This column originally ran in the Danish tabloid BT on July 3, 2019.
As summer vacation season begins and some of my Danish friends and business contacts tell me they are heading to the US on holiday, I’m always pleased but also a little nervous. Oh, dear, I think to myself, I hope they have a good time, and get to see the good side of America and not the bad.
And I try to give them a few tips for Danes visiting the USA.
My Danish friends who are about to spend some time in the U.S. often ask me for advice about surviving American culture, and I give them all the same two tips.
First, in the U.S. it’s a good idea to be polite to police officers. Danish cops often come from the countryside and have funny rural accents and since Danes generally don’t like hierarchy and authority anyway, they have no problem being sarcastic and a little smart-ass with a police officer.
That doesn’t work in the States. That Highway Patrol lady with the mirrored sunglasses who has just caught you speeding down Route 66 is unlikely to have much of a sense of humor. If she pulls you over, say “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” a lot and keep your hands in view at all times so she can see you’re not reaching for a gun.
That’s the first tip. The second tip is that, should you go to a bar, it can happen that a stranger or two will offer to buy you a drink. If the stranger is of the opposite gender, or same gender depending on the bar, that person is interested in you. Let them buy you a drink. And chat with them while you drink it. If there’s no chemistry, when the drink is finished, you can both go your separate ways.
That’s a little shocking for Danes. Buying a drink for someone is a big deal in Denmark, a place where a loving couple who go out for a romantic candlelight dinner often split the bill. For Danes, buying someone a drink is like buying them a birthday present. Many Danes are not comfortable with a stranger making that level of commitment.
The How to Live in Denmark project was recently featured on DR.dk, the website of Denmark’s national broadcaster DR.
The journalist chose to focus on love and romance in Denmark. Here are a few translated excerpts:
Having lived in Denmark for 15 years, Mellish has noticed that there are special rules for love here.
“Many of the dating mechanisms that work in the rest of the world don’t work here in Denmark. No one knows who should take the initiative. Women can’t figure out if a man is ‘Danish passive’ or just not interested.”
“Danish men are ‘nice boys’ that won’t go after a girl who doesn’t want them. There’s very little mystery and a woman simply cannot expect a Danish man to seduce her.”
Instead, Mellish has found, romance is facilitated with large amounts of alcohol consumed in the evenings.
“In Denmark, it’s easy to find sex, but hard to find love. People drink a lot of alcohol and go home with someone they don’t know well, and then figure out the day after if they want to get together for coffee.”
Cheating on one’s romantic partner is also common, Mellish says.
“I see a lot of infidelity, and I believe that’s because in Denmark, everything is so secure. There’s no war at the moment, people are financially protected by the welfare state, but you can still be unfaithful! That’s still dangerous! In Denmark, people are so open about sex that there is very little ‘forbidden fruit.’ But forbidden fruit is one of the things that makes sex sexy!”
Read the full Danish-language DR interview featuring How to Live in Denmark. Or read all of our blog posts on dating in Denmark on our dating tag.
Photo: Roman Boed via Creative Commons
I was on Danish morning TV recently, which isn’t really something to boast about. In a country of 5 million people, 10 guests a show, 365 days a year – you do the math. Just about everyone gets on TV sooner or later.
Some of my friends and colleagues mentioned that they had seen me, stumbling through with my imperfect Danish, trying to promote my book, How to Live in Denmark. But just some of my friends and colleagues. Specifically, it was my friends and colleagues who work in trendy creative industries – advertising, app designers, actors.
That’s because I was on TV at 8:45 in the morning, when people in those industries are just getting out of bed in preparation to roll into the office around 10.
My friends who have more conventional office jobs, like working in a bank, have to be their desk at 9am, so some of them had seen teasers – you know, coming up next, someone who doesn’t speak Danish properly, trying to promote a book – but they hadn’t seen the show itself.
And my friends who do real, physical work had no idea I was on TV at all. Airport tarmac staff, postal carriers, builders. They start work at 7am. Or even earlier, as you’ll know if you’ve ever had your deep sleep interrupted by a Danish builder banging on something outside your house at, say, 5:30 in the morning.
If you enjoy the podcasts and this website, you may also enjoy the new How To Live in Denmark book, now available for download from Amazon, iBooks and Saxo.com.
The book is an easy-to-read collection of essays from the first year of the How To Live in Denmark podcast, which premiered in summer 2013.
It includes material from some of the most popular podcasts, like ‘No Planned Hangovers: Ways I will not Integrate in Denmark’ and ‘Tips for Dating a Danish man’ and ‘Tips for Dating a Danish woman.’
There’s also an extra essay with a little bit more personal information about me, such as how I first came to Denmark.
There’s a postcard you can buy at souvenir shops called The Perfect European. You’ve probably seen it somewhere. Last time I went through Kastrup airport, there was a poster version in the customs area.
The postcard has been around since the 1980s, and it has several small cartoons, illustrating each nationality within the 1980s EU, and making a sarcastic remark about what it does best. It says: The Perfect European is as humorous as a German. The Perfect European drives like the French. The Perfect European is as humble as a Spaniard, as organized as a Greek, as calm as an Italian, and serves traditional British food.
And, according to the postcard, The Perfect European is as discreet as a Dane. A little cartoon in the lower-right-hand corner shows a blond Danish man opening his coat to show off pictures of naked ladies.
Denmark was the first country in the world to legalize pornography, in 1969. And for awhile, it was the world’s leading exporter of pornography.
This essay is from a series I wrote in co-operation with the Danish tabloid BT in 2003, shortly after I arrived in Denmark. The line drawings are my own.
When one of the right-wing nut-cases from the Danish People’s Party recently went on a rant about how most foreigners in Denmark were criminals, my friends and I were furious. Here we were, foreigners, and we were clearly not getting our cut of the criminal millions being made on the streets of Copenhagen. All we did was go to work every day and pay Danish taxes. We figured we had better get started.
After considering a variety of profitable crimes, we decided on a male prostitution ring, with the idea that our workers could do internal projects on slow nights. But our male escorts would not provide sex: that was too easy to get in Denmark.
Instead, they would offer romance. Specially imported from Mediterranean countries, these Romeos would bring flowers, write poetry, and say things like “Your eyes are like the ocean.” In short, they would do things that Danish men wouldn’t consider even if it would give the local Copenhagen team an instant victory over the German national squad.
This essay is from a series I wrote in co-operation with the Danish tabloid BT in 2003, shortly after I arrived in Denmark. The line drawings are my own.
When I first came to Denmark, people kept asking me what I thought about Danish men. It seemed like a weird question. Why didn’t they ask what I thought about Danish weather (bad) or Danish food (bad), or, for that matter, Danish women and children? (very nice, in my experience).
I soon learned their interest in Danish men was a variation on the famous German saying: Man spricht uber das, was man nicht hat. (You talk about what you don’t have.) There are NOT a lot of men in Denmark, although there is quite a bounty of tall, timid boys.
While the culture of egalitarianism has done some great things for Denmark – where else will you see tattooed musclemen pushing baby carriages? – it has led to a terrific siphoning off of testosterone. Danish men seem too timid to do anything that makes men men, such as taking risks, taking initiative, or enjoying the pure thrill of the chase. Don’t return a Frenchman’s calls, and he will become intrigued and pursue you until the end of the Earth. Don’t return a Dane’s phone call (singular) and he will forget the whole thing.