Bonjour! Mon nom est Josh.

This column was written in French for L’actualité magazine in spring 2012 and was re-blogged a day after the Quebec election win by the PQ. It became the most widely-read online piece in the magazine’s history—and elicited almost a thousand e-mails from francophones, most calling for language reconciliation after a divisive election. The following is a slightly edited English translation.

Hi, my name is Josh—and I confess, I’m a Quebec Anglophone. In fact I’m a typical Montreal anglo—I’m Jewish. Like most Jews I went to the English Protestant School Board of Montreal, because the French Catholic Board didn’t want us back then.

So I see myself as a Jewish Protestant. That’s because I spent every morning of my childhood learning all these traditional Christian hymns that only Jews in Montreal sing. For instance:

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so…

and O Little child of Bethlehem, how still we see thee rise…

I can go into any synagogue full of Montreal Jews, and lead them in a rousing chorus of Onward Christian Soldiers, and they’ll all know the words—including the rabbi!

Now unfortunately, while I was learning all these Protestant tunes, I didn’t learn much French, because English schools didn’t really teach that language in Quebec. When I went to school, at Sir Winston Churchill High, I did have a high school French teacher—Mrs. Schwartz. She taught me French twice a week with an English West End accent—that was one part Paris and two parts Cavendish Mall. But it turned out to be incomprehensible once I was old enough to go East of Schwartz’s Deli.

I grew up on a street called Deleppy—and I was fifteen before I found out it was actually called De L’Épée. I found this out when I took my first cab home alone and the francophone driver couldn’t find my street—even though we kept driving right by the street sign.

Fortunately, in my late teens I moved to downtown Montreal where I finally started to understand how Montreal worked. I lived in an area full of francophones on a street I called Gene Manz. This was obviously a cousin of Rue Jeanne Mance, the name every francophone I met called it. Same went for Pine Avenue which francophones all mysteriously called Avenue Pins.

But slowly I started to adapt and speak French better in this francophone city full of anglophones, allophones and xylophones. I worked in French, I dated in French I even voted for René Lévesque in 1976 to boost French power at a time I thought we needed it. I guess it worked.

My anglo wife and I also sent our son to French school for eight years, where at first he spoke a strange hybrid language—and came home saying thing like “Dad—I want a collation” (snack).

Even today he thinks buying milk at the corner dépanneur is standard English throughout Canada—just like taking the Métro, or the autoroute. Our goal was to make sure he spoke French better than me and we succeeded. At age sixteen he’s bilingual and totally embarrassed to hear my pre-historic anglo accent.

It’s a garden variety, pre-Bill 101 anglo accent. I struggle to get my eu sounds quite right—so I’ve been known to pronounce the city of Longueuil as “Longay”—instead of the correct Longueueueuey, But I read French newspapers and like most anglos I watch Canadiens hockey games on the French-language channel RDS—ever since English CBC started favoring Toronto Maple Leaf games.

Overall I think my history is typical of many, and probably most anglos. Our community has changed and adapted enormously over the past 30 years, as much as almost any in the western world. Our grandparents didn’t speak French at all—they were too busy trying to survive.

But today most anglos send their kids to French immersion, or French school and many of them end up with the Québecois accent of a lumberjack and the wine sophistication of a sommelier:” “Dad, Passe-moé le Grand Cru Château Dépanneur 2004, s’il te plaît.”

To quote a recent joke by legendary Quebec comedian Yvon Deschamps: “On ne peut plus se moquer de nos Anglophones ... ils sont devenus bilingues .. ils nous comprennent.”

We anglos are slowly mastering many others linguistic skills too. For example we’re learning to quickly decode those flashing electronic construction signs on our highways filled with large numbers of French-only words, announcing information like:

AUTOROUTE EN CONSTRUCTION. ROUTE ALTERNATIF FACULTATIF A MONTREAL, VIA IBERVILLE par le Chemin d’Argenteuil, à la Route 66(b) et 35(a)—sujet a des changements imprévus.

And they wonder why there’s always a traffic jam on the Eastern Townships highway. It’s because everyone’s slowing down to read the sign—especially us anglos. I think the roads department should at least give us some warning with a sign that says:

“Attention! Affiche en français difficile dans 2 km. Préparez vos dictionnaires!!”

Finally there are the most challenging signs of all—Our No-Parking signs, which aren’t easy to understand if you’re French, let alone English. That’s because they say stuff like:

Stationnement reservé pour détenteurs du permis de residents, secteur 33, 9h à 15h et 17h à 21h—sauf les fins de semaines et jours d’écoles.

Livraison seulement—le 5 mars au 27 décembre—sauf les lun. et ven. tous les deux semaines. Rémorquage à vos frais—évidemment!

Living in Quebec is always interesting, and it’s made us anglophones more interesting too. I think just like my journey from Deleppy Street to Avenue de L’Épée, we anglos have travelled a long way over the years. But it’s a voyage that’s just starting. The truth is that Montreal is an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in a duffle coat. It’s a mystery that’s hard to fathom—and so are we anglos.

We chose to stay here when hundreds of thousands of others left. We stayed through exhausting sign law battles and two Neverendum Referendums we didn’t want. We stayed because we’re Québécois—and Montrealers who love our city with a passion few Canadians can outdo. We’re all in favor of French signs and French service as well as French wine, French food and French kissing. That’s what makes this French North America and gives our city its je ne sais quoi.

We’ve also stayed in Montreal while too many francophones have quit for the suburbs. And we may need a Bill 301 to save French in Montreal—by forbidding more francophones from moving off the island.

