What Is Romance?

While some depend on fiction and Hollywood to derive their intepretation of romance, others believe that their experiences will lead them to it. ANAND KAPOOR digs deeper into his travelogs for a definition.

- Anand Kapoor

The mere mention of romance now terrifies me. It seems I just cannot win. According to my friends, I have set a very high bar for their spouses, but it’s more like a cross for my own back. If you asked my wife, she’d say I am no longer a romantic; she would even question if I ever was.

To me, romance has always been inevitably intertwined with travel, an escape from the norm, but my love-hate relationship with its concept began with the mother of all vacations, the marriage-defining honeymoon!

My wife and I have very different opinions on how a romantic holiday should pan out. For me it’s not the candlelit dinner, or staring vacantly in each other eyes and walking hand in hand like star-crossed lovers, or behaving like demented sycophants with constant sickening praises and silly pet names: that to me is the stuff of novels, films, and dare I say fiction. However, for as long as I can remember, I’ve thought about it as sharing a new experience with someone you love and creating a lasting memory.

I remember standing alone on top of the Empire State building before I was married, thinking “Yeah it’s a nice view, but so what!” I couldn’t wax lyrical about it with someone or share my excitement—which is how I filed it in my mind until I revisited it with my family and it came to life.

Anyway, I digress. All this would have been fine, had my wife’s idea of romance matched mine, but her dream holiday destination was Switzerland, or some scenically dramatic location in Europe! We ended up going to Luxor and you can imagine the look on her face when we landed in the Egyptian bustle and she was confronted by a scene straight out of a Merchant Ivory period drama. Needless to say, it was a far cry from the Matterhorn.