Where Would You Take Me
To Show Me Who You Really Are?

We are all, it seems, terribly eager to please in love—always murmuring vague assurances like “Wherever you wish to go, dear,” as though life were nothing but a smudged travel brochure. But what if, instead, you asked your partner a question with the faintly alarming yet electrifying specificity of a good architectural detail? Something like: “Where would you take me to show me who you really are?”

Not the sort of place where the terminally fashionable gather to sip muddy cocktails, nor where guidebooks have planted their weary flags. I mean the place that stirs them—some fragment of landscape, a ruin, a bend in the river where they once learned the meaning of silence.

Allow them, for once, to do the steering. This is their canvas—not yours. Resist the temptation to rearrange it like bad interior decoration. The small discomfort of not orchestrating every meal and hotel pillow will be amply rewarded by the intimacy of watching them reveal their inner geography.

Why? Because taste may choose the restaurant, but inheritance chooses the destination. These are murmurs from the past: family stories, half-remembered childhood summers, or perhaps simply a stubborn seed lodged in the subconscious.

And if you are quite stuck you could do far worse than Japan. “If you ask top chefs from around the world where they’d choose to eat for the rest of their lives, they all unanimously agree: Tokyo, Japan.” — Anthony Bourdain. Where moss-covered stones say more than most men at dinner, and every corner conspires to show you precisely who you are without demanding you announce it on Instagram.

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