What a Real Night Out Looks Like vs What People Post About

There is a whole other city that exists only on people's phones, and I swear it is better lit than the actual city.

The Version That Gets Posted

You've seen it. The photo is perfect. Everyone's hair is doing the right thing. The cocktails are sweating just enough to look intentional. Somebody wrote a caption like "needed this" and got four hundred likes, and you're sitting there in your pajamas at eleven-fifteen on a Tuesday thinking, why don't I do that, why don't I go out like that, why doesn't my life look like that.

I'll tell you why. Because that's not what a real night out looks like. That's what a real night out looks like for about forty-five seconds, usually right after everyone sits down and before anyone has said anything real yet.

What a real night out actually looks like is: somebody's running late. The place is louder than expected. You can't find the bathroom. There's a thing on the menu that sounds good but you're not sure, and you ask the server, and they say "it's popular" which tells you absolutely nothing. Somebody's wearing shoes that are already hurting them. Somebody ordered the wrong thing and is pretending they didn't.

And then something happens. Somebody says something and it lands wrong and then lands right, and all of a sudden you're laughing so hard you can't find your way back to regular. And that moment, that one right there, that's the whole point of going out. But nobody photographs that because everyone's too busy being inside it.

What Actually Happens After the Photo

What a real night out looks like, past the photo, is people. Just people being people. Somebody tells a story they've told before but you let them tell it because they tell it well. Somebody gets a little honest about something they've been carrying around. The drinks are fine. The food is fine. What you remember isn't any of that, it's that one thing somebody said around the second round that felt true in a way you weren't expecting.

Herb and I had a night like that recently. Nothing planned. Nothing particularly beautiful about it on the outside. We had something from Herb & Lou's and sat in the kitchen and talked for three hours about nothing and everything and I looked at him at one point and thought, I really like this person. Which sounds simple. But it felt enormous.

That didn't go on Instagram. It just went into the part of me that keeps things.

The Lights Are Different When You're Actually There

Here's what I've figured out, and I'm not sure I can explain it all the way, but I'll try. What a real night out looks like is always a little messy and a little loud and a little bit not what you planned. And that's exactly where the good stuff lives. The good stuff doesn't live in the version that's been cropped and filtered and captioned.

The good stuff lives in the in-between. The walk home when you're still laughing about something. The moment the place clears out a little and you can finally hear each other. The look across the table that means we both caught that, didn't we.

I think we've gotten a little confused about what we're actually after. We're after the feeling. But we keep chasing the photo of the feeling and those are not the same thing at all.

Go somewhere. Order the thing you're not sure about. Let the night be loud and imperfect and a little bit longer than you planned. Stop trying to make it look like something. Let it be something.

And if you want to make your actual kitchen feel like a night out, Herb & Lou's is a good place to start. We've had some of our best nights right there on 47th Street with nowhere to be.

The lights in our kitchen aren't anything special. But some nights they look like everything.