I went to Copenhagen for 8 days and was so excited by the mere thought of running into Mads Mikkelsen (probability: slim, but still)
By the second to last night, I'd finally accepted that this was highly unlikely to happen and that it's probably for the best. Don't meet your heroes and all that, right?
So, the last night, my partner and I went out for drinks at a local bar. We'd become friendly with two of the owners. Sitting at the bar itself were two Danish guys and one Norwegian guy. My partner looked at me, saw my face, and begged me not to talk to them. I'd kept us up most nights until 3am by getting into conversations with people in my very elementary Danish.
He said, "Don't even think about it."
So naturally, I did. We ended up chatting until 1 or 2am that night. In the course of the conversation, I learned their names; one of the Danish men was named Mads. And I got a little excited.
My partner laughed and told the guy directly that I have "a massive crush on Mads Mikkelsen." Thanks for that, dear. The guy said he understood and thought Mikkelsen is a "beautiful man." So my partner began speaking with the other two gentlemen, and I began speaking with Mads about the world, life, all of that. And at one point in my tipsy state, I blurted out, "Oh my god, you're adorable!" This is common from me. So, I tried to translate it into Danish just because. "Du er sød," I said with a smile. This Mads paused, looked at me, and replied "I lige måde." And I thought, well that was an odd physical response. So, to switch the conversation and continue forward, I said, "Tak! Jeg ved!" (Thanks! I know!) And continued forward.
The next day, I wondered why the guy had had that reaction. Didn't "sød" mean cute, as in adorable? It did, right? I called the guy adorable, right? *Just* adorable?
Yes, sød can mean adorable. It also means cute, sweet, pretty, and can apparently--I learned from a friend with a Danish background--be a flirty little comment. And according to this friend, I was likely not expressing it as "You're an adorable individual." She said given everything I had told her, it was likely inferred as "You're cute 😘"
So Mads here responded in kind.
And that is the story of how I gave up trying to meet the handsomest man in the world, Mads Mikkelsen, found another guy named Mads, accidentally flirted with him, and had him call me cute or pretty back.
And now my partner will not let me live it down. But I had to write this down somewhere.
