the next summer, they begin the long, arduous process of buying the house. After that, the long drawn-out renovations begin, with many twists and turns.

I love this version of events as well, how the house lingered in their minds all winter.

‘During several years of looking, sometimes casually, sometimes to the point of exhaustion, I never heard a house say yes so completely,’ she writes.

Even though it unfolded more slowly, that feeling of falling in love at first sight is still there.

I caught a glimpse of a shrine, then looked up at the three-story house with a curly iron fanlight above the door and two tall, exotic palm trees on either side. On that fresh morning, the facade seemed radiant, glazed with layers of lemon, rouge, and terra-cotta. We both became silent as we got out of the car. After all the turns into unknown roads, the house seemed to just have been waiting all along.

‘Perfect, we’ll take it,’ I joked as we stepped through the weeds.

Yet they are cautious, as one should be when falling in love. Her sisters think she is acting like a gooey-eyed teenager. She hears her grandfather’s voice in her head, telling her, ‘Be realistic. Come down out of the clouds.’ She asks herself if this is a whim or something deeper.

‘I am seven thousand miles from home plunking down my life savings on a whim. Is it a whim? It feels very close to falling in love and that’s never whimsical but comes from some deep source. Or does it?’

You know how people say, ‘You just know’? This again applies to falling in love with a person or a house. I’d like, once in my life, to just know.

I can’t recall if money becomes an issue as they renovate the house. (I haven’t finished re-reading the rest of the book.) But money is a very real practical issue. I’m NOT going to spend my life savings on a house.

I’ve told myself that I have no business dreaming about homes until I know what kind of mortgage I can get in France. So next on my to-do list is getting some kind of pre-approval.

Also, getting a visa. Better to know I can actually stay before falling in love. (I fell in love with Scotland and had my heart broken. I’m trying to be more careful this time.)

I had a wonderful time with my daughter on our recent trip to France, but I didn’t have anything close to a ‘Stop the Bus!’ moment. There is one place in Mayenne I’m still considering, but it’s a very small village, and there isn’t much nearby that gets me excited. I was starting to pursue it, but I realized, I want to feel excitement and that falling-in-love feeling. So I’ll keep looking.

I’ve stopped scrolling through endless houses online. I’m done scouring the internet for my dream home. Instead, I’m planning a trip to Normandy with a friend to visit more towns I’ve found that seem like a good fit for me— beautiful, vibrant, historic market towns close-ish to Paris (but with cheaper housing prices). If you know of any you would recommend, let me know.

And I’m also done with online dating. I have been for a while, in fact. But I did a fair bit of it during my first year of travel. In fact, in the next installment of my memoir I arrive in London, where I first began online dating.

I think that the best way to fall in love—with a person or a house—is IRL, as they say. So once I find the place where I want to be, I’ll start going to see houses, in person, not online. And I’ll put myself out there, meeting new people and . . . who knows what might happen. But I do not intend to go down the rabbit hole of scrolling for love again!

I’m dying to hear your stories of finding your (dream) home. Was it love at first sight? Did you throw caution to the wind? Did you have a ‘Stop the bus!’ moment?

Do share in the comments!! I’ll see you there. :)

Until next time,

Anne

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Bonus: Video of a visit to Bramasole, the house Frances Mayes wrote about in Under the Tuscan Sun. I was surprised at how large it was!

Anne Boyd was a literature professor in New Orleans for 23 years before embarking on new life abroad as a creative writer. She is the author or editor of seven books. She has been writing this newsletter since December 2022. You can learn more about her on her website. (Coaching page currently under construction—contact me if you’re interested in learning more).