"You can actually see old lobster couples, walking around their tank, you know, holding claws." — Phoebe Buffay, Friends (1996)
Right now, as I write this, Lisa is crossing the street outside my window. Blue denim dress. The bag of the day. Sunglasses on, coffee in hand, on the phone, the sun catching her as she heads to lunch with her friends. Tomorrow she turns 50.
I’ve been watching her cross streets for 32 years.1 I still stop what I’m doing.
September 1994. A house on Washington Circle in DC that I shared with three fraternity brothers. Emily Krasney, a high school friend, stopped by with her new roommate from George Washington. Lisa was 17, a few days into college. She picked up the controller for FIFA Soccer 94 and took me apart. A month later she was at The Exchange on F Street in a ridiculous costume her friends had made her wear to announce her birthday. The bartender asked if I wanted the usual.2 I reached into my pockets and found nothing. The cutest girl in the room was standing next to me and I couldn’t afford a drink.
“Just two waters, please.”
She took one anyway. I walked her home and kissed her goodnight on the steps of Thurston Hall. The next afternoon we met at Kramerbooks & Afterwords3 on Dupont Circle. It was her 18th birthday.
A few months earlier, as a senior at Bullis, she’d won the Manuel José Baca, Jr. Joy of Living Award. I found out years later.4
I think about how thin the thread was. If Emily had been assigned a different roommate. If I’d stayed home that Friday. If she’d left ten minutes earlier. Everything I love hangs on a night I almost missed.
I believe in making your own luck. I didn’t make this one. I didn’t earn Lisa. I got her, and I’ve spent 32 years trying to deserve it.
She bet on me before there was any reason to. I dropped out of college to start Neptune the same spring we got serious. She didn’t flinch. Her parents did, which was fair. In 1998, over lunch at Caliente Cab in New York, Arthur Cinader Jr., my boss at the time5 and now one of my closest friends, told me to stop waiting and marry her. I couldn’t afford the ring, so Alan helped me set up a payment plan.6 At her graduation dinner, Alan gave a toast, handed me the room, and I got down on one knee.
Rabbi Bruce Lustig stood with us under the chuppah at Washington Hebrew Congregation on September 25, 1999, and told us about beshert. Meant to be. I don’t remember his exact words. I remember he said it like a fact, and I remember believing him.
Then came the dot-com crash. 2008. COVID. Every time the world broke, I looked across the room and she was still there.
I’m writing this on October 7th. Thirty-two years ago tonight, I walked her home to the steps of Thurston Hall. Three years ago, the same date became a day our people will mourn forever. I wrote about what it taught me in We Dance Again. Now the worst day and the night everything began share the same square on the calendar. Tonight I’ll hold both.
She was the soul of POPSUGAR from its first post, leading hundreds of editors in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and around the world, knowing the bag before it was the bag. She is raising Katie, Juliet, and Elle without missing a meet or a game, then up at 7 a.m. on applications and housing forms before the rest of us are awake. She jokes that she’s a single parent. It’s a joke. Mostly. I know exactly how much she carries, and I know I don’t thank her enough while she’s carrying it.
She taught me no grudges. When we fight, one of us asks whether the fridge is making a funny noise, and it’s over. She taught me family first, the way Alan and Inez taught her, the way Alan’s mother did, gathering everyone in Boca Raton every December until she was 100. She taught me that an optimist needs someone nearby who checks the math.7 She says anyone standing next to me turns a little pessimistic just to keep the room level.
Then there are the dogs. Jack arrived for my 25th birthday. Lucy I brought home one day just after the dot-com crash, without telling Lisa. Lucy stayed. When Jack died, we got JJ, short for Jack Jr. Lulu was our COVID puppy. Four dogs across 27 years, and every one of them figured out within a day who runs the house. They follow her from room to room, and every night they follow her to bed. Ever since, there has been a dog between us. Romance finds a way.
Our life is blue. The house, the cars, the company colors, the closets. Even now, out the window, the dress is blue.
Thank you for taking the water. Thank you for not flinching. Thank you for Katie, Juliet, and Elle. Thank you for never missing a game, and for every 7 a.m. at the kitchen table. Thank you for the fridge.
Thank you for being my wife, my best friend, my co-founder, my co-pilot, my ride or die. The planner. The editor-in-chief. The venture capitalist across the table. Khaleesi, mother of three dragons.
The first call. The last word.
She’s been there for all of it, starting with a broke kid who ordered two waters.
Tomorrow at five o’clock, it will be 32 years since we walked into Kramerbooks on her 18th birthday.
She decided a long time ago that I was her lobster. Phoebe swore lobsters mate for life.8
She just called. Lunch was great. She’s off with Krista and Molly to get her nails done, and she might stop back at the office.
If she does, I’ll stop what I’m doing. I always have.9
Happy birthday, baby. ILYSM 💙
Phoebe was wrong about lobsters. Rabbi Lustig was right about us.
There’s a meme going around where couples brag about being together in 2006, 2016, and 2026. Our version is 1996, 2006, 2016, and 2026.
The usual was vodka on the rocks, a drink I’d spent the previous year trying to rebrand as the Efficient. Half the bartenders in Foggy Bottom knew the order. It was my first branding exercise, and I had no idea that’s what it was.
It’s called Kramers now. It turned 50 this year. Tomorrow, so does she.
I had to text Aaron for the exact name. He grew up with Lisa, and the two of them have spent every Thanksgiving together since they were kids, minus a couple of COVID years. Now our kids do too. Aaron is married to Krista, who co-founded POPSUGAR with Lisa and me and is now our partner at Sugar Capital. Aaron is also my best friend, and and one of the few people who has known Lisa longer than I have.
A week after we put the J.Crew catalog online, I took the site down from a beach in Hawaii, on vacation with Lisa’s parents and her brother Jonathan. Arthur forgave me. A few years later, he helped us start POPSUGAR as a co-founder.
Arthur’s first idea was that J.Crew would lend me the money. I was so excited I called Alan to get things moving. Then Scott Rosen, the CFO, heard the plan and said hell no. Years later in San Francisco, Lisa insured everything we owned because we were finally adults, and the ring appraised for twice what I paid. Everyone denies it. I know it was Alan. That’s the family I married into.
She’s a Libra and weighs every option twice. I’m a Taurus and already moving.
They don’t. Lobster pairings last a couple of weeks. Lisa is aware. She has never cared.
Tonight it’s dinner at her favorite restaurant with her favorite San Francisco girls. And me. Tomorrow she and Krista head to her happy place for a spa day. On Friday, Juliet, Elle, and I follow her there, along with Aaron and Miles. Katie’s in Italy and Nate’s at boarding school, the only two who can’t make it.