For years, people have assumed Holly and I are romantically involved from the looks of our beautiful vacations. (When I returned from Como, my neighbor asked me if I had gotten married and didn’t tell him, because he thought, having seen my photos with Holly on Instagram, that I was on my honeymoon.) While marriage comes with a set of rules, legal protections, and built-in expectations around choosing each other first, there’s less of a social script for deeply intimate lifelong friendships. Within and without our travels, Holly and I have written our own script. We both believe that alternate types of intimate relationships are worthy of shared extravagant travel. And when it comes to lying in crisp, fluffy hotel beds, silently watching TikToks in tandem, we will always choose to do so together.
But that’s not to say our relationship is devoid of romance. On our trips we are constantly spoiling each other with little gifts. In Bellagio, I returned from a solo walk with overpriced his-and-hers novelty calendario: a Chihuahua one for me and one for Holly covered in tabby cats that look just like her two at home. When she visits me in Brooklyn, she immediately gets to work on cleaning out all the rotting contents of my fridge, without me ever asking. We often talk about me moving in with her and her husband one day, maybe in a pool house. I start these conversations in the cadence of a joke, but we both know we’re serious.
Our last night in Italy, we grabbed ruby red Campari cocktails at the elegant Mio Lab bar on the first floor of the Park Hyatt. Holly asked if I remembered our first international trip together as grown-up college grads, before they got swanky but after they involved bunk beds. We stayed at a midlevel hotel chain in downtown Ghent, Belgium, with no roaming cellphone plans or Internet on our phones. After a night out with a ragtag group of locals we met at a bicycle-themed bar, Holly told me she wanted to go home with someone who lived out in the suburbs.
“You wrote our hotel address on my arm in lipstick,“ she remembers, laughing. I’d stayed up all night, worrying she’d never find her way back or that her one-night stand had killed her. Tonight, thankfully, we are going home together–just an elevator ride upstairs, where we’ll slip into couples’ robes and slippers and plan our next big trip.
