Hindsight is always 20/20, which makes it pretty tough to watch a misjudgment as drastic as this one play out: This woman’s weekend-long trip with her friend should have really just been a lunch.
Wow. This was a serious error on her part.
When Marta Holman embarked on a weekend trip to Nashville with her friend from college, she realized within the first hour that she had gravely overestimated how much the two had to talk about. The amount of life updates that they had for each other could have easily been condensed into a quick lunch, but now they’re stuck on this entire weekend trip with nothing else to talk about.
The two friends, who had never been that close to begin with, were already hitting awkward silences walking through the airport before boarding, which was a critical indicator of just how flawed Holman’s decision was to go on a whole trip with her friend instead of just chatting briefly over coffee. And by the time they got on the flight, they had resorted to fluffing out the conversation by talking about a mutual friend who had recently graduated from law school, which was both a boring topic of conversation and one which exhausted itself after several minutes.
In retrospect, Holman would have been much better off spending the weekend in her own apartment and shooting her friend a text to plan a bite down the road. Thanks to her severe misjudgment, she’s now looking at another 48 hours of strained conversation and forced politeness with a friend who she’s starting to realize she doesn’t even like that much. It’s absolutely tragic to see.