MONTREAL—To the men: don’t step into a woman’s personal space; refrain from touching; avoid talk of marriage or kids; be prepared to split the bill.

Women: time spent waiting on the romantic advances of a Canadian man is time wasted.

Jump on him before he gets away.

This was the advice for about 50 new arrivals to Canada who attended a Montreal immigration conference this week determined to crack the confounding cultural codes and signals of the Canadian dating scene.

One attendee, French national Severine Fourquet, said she has spent the last month and a half searching for jobs, attending conferences and networking as part of a reconnaissance mission for the new life she plans to build in Quebec.

That includes finding a significant other.

“It’s part of a life project,” she said. “I haven’t been able to find it in France. I’d like to be able to find a boyfriend here.”

In a workshop entitled “Flirting in Quebec,” there was no room for misunderstanding among attendees from France, Belgium, Benin, Colombia and Guadeloupe, a small Caribbean island belonging to France. They were all there in search of the same thing.

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“I haven’t tried to approach anyone, but I’ve tried showing signs,” explained Fadel Dehbi, a French national from the southern city of Marseille.

He has had no success so far, though he remains upbeat.

“It’s only been six months,” he said.

At the immigration conference where the workshop was held, there were kiosks set up by service providers, universities, regions of Quebec looking to fill labour shortages and many other groups who exist to ease the integration of the 55,000 people who settle in the province each year.

In addition to the many challenges of adapting to this country, people struggle to learn the language of love, said Marie-France Archibald, a seduction and life coach who co-hosted the workshop.

“I had two Latino clients this year and one of them said he wanted to go back to Brazil because socializing here was difficult,” she said.

“In Latin American countries people approach each other wherever they are. They send each other signals that they are interested. Here, you don’t find that in your daily life. You might see that at social events or in bars, but not in public transit. I often hear that.”

Nathalie Rochefort, president of DeGama, a non-profit organization that helps immigrants navigate their new world, said the course was created after seeing both men and women struggle to figure out the local dating scene.

“There were many women who complained about not being flirted with, about feeling invisible in the eyes of men,” she said. “On the other side, there are men who arrive in Quebec who think it’s fun and easy to flirt and pick up here.”

The course’s content is decidedly heterosexual. There was no discussion of cultural differences among the LGBTQ communities in Canada and other countries, nor were there any questions from the audience.

Rochefort has her own historical theory about the development of male and female dating characteristics in Quebec that make it so vexing for new arrivals.

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“When men came back from the logging camps, those women who were single didn’t have the time to wait around for a partner,” she said.

If there was to be a courtship, a marriage, a household and children, it had to happen fast.

“It was the woman who took things into her own hands so it could be dealt with before the men left again. That’s my interpretation. There are surely others.”

Other reasons suggested at the workshop include the rise of a robust feminist movement in Canada and the high divorce rate in North America, which may have resulted in boys being raised without a male role model to teach them about gallantry and more traditional modes of gender relations.

Whatever the reason, there were a roomful of female new immigrants who agreed that Canadian men, particularly those from Quebec, tend to be the complete opposite of their hot-blooded counterparts in other parts of the world.

“Here, if someone says ‘hello,’ you don’t know if they’re flirting or if it’s something else. It’s a bit complex,” said one woman from France, who asked that her name not be published.

“(In France) we have a tendency to be more expressive on things that please us or don’t please us. That’s how we communicate, so it’s difficult when you’re dealing with someone who won’t say things directly or frankly.”

Vincent Loubet, another French national who has been in Montreal for a month and a half, said he has noticed the bubble of personal space in which Canadian women feel comfortable is much larger than back home. But he has also benefitted from the supposed opportunism of women from Quebec, albeit when he was in France.

“She was the one who made the first move, but I was the one who invited her out to dinner and took the matter in hand,” he said, adding that he wasn’t put off by a forward woman. “I’m the same way with French women so I was pretty happy to have an experience with someone who took the lead.”

Fourquet said she is both destabilized by and optimistic about her enhanced role and increased power under this Canadian style of courtship.

She admits it could be tough to get over the ideas she has been raised with about women waiting for men to make overtures lest they be seen as eager or easy.

But then she thinks of the glances that were never pursued, the possibilities squandered.

“It’s a lost opportunity because if we had taken the initiative maybe it would have led to something.”

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