Why I gave up my life in Auckland for love in France at the age of 63

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When a whirlwind romance led to a life-changing decision, Maria Hoyle left Auckland behind to start a new chapter in France at 63.
Kiwi journalist and author Maria Hoyle moved to France, aged 63, after a whirlwind romance.

“Oh I live in France now. In a water mill. I went there at 63, to
be with a man I’d only just met.” For the past couple of years, that cluster of words has become something of a personal brand. It’s pretty niche, as branding goes, but it never fails to get a reaction. Even my desperately busy GP – during a consultation when I was last back in Auckland – stopped in her tracks, swivelled her chair to face me and said, “Wait, what? Okay… I need to hear this from the beginning!”

I didn’t do it for that, of course. I don’t believe I’ve ever done anything thinking, “Ah, this will make a great story.” I’m too much of a coward to flirt with risk on such a frivolous premise. So then what does make a reasonably sane, middlingly content copywriter and mother of two nearing retirement pull up 25 years of New Zealand roots and skip off to deepest rural France on a whim?
I’ve thought about this a lot, and it mostly comes down to four letters. Fomo.
They say you get it from Instagram. That you can contract if from Facebook. That it’s a disease of the young. Yet there’s nothing to give you “Fear of Missing Out” like getting older. And not just any “older”. You have to be old enough to see there’s a door to a whole other world that’s ever so slowly closing – yet still young enough to hurl yourself through it. At 63, that was me. And that “other world” was Europe. I’d dreamed of living back there for some time. I’d grown up in the UK, my late mum had gone to live in Spain when my brother and I were in our 20s, and I’d studied Spanish and French at university. So I had strong emotional and cultural ties to “the Continent”.
I’d never quite made the move back, though, because I’d grown to love New Zealand too. After emigrating from London to Auckland in 1999 with my Kiwi then-husband and baby daughters, I had invested almost a quarter of a century in learning to understand Aotearoa’s ways. To letting myself marinade in its other-ness until its scents, sounds, landscape and textures became a part of me. I’d cultivated beautiful friendships and strong work relationships, layered experiences on top of each other like fragile strips of damp paper until they slowly coalesced into a shape I could call home.
So at 63, I was happy enough – single, always broke, but grateful for my friends and beautiful grown-up daughters. Yet also guiltily thinking, “Is this all there is?”
Then just as I was pondering the what-ifs and the is-it-too-lates, along came an adventure – complete with the aforementioned mill, a French hamlet and a charming silver fox named Alistair. It was like having someone else’s Uber Eats mistakenly delivered to my door, only rather than me saying, “Erm, I think this is meant for Mrs Cooper at number six”, I greedily seized the opportunity with both hands.
After several romantic fails, it was indeed an app (only Tinder, not Uber) that finally brought me Alistair. He lived in Nelson, but was soon moving overseas. “I own a 200-year-old water mill in France,” he told me during our first phone conversation. I’d read somewhere that when courting, a certain Central American bird goes to great lengths to draw the female’s gaze to its splendid yellow thighs. In the absence of yellow thighs, Alistair’s girl-magnet equivalent appeared to be French real estate. Two dates later he asked me to go with him, and I couldn’t think of any earthly reason why not. Alistair was funny, attractive, smart, interesting, emotionally articulate and seemed incredibly open – with not a glimmer of “Grumpy Old Man” syndrome. I didn’t own my home, the dog wasn’t actually mine and could live with my daughter, my job could be done remotely and everything else was just excuses. Plus, it was France.
The infatuation with everything French began at school – improbably, with a set of Longman’s textbooks depicting a Parisian family living the most boring life imaginable. The famille Marsaud were very white, very dull and today would probably be Marine Le Pen voters. Maman spent all her time in the kitchen, Papa at work, daughter Marie-France was often just being in the garden (a budding existentialist) and little Jean-Paul was a pain in the neck. Despite Longman’s best efforts to kill our enthusiasm, I couldn’t get enough. Everything seemed inherently more interesting in French. The table is feminine! The ducks say “coin, coin”! Jean-Marie is a boy’s name! Especially when later text books showed black-and-white images of cool young Parisians chatting animatedly at cafe tables, of the Metro, the galleries, the wide boulevards. It was a taste of something more exotic, a hint of adulthood. It was a voice that whispered, “There is so much more beyond these drizzly English suburbs.”
They say you should never meet your heroes, but I did finally make France’s acquaintance aged 19, working as a nanny in the searing heat of a Parisian summer. It was sweltering, it was dirty, it was bewildering, it was more sprawling than I expected. It was wonderful.
At 20 I lived in France for six months, and later took any chance I could to spend a long weekend there. Easy from London. Impossible from New Zealand.
So fast-forward to 2022, and I said yes. Yes, I would go with Alistair, this 65-year-old with a goatee and a thing for ancient French buildings.
Auckland cunningly turned on the charm in the weeks before my planned departure, and I almost backed out. Everything suddenly looked more attractive – even the traffic cones. And I couldn’t go anywhere without my subconscious thrusting a photo album under my nose every time I drove past a personal landmark. “That’s where you used to take the girls for fluffies; oh, look – there you are having a birthday picnic; ah, remember that night at the Powerstation; oh, here’s one of you losing your bikini bottom in the waves!” And so on. Simple memories that gang up and try to drown you in nostalgia.
But I got on that Emirates flight to Paris anyway (to be followed by a long, exhausting journey to the middle of French nowhere). Because I’d also somewhat narcissistically modelled myself as an inspiration to the post-menopausal. Look at me living life to the full at 63! Look at me, daughters – see how life is a never-ending adventure? Look at me showing that love is possible at any age!
Yes, that was the final bit of marketing (mostly for my benefit) that got me on that plane. So, have I found my happy-ever-after? Is life in a French rural idyll all you’d imagine it would be? How are Alistair and I getting along? Ah, well, that would be telling, and my publisher warned me: “No spoilers.” I will say this, though. Je ne regrette rien.
A Very French Affair by Maria Hoyle is published by Allen and Unwin (RRP$37.99) and will be on sale from September 3.
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