DAYO: I really really like this girl aminatou
ANN: i’m excited to meet aminatou sow. That girl knows like everyone i know, yet i haven’t met her
DAYO: oh she’s excellent. what’s the drills with gossip girl? she’s a big fan
A plan was hatched: Dayo would host and invite Aminatou. “I want to say that there is an element of ‘Oh, how nice that everything worked out,’ ” Dayo told us many years later. “But thinking through this now, there was a lot more intention to it.” She knew before we did that we needed to be in each other’s lives.
It’s hard to remember who we were that night at Dayo’s house, before we were friends. Not only because it was a long time ago, but also because we have changed each other in countless ways, from the profound to the imperceptible. We didn’t just meet each other that night. We began the process of making each other into the people we are today. Although we’re self-confident enough to know that we would have been great if our paths had never converged, we cannot imagine what that alternate reality looks like. It’s impossible to untangle us.
This feeling of being inextricable is a hallmark of Big Friendship. As humans, we are all thoroughly shaped by the people we know and love. Day to day, our friends influence our tastes and our moods. Long term, they can also affect how we feel about our bodies, how we spend our money, and the political views we hold. We grow in response to each other, in ways both intentional and subconscious.
Behind every meet-cute is an emotional origin story, one that answers a deeper question. Not “How did you two meet?” but “Why did you become so deeply embedded in each other’s lives?”
“We met at a friend’s house” is the superficial narrative we tell to strangers. But our real origin story is that we met at a time in our lives when we were both a little bit lost. We were both figuring out how to set a course for where we were hoping to go. And in each other, we found someone who already understood who we wanted to be.
* * *
Four years before she met Aminatou, Ann was arriving in San Francisco for her first-ever magazine job. It was a short-term fact-checking gig at a lefty publication known for its investigative reporting. (Basically, an internship that paid a small stipend, which Ann supplemented with the savings she’d built up the previous year, working a nonjournalism job.) Immediately, she felt sure that she was in the right place. She loved sitting at the edges of the conference room, listening to the editors at the table debate which topics were worthy of the magazine and make the case for stories they wanted to commission. She befriended a few of her fellow fact-checkers, as well as several women who worked in the fundraising and marketing departments, and they’d go out drinking and dancing together. She even fell in love with one of the journalists at work, and they started dating. Ann and her boyfriend spent weekends making pizza from scratch and taking day trips up Highway 1. Often at night she walked the city’s roller-coaster hills home to the small room she was subletting in a Victorian near Alamo Square Park, drunk on whiskey gingers and the feeling that she was shaping her life into something she loved. But she knew it couldn’t last—she was surviving on canned beans and unsure of her next professional step. San Francisco sparkled with a just-out-of-reach charm.
As this glorified internship was coming to an end, Ann managed to score a coffee meeting about a full-time position at an online magazine in the Bay Area. This felt like a minor miracle, as California had precious few media jobs. She had heard whispers from a few young women that this potential new boss was a monster, but she was in no position to turn down opportunities. When she showed up to the coffee shop, the boss confirmed the rumors by immediately making a bizarre comment about her body. (“Mmmmm… really tall women like big sunglasses, huh?”) The meeting was so casual that Ann didn’t even realize it had been a job interview until the offer arrived. But she ignored the neon sign flashing “This Is Going to Be Awful.” She quickly accepted because the annual salary was more than she could comprehend—$40,000—and it was a big professional step up: she would be writing headlines and editing short articles. How bad could this boss really be?
Pro tip: if you are creeped out at a meeting so informal you don’t realize it’s a job interview, run.
It was worse than Ann imagined to work for a lecherous bully. At her one-month performance review, the boss demanded to know why she refused to discuss her personal life with him and said, in an unmistakably threatening tone, “You know, most new employees try to please the boss.” (He got his comeuppance many years later, when an entire episode of the radio show This American Life was dedicated to his misbehavior.) Ann couldn’t imagine working for him much longer but didn’t know where else she’d even apply.
Then Ann’s boyfriend moved to Washington, DC, to start a prestigious but underpaid gig at a political magazine. From a different sublet in a different Victorian (Ann moved three times that year), she talked to him with her phone pressed against a window because her bedroom was a cell-reception dead zone. He relayed the conversations and inside jokes he had with a new crew of friends, who were all young journalists. Ann had to force herself to laugh along.
As she searched for a new job in San Francisco, her boyfriend stepped in with a plan. He was about to turn down an entry-level editing job he had been recruited for at a different DC magazine, and he could put forward Ann’s name for the position. In some ways, this came as a relief to her: job hunting in California was a nightmare. She also missed being in the same zip code as her boyfriend. And if she was honest, she was hungry to prove herself professionally.
At the same time, Ann worried that she didn’t know enough about policy to hack it in the world of political journalism and that this magazine would be interviewing her only as a courtesy to her boyfriend. (Her ego still feels tender just thinking about it.) If she got the job, it would mean taking an almost $10,000 pay cut. And then there was her deep sadness at the thought of saying goodbye to California and her friends there, who had become dear to her so quickly. But she decided there was no harm in applying. When she got the job, it just made sense to say yes. She hated that this life decision could be headlined “How My Boyfriend Got Me a Job and I Left My Friends to Be with Him.” She put in two weeks’ notice with the bullying boss, who slammed his office door in her face, and she assured her California friends that she was going to DC for only a year, tops. This is not how careers work! But this is the only way Ann could convince herself to move.
As Ann drove eastward across the country, her dented green Honda was heavy with her every earthly possession and a growing sense of dread. She had repeatedly tried and failed to argue herself out of this move. Professionally, she was sure it was a good choice. She was also certain it was the right thing for her long-distance relationship. It made sense in every way, except for the fact that she didn’t really want to live in a swamp full of status-obsessed former debate champions. Ann, who had always followed politics and was on her own high-school debate team for a few years, considered herself above DC before she even arrived. Moving was her choice, but it was one she made reluctantly. And so she showed up with the pouty energy of a preschooler being sent to time-out: compliant but with an air of superiority.