In Praise of the Standing Coffee Date
Scheduling is the bane of my existence, which is one more reason to love the standing coffee date.
In Praise of the Standing Coffee Date
“Do you want to fly home on Tuesday or Wednesday?” my husband asks as he scrolls through potential return flights for my trip next month.
“Tuesday so I can make my Wednesday coffee date.”
“Of course,'” he says, laughing.
The date in question is the standing appointment I have at the coffee shop down the street with my two friends, R and S. We’ve met every Wednesday afternoon since mid-2019, barring those months of lockdown when fraternizing was potentially lethal. S originally convened our group so R and I could help him review his matches on a dating website. Now, S has been happily married for over two years and is expecting his first child any day now, but we’re still meeting every Wednesday.
We are an unlikely trio. S, the intense professor in his early forties, who speaks seven languages and immigrated to the United States when he was ten years old. R, with the Irish surname and Long Island accent who recently celebrated his seventieth birthday and enjoys a multi-course dinner with his wife and four grown children every Sunday. And me, the lawyer-turned-writer who grew up in Texas and is now a half-century old, raising two teenagers and working from home. We met in a therapy group, but we are very clear: our coffee dates aren’t therapy. There’s no doctor, no agenda, no obligation to be serious or psychologically minded or particularly helpful. Our Wednesday coffee meetings are our chance to gossip, to tell long-winded stories with no moral or clever punchline or to debate arcane grammar rules while showing off that we know the etymologies of everyday words.
The friendly barista knows my order—decaf skim-milk latte—and asks after R and S if I show up alone. I tell her they’re coming and find my way to our usual seats—three chairs (two on one side and one on the other side) in the long row that spans the length of the cafe. Nearby, there are other coffee shops that serve richer blends and heartier snacks, but the few times we’ve tried other venues we’ve found them lacking—too dark, not enough seating, or insufficient parking. We favor our unassuming spot where we can sit among college students and enjoy the retro Rick Astley and Paula Abdul tunes piped through the speakers.
We have our routines. S always promises to be on time but is typically ten minutes late. R texts every Tuesday afternoon—Lattes tomorrow?—even though he knows the answer is Yes. Often, I show up early, and they find me reading a novel and mock pouting no one else could be bothered to be on time.
“What do you talk about?” my daughter asked once after she stopped by the coffee shop to grab a smoothie with a friend. “I heard you laughing all the way at the register.”
“Everything and nothing,” I tell her. Our conversations might start off focused on one of us—say, the upcoming ultrasound for S’s wife—but by the end of the hour, we have drifted to R’s recent trip out East or my ongoing debate about whether to subject my face to cosmetic injectables. Most likely, we will spend half of our hour together puzzling over a question of language, say, the origin of the word thief—from the Greek word klephts as in kleptomaniac—and R will inevitably correct S’s English pronunciation. This brotherly gesture will spur S to explain that the Sanskrit word choro (thief or burglar) comes to Argentinian Spanish from Calό, a language spoken by the Romani people who migrated from India to Europe. I will interject my intermediate Spanish—I thought the word for thief was ladron—and they will aim their laughter at me for my paltry contribution (and for speaking high school Spanish with a Texas accent).
If someone overheard our conversation, we would sound like three nerdy friends who’ve developed a shorthand for intimacy that allows them to tease, challenge, and console each other, often in the same breath.
Our disparate ages are an endless source of conversation. S and I do not remember The Honeymooners or duck-and-cover drills in school during the Cold War; R has never seen an episode of Friends and confuses memes, Gifs, and bitmojis – though secretly so do I. Just you wait, R tell us when S and I complain about losing our mental agility. I like being in the middle age-wise—like Goldilocks, I feel not too old and not too young.
Having never been a “guys’ girl,” I also enjoy being the only woman at the table. Is that terribly anti-feminist to admit? They don’t seem to give me any special treatment, and I gain no social capital for spending an hour with two men drinking coffee. As a rule, I don’t let their gender stop me from holding forth about things I don’t expect them to understand—my feelings about my hair, my attraction to Howard Stern, my perimenopausal symptoms—and I don’t let mine prevent me from offering my two cents about their urology appointments or relationships with their older brothers.
Once, last summer, my daughter’s theater rehearsal prevented me from making Wednesday coffee time. I was grumpy and out of sorts by late afternoon, prompting my husband to observe: “Your coffee dates are more important than therapy.”
My husband is right. While Wednesday coffee dates are purely social, a designation that makes them seem superficial next to doctors’ appointments and work meetings, they are vital to my mental well-being. We know this; we’ve all read the articles in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal confirming that loneliness is an epidemic, lethal as a cigarette. We have to make time for our friends! It’s science!
Are we meeting tomorrow? Need to know ASAP—R texted us one Tuesday a few weeks ago. I wrote back immediately: Yes, of course. What’s your emergency? The next day he explained that he panicked because he needed to be on an important call at noon, but he also wanted to join us for coffee. “I had to move things around, but it all worked out.” We were five years into our weekly coffee date, and it was the first time I realized it meant as much as R as it did to me.
We often joke that long after our therapist has retired to the white-sand beaches of Boca Raton, the three of us will still meet on Wednesdays, sip our coffee, and update each other on our lives. S will be late, of course, and R will send a text confirmation on Tuesday, but we will be together for another week, living out our long and happy lives.
I could not love this more, both in topic and your Christie-style. Sharing it on my own newsletter going out later today!
As always, so lovely (and relatable) to read your thoughts, Christie!