Eat spaghetti and celebrate break ups

Time to invite the ladies over for spaghetti and manifesting

Welcome to Friendshift, a new newsletter about friendship and how it changes throughout our lives. If you missed the first few editions, you can get a better understanding of what this newsletter is about here. Recently I wrote about when life plans overtake fun exciting group plans and why we no longer want to watch people hanging out on TV.

Last December I invited a bunch of cool women over to my house for a Favorite Things party (and then wrote about it for work because everything is content).

Basically you had to bring two identical gifts of something that you’ve really loved this year.

Yes, I’d seen them on TikTok and got inspired — although I reject the Gen Z hosting style that expects beautiful menu cards and table settings because if I worried about those things I would simply never host.

Everyone came over with their two identical gifts worth $25 each and explained what they’d brought and why — a mini humidifier you can keep on your desk so your face doesn’t dry out. A body oil that smells delicious. Their favorite Trader Joe’s snacks.

One friend K brought a water bottle that fits in your handbag and the ingredients for her favorite meal: spaghetti with olives.

The meal came with a story, which is that every time her partner is out of town, she cooks herself this very specific dish — and it’s the only time she eats it.

“People say: ‘Why do you only eat spaghetti when he's out of town? Does he not like it?’ And I said, ‘No, it's just for me,’ she told me later. “I am extremely literal. So when you had the favorite things party, I had to ask myself, what are my favorite things? And the answer was: my tiny water bottle and the spaghetti.”

The recipe itself is straightforward: while the spaghetti is cooking, you take Castelvetrano olives — preferably already pitted — and smash them. Throw them in the pan with some olive oil, red pepper flakes, garlic and pepper, and let them char a bit. Toast some bread crumbs on the side.

When the spaghetti is done, add it to the pan with the olives. Add some spaghetti water to coat and make a little saucy. Throw it all on the plate. Add the bread crumbs, more olive oil, and some Maldon salt flakes and voila.

“At some point it just got into my head as like a Pavlovian response, that if he was gonna be away, I was gonna make myself delicious spaghetti with olives for dinner,” she said.

You can probably see where this is going.

A month after the favorite things party, K and her partner broke up. They’d been together over 14 years and lived together for a decade.

And in the early weeks of the breakup, as he moved out and she figured out her own next steps, “two different people who have never met each other both texted me that now I would get to eat spaghetti whenever I wanted to.”

So she did what every woman in history has done (or should do) when confronted with a relationship ending: she invited a bunch of girlfriends over for wine. And, of course, spaghetti.

A lucky invitee, I can confirm the pasta is delicious. But more importantly, a bunch of women all hung out together — and made plans.

K had recently done a work brainstorming activity where you wrote ideas down on post-it notes and then voted for the best ideas with little stickers. So she introduced her own version and gave us a prompt, something along the lines of: what should I do now?

And we all started writing down our ideas for her.

Get a piercing. Take up boxing. Get a tattoo. Do a hot photo shoot. Buy sexy underwear. Rekindle a friendship you’ve neglected. Buy that luxurious bag/coat/dress that you’ve been eyeing and thought was too expensive. Have a one night stand. Travel solo. Go surfing. Join a sports league. Fuck a firefighter.

“What I should have foreseen was, if you give me a to do list, I feel compelled to do it,” K said.

She’s got a tattoo — and is planning the piercing. Sexy underwear — plus a host of other luxurious items she’d long wanted, mainly for her apartment — have been acquired. Friendship have been rekindled, dates have been gone on, a sports club joined.

The “Fuck a firefighter” got the most votes of the night — and when party attendees have walked past firefighters responding to a crisis, they’ve texted a photo to the group chat with the cross streets, so that K can easily find them as needed.

“A small gaggle of firefighters showed up in my home recently, but they weren't hot. But all I could think about was, you've just literally showed up at my door,” she said.

But there was one post-it note that I hadn’t even noticed on the night — but K had kept them all, in her diary, and brought them over to show me.

She called this one the finale, and it read simply: Women.

“This one kind of pulled the whole party together, even if it wasn't the one that everyone walked away,” she said.

Friendships with women have usually been the most powerful long-term relationships in my life, even if sometimes they get forgotten or neglected by other romantic relationships or family ones — and it can take a break up to really drill in that your friends offer the real love affairs of our lives.

The break up changed K’s relationship not just with her former partner, but also with her friends.

As she described: “It felt like stepping from one club to another club, especially having a lot of friends who are in quite long term relationships, and suddenly I was out of that club. But what I didn't realize was: I was just joining a different community.

“And I wouldn't even say that that first group was lost, because it's not like I'm not friends with those people anymore, right? I've kept them. It's just opened up a new channel of relating to other women in my life.”

And sometimes you need a break up party to celebrate that.

I do plan for this to be a paid newsletter (and lord knows writing takes a lot longer than most people think) but won’t paywall anything initially. A subscription is available now if you want to contribute, and I would be so grateful. Fwd this to a friend who has gone through a break up recently and maybe needs their own post-it note to do list created by their pals.