Category Archives: Friends

New York couple friends

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I think in our time together as a couple, Chris and I have really only made one net-new couple friend in New York City, and we just happened to meet one half of this couple during my friend’s nonprofit food tour last year. I feel this way about individual friends, but couple friends are even harder because all four people need to get along to a certain degree, and that makes it even harder to make the relationship sticky and to continue to want to see each other and spend time with each other. We had them over for dinner tonight, and we talked about everything from family to travel to our futures. When we are with them, something happens that rarely happens when four people are all together who are parts of couples: we all listened as one person spoke at a time, and few side conversations happened. That almost never happens with my other friends and their partners, and it’s probably because someone’s conversation is going to bore the other. It was so refreshing, and I relished every second of it. It didn’t feel like we were at war to be heard because everyone just wanted to listen to each other. It was like a utopian conversation.

It’s so nice to feel like people actually want to listen to what you say and respect what you have said.

Hanging out in the South

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Last night, Chris and I had dinner, broke through an Escape Room, and had drinks with my friend and her friends in Little Rock. For the first time probably since college, I was surrounded by people who were not from one coast or the the other and who were all in the sciences. Her friends are all specializing in different areas in the same medical residency program, and one of the friend’s boyfriends is a microbiologist working for the FDA. Their places of origin included Kuwait/Baton Rouge, San Antonio, Orlando, and Austin.

We were sitting at a table over drinks until past midnight, talking about everything from what truly defines Tex-Mex cuisine (the guys from San Antonio claim that Austin “Tex-Mex” is “whitified” and not real, and that San Antonio is the only city in the entire South where you can get “real” Tex-Mex) to immigrating to the U.S. as a brown Bangladeshi person from Kuwait, to what “diversity” means in different environments. One conversation I had that surprised me was that one of the women said to me that she found Little Rock far more diverse than Baton Rouge, where her family currently lives and where she did her undergrad and medical school studies. “In Baton Rouge, all I was meeting were people who either didn’t want to do anything meaningful with their lives and stay in their home town forever, or people who were obsessed with work, superficial, and frankly very uninteresting as people,” she said. She expressed annoyances that it was hard to meet someone who was a working professional, dedicated and passionate about what they were doing, who is also interesting and good to have conversation with. “It’s been easier for me to find that here in this residency program,” she said. “People are actually interesting, they’re from everywhere, and it feels diverse!”

We all live in our bubbles. I spend time mostly with people in tech, consulting, and the agency world. They are surrounded by doctors and biologists and others in the medical and science professions every day. I thought to myself that night that it would be great if we could meet people not just from different racial and geographic backgrounds, but also different professions. Some of the conversations I had that night were some of the most thought-provoking and stimulating I’ve had in a while. It was certainly a pleasant break from what I usually hear at my work.

 

Abusive relationships

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Today, my friend and I went to see Waitress the musical on Broadway. The show is about a woman in an abusive relationship who works as a waitress at a pie shop cafe, and she unexpectedly gets pregnant and doesn’t know what to do. She really doesn’t want the baby, but she feels too weak to leave her husband. The depiction of the husband in the show immediately reminded me of the abusive relationships I’ve seen, including ones that both my friend and I have been in, as well as other friends we’ve had through our lives who have succumbed to terrible men.

It’s really disturbing how even the strongest women can succumb to (verbally and/or physically) abusive men simply because of what we’ve been conditioned to believe are gender norms — that women need to be nurturing and accepting, that women have the ability to “change” the men they are with if they only try hard enough, that women need to “take care of” and in some ways even mother their partners. I still remember being in a terrible relationship when I was 19 and being in complete disbelief that all these awful things were happening to me… My friend even reminded me she didn’t realize how bad he was until it was almost over when I finally told her everything. It was surreal, as though it was all just a bad dream that I thought would end, but it took so, so long to end. But instead of walking away, I kept trying to believe things would get better and that he’d change, or maybe it was just a bad work day or a bad mood… classic women thoughts. I had a good friend constantly tell me to leave him, and when I finally did officially, it was the most liberating feeling ever.

The disheartening part of watching this musical, which both of us really enjoyed, is that it made me think about all the women out there in today’s day and age who are probably feeling just like Jenna the waitress, who feel trapped and like they can’t do any better than the loser abusive men that they’re with. There are too many problems in the world, and as many opportunities as there are out there for women, it’s sad when these opportunities aren’t made apparent to these women, and they think they have to put up with horrible sexist treatment that was normal fifty or a hundred years ago. I hope all women can be as strong as Jenna was in this show and leave their abusers, even if it means raising a child on their own. We don’t want to bring children into a world and raise them to think that abusive relationships are normal and expected.

A talk about nothing

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Tonight, I went to dinner with Chris, my two good friends, and their husband and boyfriend. We spent almost two hours chatting about a lot of random things, but really, it wasn’t like there was anything very substantial or serious we discussed. It was a really long talk with all sorts of tangents about seemingly nothing, yet the entire time, I was enjoying myself and the company of my friends. A talk about absolutely nothing was entirely satisfying to me, and the laughter that came out of it was genuine. And when it ended, I knew this experience would not happen again until the next time I’d come visit home, and it made me feel a little sad on the walk back to the hotel from South of Market. It made me realize that I really do miss having a friend group like this back in New York. I have individual friends I can catch up with there, but I don’t have the same dynamic with them the way I do with these two friends. We can’t really talk about nothing and have that be satisfying or sufficient for me. And then I thought, why is it that I haven’t made friends like that in my entire eight years in New York City? I guess I married my best friend (not that that’s a bad thing, of course). I guess I go through these same thoughts every few months, but it still makes me wistful. I could potentially leave New York City without a real friend group developed at all.

