The Most Romantic Places on Earth

There was a time when the most romantic place on earth was a white-walled studio apartment on the otherwise completely dull 54th Street and 9th Avenue in New York City.

That was where my partner was living, and where I spent most weekends, flying in from Toronto and into his arms in the first throes of our topsy turvy, sometimes extremely testy, love affair. Flowers, champagne, candles – these were the elements he brought in to overcome the utter blandness of the space.

It had “fully furnished” rental status, meaning, besides the blameless white walls it had innocuous at best and cigarette-burned crap furniture at worst, and it was for me and possibly for us, heaven on earth.

Romantic is as romantic does. From this unprepossessing flat we would strike out to explore the city, finding our own favorite pubs and restaurants and galleries, building our life outside its doors even while building it inside them. Well, we did that when we left the place at all. You know how early love is.

Prior to this my romantic places were the world’s romantic places, though profoundly meaningful just to me for the reasons my life offered. These world-renowned romantic places do touch people individually while tapping into something deep, human and shared.

Not so. He was simply shocked that someone had reached the age I was without ever being to Paris. We split up but the tickets were booked. We debated whether or not to go anyway – we had planned a week in Paris and a week in the south of France to visit a friend of ours who was living there for a year. I thought it was probably the last time I’d be able to go anywhere for a long while, especially with all the furniture and such I’d have to buy in order to live on my own, and I still held out hope of rekindling. And so we went.

The city was magical. Human-scale, pretty, lacey almost with the filigree and balcony gardens and ornate stone and cobbles; it was feminine, which felt good to me, the battered feminine in our union. And, the women we encountered looked strong and self-assured, which comforted me greatly since the hope of actually reuniting was remote and not even altogether desirable, what with the other-people’s-kids thing. We met with a North American friend of his who was living in Paris with his French wife and children, they’d created a magazine for ex-pat North Americans, and in visiting them at their tiny apartment I felt I had an insight into that French way of life we hear about. The trip had everything in it for romance – beauty, inspiration, sadness, regret, hope, nostalgia, the knowledge that we would never see each other again, and on my side anyway, lust and love.

I’ve been to Venice, too, often considered romantic. I didn’t see that so much – it seemed labyrinthine and dank, sort of secretive and not especially welcoming. I would say it is romantic if comfort and joy is not quite your thing, if mystery and suspicion is what gets you going. All those alleys, all those masks, that inability to actually get away should you need to – you can’t exactly hail and cab and take off if you have a holy row in a restaurant, your adversary can always chase you — I see how this dark pitch might appeal to some but it certainly didn’t to me.
In the end, of the romantic places I’ve been, the most romantic was certainly the bland little studio flat. But it was only romantic for so long before even our passion for each other was insufficient to overcome its obvious shortcomings. We moved on to a better flat, in a more interesting neighborhood, and took to traveling a bit more.

So maybe what is known as a romantic destination is a signal of a different place in your relationship, when the appeal of all senses, and the appeal of your partner, benefits from cues from the outside world. Where beauty, smell, taste, touch, inspiration comes from what you are seeing, smelling, tasting and so on help you see your lover afresh. When you are inspired by the world, and inspiration is no longer contained fully in your own imagination whenever you see your lover’s beautiful face again.