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

You’re on an extended European vacation with your long-term monogamous girlfriend of two and a half years. While you’re staying in short-term apartment rentals and thus have a kitchen to cook your meals (you want to save money and you both genuinely feel “more mature” than “the hostel scene”), there exists a not-unreasonable pressure to go out to coffee and lunch and dinner regularly in order to attain the “authentic European dining experience.”

You two haven’t gone out for a couple of days, this as a result of a somewhat childish and unexpected bout of bickering and mutual “feeling bad,” the crux of which lies in old, tired, talked-about-for-probably-over-1000-hours-in-the-past-issues that you both know by now are simply there and are not going to go away any time soon, because both of you “get” the intense difficulty of personal change (but are as yet undecided if “personal change” is “right,” “right” as in “I understand aspects of my personality frustrate you but I don’t know if its right to change them for someone”). So, understandably, your girlfriend wants to go out. And you agree.

Before coming to Europe (specifically, you’re in Barcelona, one of the premier European tourist destinations according to such popular web blogs as iStopOver.com and traveleurope.com), you bought a guide book (which by it’s nature leads you to cafes, bars and restaurants at which only other tourists dine), and right now, your girlfriend’s looking at it. She’s turns her eyes to you. “Do you want to look at these restaurants with me or do you want me to decide?”

You: keep staring at your laptop and say “You can decide” or look up from your laptop, close it, sit down on the couch next to her, and say “Let’s see what our options are.”