Like many anglos, Montreal is in my blood. It’s an unpredictable, intriguing, special town—battered but beautiful, full of potholes but full of life. It’s a huge laboratory where the English and French languages mix together on the street like in no other city on earth—a global experiment. It’s where comedian Sugar Sammy can do a show that’s half in French and half in English—and sell out to 30,000 people.

It’s a city that’s living proof that English and French get along very well in practice—if not in theory. With patience and time, I believe we can ultimately have a strong anglo community in a strong French Quebec; a place where the two solitudes finally become just one.

I hope our kids stay here too and master the French language well enough to achieve the impossible anglo dream—to get a job as a Quebec civil servant.

Whenever I am confused or discouraged about what women want from me or what I want from them, whenever I feel love is a mystery I'll never be able to fathom and relationships are more trouble than they're worth, I count my blessings. At least, I keep telling myself, you're no honeybee.

Woody Allen once said that he was at two with nature; in my case, you can double that. I have lived my entire life in the suburbs, never very far, as it turns out, from a shopping mall. As a child, I refused to go to camp; as an adult, the idea of hiking in the woods or sleeping in a tent appalls me. All of which makes me an object of ridicule and scorn to friends who, despite living in the city, are constantly going on about the joys of nature. My reply is always the same: just try telling the plants, animals and insects who inhabit nature how wonderful it is. I'm not here to defend shopping malls, but there is one thing that can be said for them that can't be said for the wilderness: you can usually walk through The Gap without worrying about anyone trying to eat you.

The concept of the candlelight dinner doesn't exist in the wild either; date rape is de rigueur and dying for love is not just a romantic metaphor. For the male honeybee, even getting lucky has its pitfalls. It's not just that the bee's sex life is limited -- after all, everyone goes through dry spells -- it's tragically abrupt. To put it plainly, the male honeybee's genitals have been known to explode at the moment of climax, giving new meaning to the phrase "no-win situation."

The male praying mantis is faced with a similar Catch-22. While his head is telling him to maintain a safe distance from the aggressive female praying mantis -- "She's no good for you," he keeps reminding himself -- his abdomen is saying, "Hey, good lookin'." This is a male praying mantis, remember, so we all know which part of the anatomy wins out. The good news is that nature absolves him of any recriminations or second-guessing about his impulsive behavior. The bad news is that nature does this by having the female praying mantis devour her suitor's head during intercourse, a denouement which even guys who don't like cuddling after sex would probably find disconcerting.

The fate of the male Australian redback spider is better, but only slightly. His mate at least waits until after copulation to eat him, making the inevitable internal and eternal debate about whether or not to stay the night irrelevant.

But nature can be cruel in less obvious ways too. Take the peacock: all he has to do is show off his elaborate plumage to attract a female. Nothing to it, right? Well, leaving aside the fact that the plumage outweighs him and that it makes him an easy target for predators, there's also something fundamentally demeaning about having to preen and parade around like some sort of feathered Fabio just to get laid. It's no coincidence that the moment mating season is over the peacock sheds his plumage. At least until mating season begins again and again he forgets his pride and his common sense and is back making a spectacle of himself. Indeed, the bigger the spectacle the better.

All of this falls under the category of the things we do for love. Okay, you're no buzzing insect, no spineless invertebrate, no dumb bird or frog or chimp or salmon swimming upstream. You are a human being. You have free will. You are the only animal who can choose not to reproduce. None of which explains why you are willing to attend an Atom Egoyan film festival just because a woman you're attracted to thinks that Atom Egoyan is a cinematic genius.

I'm here to say he is no genius. Spend an evening staring at his oeuvre -- French for he laid another egg -- sometime and you'll realize just how undeniable and powerful the sex drive is. Like the praying mantis, your head is telling you: "You don't need this. Get the hell out of here. There's the EXIT sign. Why do you think it's lit up, for God's sake?" Meanwhile, your abdomen, so to speak, is telling you to stay put because when you're through with all this pretentious nonsense you can go back to her place and have sex.

If only it were that simple. Unlike most other species, human beings go out for cappuccino after the movies, which is when your date will ask you what you thought of a particularly annoying scene. If you're still thinking with your abdomen, you will stuff a croissant in your mouth and mumble something about how impressed you were with the filmmaker's stark, uncompromising vision. This is also about the time you will realize that when it comes to making an idiot of himself, the peacock has nothing on you.

That's the trouble with human beings: we think we're better than everyone else. "It's tempting to think of love as a progression, from ignorance toward the refined light of reason," Diane Ackerman says in A Natural History of Love, "but that would be a mistake." Ackerman's point is an important one and worth remembering. "The history of love is not a ladder we climb rung by rung," she says, "leaving previous rungs below. The way we love in the twentieth century is as much an accumulation of past sentiments as a response to modern life."

In other words, evolution makes us do it. Anyway, evolution is the only logical reason I can come up with for why I would jog with my girlfriend. If cocaine, as someone once said, is nature's way of telling you you have too much money, then jogging is nature's way of telling you that you have too much time on your hands.

Still, I'm out most mornings now, trying to keep up with a woman who is in infinitely better shape than me, and there's only one thing on my mind: "Why am I doing this?" The simple explanation is that we just might share a shower when we get back to her apartment. The more complicated explanation is that somewhere in my distant past there must have been an ancestor of mine with a bigger skull and a slightly smaller brain but with similarly short legs and similarly insufficient stamina, chasing after a potential mate, thinking, "Just wait till we get back to the cave."

In the meantime, I'm sweating and panting. My achilles tendon feels like it's about to snap. My back aches. I have a stitch in my side. I have to pee. Dogs are barking at me. Children are staring. That's when something buzzes past my ear and I realize what I probably should have realized a long time ago: the only significant difference between me and that honeybee is that I can't fly.