Reminder: Have Dinner With Your Friends
It's very important to share meals with the people you love. We know this.
We'd like to make a case – and issue a gentle reminder – for sharing a meal at a restaurant with the people you love.
Don't get us wrong. We love to stay in.
We're famous (amongst our mothers and siblings) for staying in, ordering too much sushi, and talking for the entire length of whatever movie we've selected for background noise.
Similarly, we love to crash a family dinner.
We have designated seats at our friend Sarah's kitchen table, where we'll stay long enough past dessert that her parents will make a picnic of their pantry for us to pick at (say that three times fast).
Once we have more established kitchens (our own), we're sure we'll love to make dinner just as much as we love to host it.
But today, we'd like to remind you that you can (and should) be going for dinner with your best friends. As much as you can, honestly.
There's something special about going to going for dinner with the people you love. To make a reservation is to create an occasion and to invite your best friends is to create a celebration. If you're anything like us and our friends, you speak all day across various different platforms, every day. You may find it a little silly to carve out some time in the week to speak some more to the people you spend the majority of your time speaking to. But you – and we say this with love – would be wrong.
Because, and hear us out, it doesn't really matter what you talk about. What matters is that you're together, hearing each other's voices. Gross, we know.
Sally Rooney said it a lot better, actually:
“Conversation and laughter, these were just pleasant arrangements of sounds in the air. Eileen in the doorway and Alice getting up to pour her another glass of wine, to ask her about work. She had come to see her, they were together again, it did not matter much now what they said or did.”
Sally Rooney,
Beautiful World, Where Are You
We had dinner with two of our best friends on Wednesday. There are five (5) of us in total (one has abandoned us for New York), which makes school night dinners a bit more difficult than we'd like them to be. We find that these dinners are a necessary weeknight reprieve from the weekdays (which have really been weekday-ing). Something to remind us and all the other working adults in North America that our lives do not end at 5pm. They start.
Something our friend group is really good at – not to brag – is asking. Asking if someone is free, what the other two are doing and if they want to join. Asking if someone can pick up, drop off, meet halfway. Asking because nine out of ten times, the answer is yes/of course/we'll be right there.
So, we asked.
Depending on your friends, sending some reminders might be helpful:
What we ordered:
Zucchini chips, grilled calamari, two orders of spicy vodka rigatoni, one spaghetti vongole, a fish special, one glass of wine (pecorino), seven martinis (four vodka, two gin, one lychee), and one cookie plus a slice of pistachio cheesecake (to share). But who cares!
What mattered:
We were together.
So here's your reminder – one that we all need, especially as we get older and our days look more and more different than they did when we were walks away from one another instead of drives: