The Social Ritual That Made Me a Better Man

My early days of expatriation were disorienting. It was 2011, and I had recently gotten married and moved to Paris. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my friendships to that point had depended on proximity: Once I crossed the Atlantic, many of them dwindled to digital approximations of intimacy. I went long stretches without talking to Carlos, my closest confidant since high school, even though we’d been like family when we lived in Brooklyn.