Choose Your Own Adventure: Going Out To Eat With Your Long-Term Monogamous Girlfriend

On your way to the authentic Catalan restaurant, just off Las Ramblas, in the city of Barcelona, one of the premier European destinations to see European-style futbol (“soccer” in American English) in a year-round pleasant Mediterranean climate where the tapas y las cervezas can be enjoyed until well after midnight, served at both the all-night discothecas and late-night tapas bars (according to Time Out’s Guide to Barcelona, “[one of the] most hip and culturally savvy” guidebooks about Barcelona available (New York Times)), on C/l’ Hospital, your girlfriend suddenly stops walking and pulls out Time Out’s Guide to Barcelona.

“Wait,” she says. “I forgot about this one restaurant. There’s this restaurant that has flamenco on Fridays for free, it’s here [she’s pointing at an intersection on the map which she has displayed for you]…” You two are now facing each other in the middle of the pedestrian-only street – a narrow, “authentically European” cobblestone corridor lined with colorful apartment buildings whose tenants hang their laundry outside strung on lines across the avenue which indeed give the street an “authentic European feel.” You feel sort of averse to going to flamenco, because you simply feel as if you’ve only “signed up for” going to dinner, not a night of music, flamenco and drinking until 2 a.m. At the same time, you know that you two haven’t yet seen flamenco and that you both have talked about wanting to see flamenco and that to see flamenco would be to have a “traditional and authentic European experience” and naturally you feel a certain pressure to tell your girlfriend that yes, sure, you two should just go to see flamenco. Besides, you know she wants to.

You: say “Yeah, let’s go to see flamenco, that’s actually a perfect idea” or you shake your head and say “I don’t know.”