Or maybe the problem is really me. You can’t really expect to have the same dynamic with friends you just met as with the friends you’ve had for two decades, right? Maybe my expectation is too high. But can’t a satisfying talk about nothing occur between two strangers as easily as it can with two friends who’ve known each other for years?

Old friends, old feelings

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It’s funny how when you are physically distant from friends, you can feel emotionally distant, but when you are put together in the same space once again, everything feels normal and like you get each other again. Over the years given that I’ve been away from home for 12 years now, I’ve gone through fluctuations in feelings regarding how “close” I feel with a number of my friends, but I know deep down that when we’re together, everything feels comfortable and good again. Maybe that’s the test of real friendship that can withstand time and distance, that the feeling you have when you are reunited is the familiar warm, happy feeling you had when your friendship was seemingly at its best and shiniest.

It’s comforting to return home and know that I will have familiar faces of friends and hear similar laughter each time I come back. It helps me think of home as a potentially happy place versus a place that harbors a lot of negativity and impending arguments and explosions.

Patacon and ice cream

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Tonight, I met up with my friend who is visiting from Seattle for work, and we caught up over patacons (Venezuelan plantain sandwiches) and Morgenstern’s ice cream in the Lower East Side. We spent about three hours together, yet it didn’t feel like enough time. I only really get to see her once or twice a year when she’s in town visiting family or coming for work.

While we talked about everything from my wedding in March to her potentially staying in Seattle to our dysfunctional families, I realized that even though I’ve known her for only a relatively short time, somehow, we probably get along and understand each other better than some of my long time friends. Why would this be the case? Maybe it’s because with friends you’ve had for a long time, they have a perception of what you were when you were really close and in proximity, and they want to hold onto those perceptions even after you’ve evolved over time and changed a lot. Sometimes, we don’t always accept change as much as we think we will; it’s just part of humans being creatures of habit.

I suppose the other aspect is that maybe we should accept that we may not always be able to understand those we once considered closest to us, and that they may not be able or even want to understand us and why we live our lives the way we do. We use excuses like not enough time, distance, but part of that is also just lack of desire. That is just life constantly moving and willing to leave you behind.

Di & Viv & Rose

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Tonight, we went to see a show at Theatre Row called Di & Viv & Rose, a play about three women who were roommates in college in England and remained friends through adulthood. All three are very different in terms of their life outlooks and personalities, and throughout the play, we witness a lot of arguments over many misunderstandings, assumptions, and gaps in knowledge that each has about the other. In the final argument between the two remaining living women, I realized how real the argument they were having was. I think the majority of all the arguments I’ve ever had with my female friends have been around some misunderstanding, assumption, or misinterpretation stemming from a conversation, e-mail, text message, or some other form of communication, and it really made me think… geez, are we women so complicated and convoluted.

One yells at the other for never calling on the anniversary of her rape. The other says, I had no idea you wanted me to call, but I thought about calling you. The first replies, It doesn’t count that you just thought about calling me because you never actually called in the end; you should have known to call me! Well, why didn’t she just communicate that to her, then? Sure, it’s easy as someone looking in to make a statement like that, but I know I’ve had similar situations where I’ve gotten mad at my friends over assumptions I’ve made, and they’ve done the same with me. We want our friends and lovers and family to be mind readers, to know what we want, even if we haven’t explicitly communicated it to them. Then, when they don’t do what we want which we never voiced, we get angry at them for never doing said action.

I don’t know how we became this way.

Unexpected wedding card

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We received a wedding card in the mail a few days ago from one of my San Francisco friends I met through my mom’s Jehovah’s Witness congregation. The card had a very long, thoughtful, and sweet message. I’m always touched whenever I open a card that anyone gives me nowadays and the written message is more than just a line or two; pretty much no one seems to do that nowadays, nor do people value it. But it always makes me happy and wish that more people would value little things like this that require a lot of time and thought. I feel like I am getting old and dating myself by saying this, but there’s such an emphasis on things being fast and convenient nowadays that we rarely stop to appreciate things like a handwritten card or a homemade meal. My eyes feel like bleeding when I think of future children and how they may or may not value these things.

Surrounded by babies

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We spent the day today in Dunellen, New Jersey, visiting Chris’s friend and her husband, who gave birth to a baby boy just four days after our wedding. They also invited a few other friends and neighbors over who also had recently given birth in the last year, so we were literally surrounded by babies for our time in the suburbs. And with that came lots of teasing for us about when we were planning to have children and “start preparing.” Lots of parenting and bottle “nipple” advice ensued.

Yes, this is what I’ve been waiting for, to get inundated by questions of when I will soon be a baby-making machine instead of an independent, working, but married woman. It doesn’t matter how much society “progresses” because these expectations will still be there, especially when people find out I’m 30 — that is to say, “not that young anymore.”

Chicken with friends

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Last night, I went out to dinner at a Peruvian chicken restaurant with two of my friends who shared a room for the two nights of my wedding. They had only met once before at a meal with me, and so they really didn’t know much about each other. Well, clearly they made an impression on each other; my guy friend asked how stable my female friend’s relationship was with her fiance and asked why she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring on her left hand (the “right” hand), and my female friend… said that my guy friend was easy and fun to terrorize and completely frustrating. It’s always interesting how my friends get along with each other once they meet.

She told me that she found him frustrating, then said as I was thinking this that it must be a prerequisite for being friends with me: the person must be frustrating to some degree. I realized how true it was. I guess I just like people who drive me crazy. It keeps my wheels turning, I suppose, and therefore, I’ll never get bored. Because as we all know, being bored is one of the worst feelings ever.