Some cities are beautiful. Some cities are interesting. And then there are cities that flirt with you. You know the difference almost immediately. You can admire a place without wanting to have an affair with it. You can appreciate the architecture, visit the museums, eat a respectable dinner, take photographs, and leave thinking, Well, that was lovely. Then there are cities where you step outside the hotel and inexplicably become a slightly different person. Those are the dangerous ones. I love them. New York does this to me. Paris certainly does. Rome has absolutely no intention of behaving itself. Miami practically arrives already wearing perfume. San Francisco, on the right day, can look so impossibly beautiful that you forgive it almost anything. Every seductive city has its own technique.
New York seduces with possibility. There is always something happening somewhere that you weren’t invited to yet. A restaurant behind an unmarked door. A gallery opening. A jazz club downstairs. A table of fascinating strangers. A man in a beautiful coat walking quickly in the opposite direction who looks as though he has somewhere extremely interesting to be. New York creates the persistent suspicion that if you go home now, you will miss something. This is probably terrible for sleep. It is wonderful for romance. A date in New York never needs much of a plan because the city keeps offering alternatives. Dinner becomes drinks. Drinks become walking. Walking becomes, “What’s that place?” Suddenly it is midnight and you’re eating something you absolutely did not need in a neighborhood you hadn’t intended to visit. That is my kind of urban planning.
Paris is different. Paris doesn’t seem particularly concerned whether you approve of it. This is part of the appeal. Paris is sitting at a café looking fabulous and assuming you will eventually come over. The city understands aesthetics in a way that sometimes seems almost unfair. The balconies. The stone. The little tables facing outward because apparently the French correctly concluded that people-watching is a legitimate meal accompaniment. Even bad weather looks deliberate. Rain in an ordinary parking lot is rain. Rain in Paris is cinema. You immediately require a trench coat and complicated romantic circumstances.
Rome, meanwhile, seduces through excess. Nothing is restrained. There is an ancient ruin beside a traffic jam beside an exquisite church beside a man on a scooter who appears to believe road markings are merely suggestions. You eat pasta at ten o’clock at night because somehow this seems completely reasonable. People speak with their whole bodies. Buildings have been standing for two thousand years and are treated almost casually. There is something healthy about being surrounded by things older than every problem you have. It puts one’s anxieties into perspective. Your unanswered email seems slightly less important beside the Pantheon.
Los Angeles seduces differently still. It is less obvious. People complain that Los Angeles has no center, which is true, but perhaps that is the point. Los Angeles is not a city so much as a collection of alternate realities connected by traffic. You can spend breakfast beside the ocean, lunch in a neighborhood that feels like another country, and dinner somewhere in the hills looking down at millions of lights. It has glamour, certainly, but also weirdness. I require a little weirdness in a city. Perfect places make me suspicious. The cities I love have contradictions. Polish beside decay. Wealth beside creativity. History beside ridiculous novelty. A grand hotel around the corner from a tiny restaurant where the chairs don’t match. Beauty with a chipped tooth. Maybe cities are like people that way. Perfection is impressive from a distance. Personality makes you want to stay. And just like people, some places attract you for reasons you cannot fully defend. I’ve been to objectively wonderful cities that did almost nothing to me. Everything worked. Everything was clean. Everyone was polite. I admired them. I did not fall in love. Then I’ve arrived somewhere inconvenient, confusing and slightly chaotic and thought: Oh no.
Because attraction is rarely a spreadsheet. This applies to men too, obviously. If attraction worked rationally, dating would be much easier. We could simply compare credentials, calculate compatibility and issue a decision. Instead, some perfectly suitable person sits across from you and produces absolutely no electricity. Then someone else walks into a room and your nervous system apparently makes an executive decision without consulting management. Cities do this. Chemistry is chemistry. I think the best way to discover whether a city has it is to walk. Not from attraction to attraction. Just walk. Leave the impressive landmarks occasionally. Find the streets where people actually buy groceries. Look into apartment windows—not creepily, please; we are maintaining standards—and imagine the lives happening inside. Notice where old men drink coffee. Notice what women wear to walk their dogs. Notice where people sit when they have nowhere they need to be. Cities reveal themselves through ordinary life. I love hotel rooms and restaurants, but I also love laundromats, fruit stands, bookstores, pharmacies, crowded cafés and tiny parks. Luxury tells you what a place dreams about. Ordinary life tells you what it is. And I want both.
Maybe that is why travel is so seductive in the first place. For a little while, you escape your established identity. Nobody knows your routine. Nobody expects you at your usual table. You don’t have history with the streets. Everything becomes possibility. You could turn left. You could turn right. You could stay another day. You could meet someone. You could become someone. Of course, eventually you go home. That’s part of the romance too. Not every city should become your life. Some are better as affairs. Places you return to every few years and immediately remember exactly how they make you feel. You know the corner. The hotel lobby. The restaurant. The smell of the air. And suddenly the version of yourself who lived there briefly comes back. That’s one of the great gifts of travel. We leave pieces of ourselves in places. Then we return and find them waiting. So which cities seduce me? The ones with beauty, certainly. But also energy. Mystery. A little imperfection. Good food. Long nights. People who seem genuinely engaged with being alive. And ideally, somewhere to sit outside with a drink and watch the world walk past. Preferably with excellent company. Because every city becomes more beautiful when you’re slightly in love. Especially if you’re not entirely sure whether you’re in love with the city—or the person beside you.