Paris is always a good idea – except when it’s not. In the latest edition of The Layover, just in time for Valentine’s Day, Zack Cahill explores the lesser-known state of extreme disappointment known as Paris syndrome, which has (mostly Japanese) visitors fall out of love with the city of… well, love?
Let’s start with a story. About ten years ago, a friend of mine was maid of honour at her best friend’s wedding in Toronto. I remember the build-up to it. They’d been together six years. It was a lavish three-day event, two wealthy families pulling out all the stops and flexing their fiscals. Hundreds of guests flew in from around the globe to some private island. Imagine them all, rich people with booming voices, tight-bodied and toothy.
The wedding went perfectly, my friend nailed her maidly duties and everybody had a great time burning money into the night. Anyway, the bride and groom took a plane to Bangkok the next day. Early in the flight, the bride asked if she could borrow the groom’s iPad, and in an act of outrageous folly, he let her, not anticipating she would promptly stumble on emails detailing a sordid affair stretching back years.
The scene haunts me. Imagine being sat beside them (actually, they were probably in First Class, so imagine being in the pod nearby). Her, wedding body honed and tanned, viscerally apoplectic, berating him over the divider. Him, silent and ashen-faced, pressed into his fully reclinable seat. The flight from Toronto to their layover in Hong Kong was 18 hours. Imagine it. The inability to escape. Just 18 hours trapped in a tube with your new wife and your ex who are the same person.
Hemingway once said “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love”, and as someone who’s been to Paris with an ex who later hacked my emails, I wholeheartedly agree. But Paris didn’t just backfire for me. For around 20 tourists a year, the city of love is enough to bring on a strange psychological condition known appropriately as Paris syndrome. It seems these folks are so crushed that Paris is not the city of their dreams that they experience an actual mental breakdown.
Bizarrely, only Japanese tourists seem to suffer from this. “In Japanese shops, the customer is king”, said Bernard Delage of Jeunes Japon, an association that helps Japanese families settle in France, in conversation with The Guardian. Japan also has a famously low crime rate. Imagine the poor visitor from Kyoto, used to clean streets and benevolent smiles, arriving in the storied city of love, to be met by French “hospitality”. You start to understand why Paris syndrome is a thing.
Stern-faced waiters who openly despise you, handbag snatchers and scammers in Montmartre. For us Europeans, it’s all part of the deal. We know whether we place our order in disgusting English or butcher it in French they’re going to spit in our espresso: it’s the Paris experience, baby (and we love it)!
For us, it’s an anecdote. “You simply must go to Paris. They’re absolute bastards”. For the Japanese, it’s a full-blown 2008 Britney. The Japanese embassy has a hotline for the afflicted. You can actually check in to recovery clinics when you get home, where, presumably you have a nice lie down and order tea from someone who doesn’t hope you die in a fire.
Much like those who became depressed after seeing James Cameron’s Avatar and realising their life would never compare to Pandora, the Japanese tourists had fallen in love with an idea, not a place. And sometimes the version you have in your head isn’t as good as the real thing… which is exactly like a relationship.
And travelling with your lover – as Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston learned on New Year’s Eve 2005 on that fateful beach in the Bahamas – can really put a relationship to the test. Like buying a puppy together, travel will either draw you closer or prise open the cracks in your relationship, exposing them like the sucking chest wounds they are. Travel will not fix things. It will magnify whatever’s there already.
This is all about expectations. In AA circles, they say unrealistic expectations are a defect of character. This is as true of romance as it is of travel. We want the Disney movie love, the perfect partner, who never gets tetchy in the immigration queue or misplaces their passport when the airport Uber is outside. And just like the Japanese tourists who envisioned Paris as a dreamy, cobblestoned utopia, only to find an overpriced latte and a pickpocket, we fall in love with the idea at our peril.
But neither love nor travel is about perfection. They’re about dealing with the ups and downs together. And maybe that’s the real test: not whether your partner sweeps you off your feet under the Eiffel Tower, but whether you can laugh when the hotel with a view is a shithole with mice. In the end, the best trips – and the best relationships – aren’t the ones that go exactly to plan. They’re the ones where, despite the chaos, you still want to do it together.
Illustration by Martin Perry, photography via Unsplash
