Too much vous, not enough tu

A favourite topic of conversation amongst Anglophones living in France is the old “tu versus vous” debate. As in, how long does it take before you get onto “tu” terms with (say) your (young, long-haired) postman? Or why does your (young, trendy, laid-back) hairdresser persist in calling you “vous”, when you’ve made it quite clear you’d love to be tu-ed?

We all have our tu/vous stories. Here’s mine. There's a late 20's (I’m guessing) and rather attractive but very shy young man who does the mucking out at the stables where I ride. I have had the hots for him since just about forever, but I digress. Every time I go to saddle up, there he is, wearing a tight, white T shirt, scooping horse poop and heaving heavy hay bales around in a manly kind of way, while I mince about in my jodphurs, all Jilly Cooper-like. Anyway, we have gradually started to chat a little, mainly about music (believe it or not but I can bluff my way in deep house and techno, being married to someone who earns his living by making just that), and on one momentous occasion fairly recently I said to Stable Boy "si vous voulez, on pourrait peut-etre se tutoyer?" and to my delight, he agreed. Hurrah! A new friend! White T Shirt Man is Mine!

Bugger me, I go back a week later and he's forgotten. Not only is he still all shy and humble, but he’s gone back to that "vous" thing. “Ah, mais tu peux me tutoyer, tu sais!” I say with a big smile, and he nods. I go back the following week. He calls me vous again. I do the “my name is Madame Personne, but you can call me Grande” thing, he agrees, we smile. And then a week later, we’re back to la case depart, as they say in France. Things continue in this vein for a couple of months. Every week or so I ask him to “tu” me, and he struggles valiantly with this idea and sometimes it even works for a bit… until he relapses again to "vous", leaving me feeling peeved. Doesn’t it occur to him that someone as obviously young (at heart) and cool as moi meme should be called "tu"?. I kid myself that perhaps he is in awe of me in a Lady Chatterley’s Lover kind of way (stop sniggering at the back), but I think not. He just knows I'm a forty-something woman with two kids and a wedding band on her finger, who wishes she could still pull. And you know what? He's got it in a nutshell.