Guilt by Association: When a Failed Romance Sours the Taste of a Place

About 15 million people visit San Diego County each year for the zoo and Sea World and palm-fringed Balboa Park. But I won’t be one of them any time soon--at least not in the city of San Diego. The mere thought of the city makes me feel terrible.

It isn’t the city’s fault. About a decade ago, one of the most important romantic relationships of my life came apart there. It was lovely and sunny outside, as usual in San Diego, but inside I was in the middle of “The Perfect Storm.”

I remember crying through a play at the Old Globe Theater, though my tears had nothing to do with the production. I drove aimlessly around Mission Bay, feeling as though I’d lost my rudder. I had intended to stay in town visiting my significant other for two weeks, but things went so badly between us that I flew standby back to New York, where I lived, after just three days. At the airport I broke down and begged the airline attendant at the gate to put me at the top of the standby list. Fortunately she took pity on me, and the flight wasn’t full, so I lay across three seats near the rear bathrooms, sobbing under an airline blanket.

For similar reasons, I don’t think I’ll ever vacation on Cape Cod again and am not entirely sure how I’d fare in San Francisco, a city I visited with an old love. It is, I know, a weakness that I can’t separate certain places from the sad things that happened to me there. But in talking to other women, I’ve found I’m not the only one who has a list of destinations ruined because they served as the unforgettable settings for romances gone awry.

A hotel in Anaheim is a doomed place for a friend of mine. She stayed there with a man she loved who was separated from his wife. There was nothing special about the place, she says, but it was their love nest. Then he went back to his wife, which is why she’ll never check into that hotel again.

Cannes was ruined for Linda Chen, an L.A. motion picture still photographer, after a lover left her there when she got a virulent attack of food poisoning. The thought of the French Riviera doesn’t make her stomach flip-flop, but it does bring back that awful feeling of abandonment.

Bad feelings can sneak up on you, says Marilyn Mason, a Santa Fe, N.M., psychologist. You may not even remember that your heart was broken in Cannes a long time ago. But then you go back, and it all comes rushing over you.

It’s a nightmare to think that a place as luscious as the French Riviera could be ruined by an affair gone bad. Some people just won’t allow that to happen. “Imagine if someone had ruined Paris for me,” says Penny Kaganoff, my New York editor friend. She’s a woman and traveler of firm principle who believes that those who shy away from certain extraordinary places for emotional reasons should grit their teeth. “It’s mind over matter,” she says. “You have to make a conscious effort to exorcise the bad feelings that may get connected to places like Paris and Venice. Go back and make other memories there. If you let someone ruin a gorgeous place for you, you let them win.”

Staying away from places connected with bad memories helps you avoid the feelings they summon up, says Debra Borys, a Westwood psychologist. “This is all too human,” she says. “But it might sometimes be useful to make the feelings come up, especially if you have to visit the place often or if a new love relationship becomes associated with it.” Revisit it with a supportive friend, write in a journal, cry--whatever it takes to purge the place of its associations, Borys advises, so that a failed romance doesn’t rule your internal map.

Not all the women I spoke with hold grudges against a destination because of what happened there. The interworking of place and memory is often more subtle. One of my colleagues told me there are places she found so dear and romantic with a lover that it was strange for her to go back to them with someone new. Sharon Wingler, author of “Travel Alone & Love It” (Chicago Spectrum Press, $14.95), decided she would never return to Venice unless with a lover, because “La Serenissima” is so romantic.

Linda Yellin, a friend and advertising writer in New York, says she crossed Italy off her list because her husband had been there with his first wife. Then she found out he’d been to England with an English girlfriend and France with a French lover. “That wiped out most of a continent,” she says. “I realized the two of us couldn’t go to Europe unless I got over it.”

Her concerns are understandable. She worries about stirring up thoughts of wife No. 1 while she looks out with her beloved over some beautiful landscape in Tuscany or on the Amalfi Coast. “I wouldn’t want him thinking of a previous love there,” she says.

Tuscany and Amalfi don’t change because of what has happened to us there. But we often can’t help blaming things on places, says Carole Markin, author of “More Bad Dates” (Renaissance Books, $10.95). She stayed away from a coffee shop in her neighborhood because of a bad scene with a date there.

We are all creatures of our memories and emotions. This isn’t bad. It is part of the richness of travel.

As a travel writer, I’m often asked what my favorite place is. I smile and say, “Remember, your experience of a place has to do with the weather, where you stayed and who you went with, not to mention the people you met.” Understanding that, I would have to say that I love Venice above all, where I went during a beautiful warm spell in January about five years ago. I was alone, but I made my own memories there. And they were thoroughly romantic.