In our case, it was a good match. Of course, this was not something explicitly hashed out in our first conversation. In the days and weeks following the moment of spark, we both settled into the knowledge that we were aligned, and we’ve been aligned ever since. It’s worth noting that what people want from a relationship can evolve over time, past the moment of spark. One or both parties can decide they feel more romantic or sexual about it—or less. This is how you get friends who used to be lovers, and lovers who used to be friends. This is how you get a person who claims they’re being “friendzoned” by someone who’s always been strictly interested in the platonic. The lines aren’t as brightly drawn for everyone as they’ve been in our particular friendship.
Even in an unambiguous friendship like ours, the first whirlwind moments can feel a lot like falling in love. In the heady weeks after we met, we weren’t trying to get in each other’s pants, but rather in each other’s brains. In the eyes of the other, we each had an undefinable emotional appeal that was at once adventurous, mysterious, and idealized. In other words, it was exciting in that pit-of-the-stomach way. This kind of immediate connection is rare, so when it happens it’s incredible—as in not credible, as in so magical it’s difficult to believe.
What made our initial bond special is that it felt effortless. We had each been in social settings where small talk felt like hard labor and none of our jokes seemed to land. This dynamic between us, by contrast, didn’t feel like work at all. Sure, we were probably trying to impress each other a little—OK, a lot. But mostly it felt like our meet-cute happened to us. Like we didn’t even have a say in the matter.
* * *
If you’d asked us about friendship on that first night, we would have told you we were pretty good at it already. We figured that we knew how to hold on to the great friends we had while also making new ones… and that, with minimal effort, we would keep all of these important people around until our blissful Golden Girls–style group retirement situation. We thought we’d simply have solid friendships for life. Just set it and forget it. See you on the lanai.
But deep down, we also knew that we could let our friendships slide in order to bolster the other areas of our lives. Friends are expected to be forgiving of this kind of neglect. Trying to get that promotion? You gotta put in long hours and can’t hang out after work. Just met someone you might want to spend your life with romantically? It’s OK, your friends will understand why you had to cancel on them.
At this stage in our lives, we had a lot of time for our friends, so it wasn’t important to examine exactly where they fell on our priorities list. They were at the top by default, and we figured they’d stay there. We had never considered that we’d find the rough patches of our friendships to be more difficult than any career roadblock and more painful than the worst romantic breakup. Given what we were about to go through over the next decade, our idea of friendship as a respite from the “actual hard stuff” of life is downright laughable. We had no idea what we were in for.
We were just excited to have met each other.
The credits rolled on the Gossip Girl episode, and a heavy spring rain started to fall outside Dayo’s row house. As Aminatou walked down the front steps and opened her umbrella, she hoped Ann would be headed in the same direction. But Ann went the opposite way. Aminatou waved goodbye, maybe a little too enthusiastically. There were no phone numbers exchanged, no promises to find each other on social media, not even a “hope to see you around.”
Aminatou shouldn’t have worried, though. By the time she got home and logged on to Facebook to find Ann, she already had a friend request waiting.
And of course she clicked “Accept.”
TWO
Obsessed
The very next night, Ann had plans to attend a networking dinner at a fancyish Indian restaurant. She’d been dreading it. This was exactly the kind of after-hours work event she hated, and she could think of a million ways she’d rather spend her Thursday evening. The guest list featured a conservative writer whose views Ann loathed, so she joked to a friend that she planned to show up late and say breezily, “Sorry, I had a 6pm abortion, and I thought I’d be done sooner!” But she had RSVP’d yes, and she knew Dayo would be there too. So Ann arrived on time.
When she walked into the restaurant, she was elated to find Aminatou already sitting at the table. Ann quickly claimed the seat next to her.
We fell into a rapid-fire conversation about everything but work. Denim skirts were our first and biggest point of disagreement. (Aminatou’s position: they’re never a good look. Ann’s position: it depends. Aminatou has since softened on this issue.) Rather than going home after the meal ended, we headed to a nearby movie theater, where we watched a midnight screening of Beyoncé’s star turn in the camp classic Obsessed. Aminatou had already seen it twice, but she wanted to spend more time with Ann, who had been meaning to see it but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. We shared the conspiratorial thrill of being out late on a school night, having turned a networking event into a chance to enjoy some trashy pop culture together.
After that outing, our digital relationship began in earnest. We added each other on Gchat, the first big commitment in any new friendship at the time. Our first recorded email exchange is from less than a week after we met, when Aminatou—whom Ann had started calling Amina as other close friends did—forwarded an article about “Spring’s Must-Have Denim Skirt.” A few days later, Ann invited Aminatou to a cookout and trolled her by showing up in a denim skirt. But forget the skirt, Aminatou was more impressed that Ann had brought homemade deviled eggs.
Soon after our first unplanned friend dates, Aminatou sent Ann another fashion-blog post. (It’s hard to overstate the role that fashion blogs played in our cultural consumption back in those pre-Instagram days.) “Ugh, denim skirt,” she commented. Ann replied, “I like it! Can we still be friends?”
“Only if we hang out soon,” Aminatou responded.
The denim skirt had become the first private meme in our friendship—a not-quite-joke we returned to again and again to signal to each other that we were paying attention. These relatively unimportant conversation topics were one way we began forging a shared sense of humor and taste.
The following month, Ann found out there was going to be a reality show about the lives of rich Manhattan teens, modeled on Gossip Girl. Of course she immediately sent the link to Aminatou, kicking off a volley of messages.
ANN: Can we please have a date-night and watch this shit? to get us through the gossip girl off-season?
AMINATOU: omg yes!! also can we hang out this weekend?
The Gmail trail doesn’t lie: we were keeping up digitally, but always quickly proposing opportunities to spend time together in person. We both instinctively knew that we were still in that fragile, early phase of friendship when “out of sight” quickly becomes “out of mind.” We had not gotten close yet, so if we stopped hanging out regularly, we would fade away from each other’s lives. It’s possible to go months without seeing a longtime friend and still feel close to them, but new friends require steady investment.