Transparent Tuesdays

Issue 240

You guys,

Do you think they like us as much as we like them?

Sam had repeatedly asked me some version of this question in the weeks leading up to the trip, and each time I assured him, “Yes, they must. It can’t be one-sided.” 

We’d made new friends in Rachel and Joe and had already spent three nights together at a beach house with all our kids together. I tried to taper my expectations for that trip. I knew from email and Zoom and seeing them in person at an event a few months prior that we had hit it off, that we got along, that conversation was easy. But three whole days? Sit-down meals? Kids? There were too many variables. We didn’t really know how it would go.

When they left the beach house we debriefed and I decided—they were our new best friends. Finally! A couple with young kids who talked about books and podcasts and Substacks. A couple where we did not gravitate towards one over the other because one was inevitably ambitious and the other a casual. A couple who liked to sit around and drink good coffee and eat good food and discuss the difference between service and hospitality and answer big questions like what is the difference between your life’s work and your life’s purpose? But Sam was less convinced. “We’re never going to see them again,” he said, definitively. “They live so far away, and they already have so many friends.” 

We were in North Carolina and they were in Michigan. We had no couple friends in our town—we barely had individual friends. Rachel and Joe had endless community and next door neighbors who came over for coffee and watched their kids at a moment’s notice. They could not be thinking about this relationship the way we were, like we had just swiped right and were desperately staring at our phone, waiting to see if it was a match.

Shortly after we returned home from the beach house Sam invited them to New York. Was it too soon? 

We had gotten a reservation at Lilia, a restaurant in Brooklyn that was near impossible to get into. The co-owner of the restaurant, Sean Feeney, had been interviewed by Patrick O’Shaughnessey on Invest Like The Best. We knew Joe loved the episode, that it was maybe his favorite podcast episode, ever. It was certainly one of ours. In it, Sean told the origin story of Lilia and spoke about the idea of finding your genius—that everyone has genius inside them. We thought the chances were low that Rachel and Joe would come—that their work schedules would allow it, that they’d be able to line up childcare, that they would even want to—but they said yes.

Do you think they’re just coming because it’s Lilia or do you think they actually want to hang out with us? 

We sat at a round table in the corner of the restaurant, sharing a clam appetizer (“This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life,” I said to our server), when Rachel gushed about how cool this was and thanked us for inviting them. Then she confessed how giddy she was when Sam had sent the text, how she wondered where they fell on the list of friends to invite, how many people we’d asked before them. The four of us seemed to be in uncharted territory—new long-distance friendship with another couple—and none of us knew how to play it cool.

It was a quick trip. Two nights, two dinners—at both I laughed so hard I cried. First when I told a story about our neighbor and Sam interrupted to say I was flat-out wrong and that was not what happened. I could barely speak as I wiped tears from my eyes and finally said, “Can you believe I’m writing a memoir?” And the second night when, after I told our server I hated truffle, he looked me in the eyes as he shaved a mountain of fresh truffle over the chocolate gelato.  

At the airport Sam and I debriefed. That was so fun. Do you think they had as much fun as us?

“Yes,” I said. “They must have.”

—

Until next week, 

Charlie