The Scenic Route to Desire

One thing has always surprised me when I hear people talking about adult resorts, lifestyle hotels or private parties. So often they speak as though the destination itself is the experience, as if everything begins the moment you arrive.

I’ve never travelled like that.

If you told me tomorrow that we were spending a few days at an adult resort, the last thing I’d want to do would be to head there as quickly as possible. I’d turn it into a journey instead. We’d start in Sanremo, spend a day wandering through the old streets, stop for lunch somewhere overlooking the sea and order another bottle of wine simply because neither of us was ready to leave. Then we’d continue to Menton, which I still think is one of the most romantic towns on the Côte d’Azur, spend the evening walking along the promenade, find a little café for coffee the next morning, stay another night in Nice and only then continue wherever we were originally going.

That’s simply how I enjoy travelling.

People sometimes assume I’m delaying the part everyone is supposedly waiting for, but that’s never how it feels to me. Those days on the road aren’t something I do before the experience. They are the experience. The restaurants, the architecture, beautiful hotels, conversations that somehow last until midnight and the feeling of discovering another little street you hadn’t planned to find all create something between two people long before they arrive anywhere.

I don’t think desire appears out of nowhere. At least it never has for me. It grows quietly while you’re living your life together. It grows over breakfast on a terrace overlooking the sea, during a long drive with the windows open, while choosing a dress for dinner because it feels perfect for that evening, or when someone looks at you across the table and you realise neither of you has looked at a phone for hours.

That’s why I’ve never understood the habit of separating everything into different categories. To me they’ve always been woven together. I enjoy taking care of myself, buying beautiful clothes, wearing perfume, staying in elegant hotels, finding restaurants worth remembering and taking photographs that still make me smile years later. None of those things feel superficial to me, and none of them compete with intimacy. They create the atmosphere where intimacy has room to exist.

Of course physical attraction matters. Chemistry matters. Looking after yourself matters. I don’t understand why we’re constantly encouraged to choose between the inner world and the outer one, as though appreciating beauty somehow makes everything else less meaningful. Life has never worked like that for me. I’ve always believed that attraction lives in the combination of things rather than in one perfect ingredient. A beautiful body, intelligence, humour, confidence, elegance, curiosity, generosity, shared memories, an unforgettable dinner and a breathtaking view become something much greater together than any of them could ever be on their own.

Maybe that’s also why I never feel the need to rush towards the final destination. Whether we’re heading to an adult resort, a lifestyle hotel, a private party or anywhere else that celebrates sexuality, I don’t want to feel as though the trip only begins when we arrive. By then I want us to have already spent days discovering beautiful places, eating unforgettable meals, getting dressed for dinners we’d been looking forward to, laughing over bottles of wine that somehow always lasted longer than we expected and collecting the kind of memories that quietly become part of a relationship.

People often expect me to remember the destination most vividly, but that’s rarely what stays with me. Months later I usually find myself talking about the little restaurant we stumbled across by accident, the drive along the coast just before sunset, the hotel where we slept with the balcony doors open or the town we almost skipped because it wasn’t in the plan. Looking back, I’ve realised those moments were never separate from desire.

They were the reason it felt so real in the first place.