Jorge Ruivinho saw Sabrina Elisa Marzaro’s picture on the dating app Hinge in January 2022 and had to know more. In her wide-brimmed hat, hair swept to the side, he said, “she looked very sexy.”
A skim of her profile offered Mr. Ruivinho, 35, of Paris, a less superficial reason for liking what he saw: Ms. Marzaro was fluent in his culture. At the time, “a lot of women on Hinge were American,” he said. “I could feel that Sabrina was not the basic American tourist in Paris wanting to date a French guy.”
Ms. Marzaro, 33, came by her Parisian je ne sais quoi honestly. Though she grew up in Calabasas, Calif., she spent much of her 20s moving between France, where she started a career in the fashion industry in 2013, and Manhattan, where she and her father founded the pasta restaurant Bigoi Venezia in 2017. She was living in Paris when Mr. Ruivinho, a financial controller with the human resources company Randstad, reached out on Hinge.
The city was familiar to her by then, but life as a single woman in it still felt new. In 2016, she and a boyfriend she had met while earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration at George Washington University moved to Nice, France, where she founded the luxury fashion and cosmetics branding firm Graphite & Ink.
But in 2018, their six-year relationship ended. After a brief return to New York, where she wrote a picture book about the search for love in the age of dating apps, “Swiping for Prince Charming,” she made a permanent move in 2020 to Paris. There, she downloaded Hinge, ready for what she thought would be an “exhilarating” foray into dating in what is often called the city of love.
Exhilarating wasn’t the word she was using to describe the experience a few years later. “In hindsight I’d call it enriching and almost anthropological,” she said.
