It’s Never Been Easier to Be an Amazing Friend
We’re all participating in a giant friendship experiment
On the how-bad-does-it-hurt scale of abominations this pandemic has wrought, a canceled wedding is not even a 3 out of 10. But it was, nonetheless, the particular sadness I experienced in mid-March: My fiancé and I called our parents and our wedding party and told the guests that our April 18 wedding would be postponed by at least six months, maybe a year. I hit send on the email, and then I went to a beach and cried. Alone.
Can I tell you a beach is a garbage place for crying? You think about how, say, your dad lives in Florida, where the outbreak is currently surging, and how he has diabetes, and how he bought this adorable shirt with little surfboards on it for the rehearsal dinner, but then you’re like, Is that seagull honestly trying to eat a Coke can? You can’t get worked up enough to really get it going. It just goes in and out like that, like waves.
The beach is not your friend.
The friend that I needed right then came through a week later, on the night that would have been my bachelorette party. She arranged for me and four other friends to meet up over Zoom and drink wine and talk.
We stayed on through three 40-minute Zoom cutoffs. It was the first time I’d…
