The friend who misses the old routine

Dear You,

For nine years, Marcus and I had dinner every Friday. Same time, 7 pm, rotating through places, always the full event: appetizers, mains, a dessert we’d agree to split and then not split because we each wanted our own. We ordered for each other. We kept a two-person running review of every taco in the county. It was the best part of my week and I think it was the best part of his.

Then I started the medication, and for about five months I quietly ruined Friday.

What changed

The first Friday, I ordered my usual and ate a quarter of it. Marcus noticed and said nothing. The second Friday I ordered an appetizer as a main and he said, “That’s it?” with a laugh that wasn’t fully a laugh. By the fourth Friday I’d stopped ordering the appetizers we used to share, because I couldn’t eat my half, and he was eating alone in front of me at a two-person table.

I hadn’t told him about the medication yet. I’d told him I was “trying to eat better,” which is a sentence that lands on a friend like a door closing, because it implies the way you’d been eating together was the problem.

He started suggesting places that were “quick.” Then one Friday in month three he texted that he was tired and could we do next week instead, and I felt something I recognized from breakups.

The awkward months

What I understand now, and didn’t then, is that Marcus wasn’t missing the food. He was missing being met. For nine years we’d arrived at that table with the same appetite and the same enthusiasm, and now one of us was watching the other one eat. Every “no, I’m fine, you go ahead” sounded, to him, like “I’ve moved on and you haven’t.”

And I was so busy managing my own strangeness, the new fullness, the new timing, which foods had quietly turned on me, that I had nothing left over to notice he was grieving the ritual too. We weren’t fighting. We were just getting quieter, which for two people who used to argue about tacos was its own kind of alarm.

The conversation

Month five. His kitchen, not a restaurant, which I think is why it worked. I’d brought a bottle of something and we were standing at his counter and he said, not quite looking at me, “I feel like Fridays are over and nobody told me.”

So I told him. Everything. The medication, the appetite that had shrunk to almost nothing, the fact that I could eat four bites of a taco now and the fifth would make me feel ill for an hour. That I wasn’t eating “better.” I was eating differently, on a scale neither of us had planned for, and I’d been too embarrassed to say so because food had been our thing and I’d changed the thing without asking.

He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Why didn’t you just say that?” Then he said, “I thought you were bored of me.” Then we both felt terrible and then we both felt better, in that order, and he ate most of a pizza while I ate one slice and for the first time in five months it was fine.

What we rebuilt

Friday is still Friday. It just isn’t about volume anymore.

We go to the same places, mostly. I order small and say so out loud, no apology, and he orders what he wants and doesn’t look at my plate. We still review the tacos. I just review one taco with great seriousness while he reviews three.

Some Fridays we skip the restaurant entirely. We’ve started cooking at his place about once a month, which we’d never done in nine years, and it turns out the thing we actually liked was the two hours of talking, and the kitchen gives us three.

We added a walk. After dinner, twenty minutes, around his neighborhood. The dessert slot got repurposed.

And once, when I was having a rough week with side effects, he suggested we get a coffee instead, and I nearly cried at the counter because he’d done the math on his own.

So: tell your Marcus. Earlier than feels comfortable. The friend who built a ritual with you deserves to know the ritual is changing, and why, before they fill in the blank with “they’re bored of me.” The appetite is yours. The Friday belongs to both of you.

One friendship, one way through. But I’ve heard enough versions of this story to know the shape is common, and the fix is almost always the same: say the true thing, at a kitchen counter, sooner.

Want to tell me something? Reply to any Low Volume email, or write to me here. I read everything.

Getting Quiet shares lived experience, general education, and practical tools. For medical decisions and individual treatment questions, talk with your qualified care team.