I haven’t made a new best friend since I was eighteen years old. That’s the age I fell in love with my husband Zack, back when we were seniors in high school. I’d met him when we were five years old, enrolled in the same Kindergarten class, assigned the same bus route to the local public school. By the time we’d graduated (and both serendipitously accepted places at UPenn for the following Fall), I knew he was the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
Before Zack, I hadn’t made a best friend since the day I was born – arriving earth-side in the hospital room as one of a set of four quadruplet girls. Since then, we’ve been the type of sisters you might imagine in a storybook – we grew up sharing clothes and bunkbeds (two sets in one room!) and are now the closest of friends. We are in what feels like constant communication, all live in New York City, and see each other at least once a week (though usually, more.)
Between my sisters and my husband, I’ve been ridiculously blessed to have found the most defining relationships of my life at a young age. They are the people I first share my stories or job updates with, the first people I text to make weekend plans. But with those relationships also come all the people, the roads, the choices not taken, because I never really had the vacancy to take them in.
When I sat down to write my debut novel Kismet, I knew I wanted to explore the realities of relationships that feel destined, etched in stone. My narrator Amy is on the cusp of turning thirty, married to her high school sweetheart, and attending her twin sister’s wedding in their family beach town, Fire Island, when she discovers an old journal from her freshman year of college. Reading those pages, Amy remembers a time in her life when she was on the precipice of change and new choices, and she begins reflecting (and rethinking) on all the steps she’s taken in the decade since. Did she marry the right man? Pick the right career? Make the right plans? Like so many of us, she wonders: was there something different for her out there? Did she make a mistake?
While writing Kismet, I started reflecting on my own collegiate anxieties, too. Like Amy, I arrived on campus with my closest relationships already decided, printed on my heart like tattoos. Romantically, Zack and I knew we wanted to marry each other one day, so in the meantime, we had to deal with the ramifications of making a high-school-sweetheart-love-story work. The less obvious reality of falling in love with your soulmate at age eighteen is spending so much of the following years meeting and actively averting other potential partners. The only way we made our relationship work was by being brutally, consistently honest. We communicated, then we chose each other, time and time again.
My relationship with my sisters had a different effect on my life as I grew older. We went to different colleges where we made new groups of friends, but around the time of graduation, I realized that I didn’t have a traditional “best friend,” besides Zack and my sisters. Don’t get me wrong: I love the friends in my life, and I am not (or at least I hope I’m not!) an antisocial person. But still, I don’t have that friend that I text regularly, and I’ve accepted the fact that I’ll probably never be a bridesmaid for someone to whom I’m not related. (Instead, I text Zack and my sisters, and to be fair, at my own wedding, my only bridesmaids were my sisters and my sisters-in-law.) I think I’ve never been the traditional best friend because I never gave someone the space or the opportunity to reach my closest layers; I always felt like my friendship bandwidth was, for better or for worse, full.
This can sometimes be scary for me to stomach, still. How do I know that my eighteen-year-old-self-made the right choices to carry me for the rest of my life? How can I be certain that I didn’t miss out on something or someone greater, more perfect for me, by focusing on the relationships I’d made before even knocking on Penn’s door? In Kismet, Amy wonders a similar thing.
The short answer: We can’t. Doubt is human. We can speculate over best routes and future plans, we can read and watch stories about sliding doors. We can dream about greener grasses, but the reality is that we’ll never really know. And that’s okay.
The long answer: I started writing Kismet at the height of the pandemic, and our Penn five-year-reunion had just been canceled due to the lockdown. My pandemic “bubble,” perhaps not surprisingly, became Zack and my sisters (and their significant others, who we adore) again. We spent those uncertain months with outdoor-themed parties and family Zoom gatherings with our parents on weekends. At night, Zack and I would watch old movies, try new recipes, make each other laugh. It was scary and unexpected, but I was also filled with a renewed and vivid gratitude that I had these caring, long-lasting relationships to march through it together.
I won’t pretend that Zack and I don’t face doubts sometimes, as we approach a new decade of our relationship together. But when it arises, we take a page from our college selves and return to communication, commitment, and a healthy dose of hope. Amy learns this through the course of Kismet, too: the importance of being open with her loved ones and trusting the foundation of what she’s built to carry her through new hardships. And as I reflect back on what I’ve experienced, growing into myself while growing up with my sisters and Zack, all I can say is how special it feels to have these unusual, impactful relationships in my life. Relationships that feel like a “kismet” of my own. I am quite lucky: there’s no doubt about that.
Kismet is available from Amazon and Bookshop.