Soft Skills
My dad was guest lecturing at HBS. I was set to start in the fall, so my mom and I tagged along. After class, a handful of women approached her — seated in a corner, trying to make herself invisible (something she’s never done well). They’d clearly prepped their question: “Your husband said you also went to business school. What was it like balancing your own career with his? Do you think women can have it all?” Without missing a beat, she said, “No, you cannot. And anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.”
That kind of absolutism warps your thinking. No room for grey — and unfortunately that’s where real life lives.
My work is the least interesting thing about me — not because I don’t care about doing it well, but because it’s not what drives my curiosity. Just as I was raised that someday I’d have to choose — job or family — I was also raised that you never ask someone what they do for a living. It’s gauche. Like clapping when the plane lands, or in between movements at the symphony. Perhaps that’s why I skate past the topic anytime I’m asked about my work. Maybe because I’m emotionally detached from my job — in what I believe is the best way possible. I don’t mean I don’t work hard at it. I mean I keep healthy boundaries and a strict professional perspective so that I can do the best job possible.
When I was hired to run Amante, I thought about it tactically: Was it a good opportunity? Could I make people money? Could I deliver a return to the people who’d bet on me, like a blonde horse with decent teeth and a promising stride?
Most founders treat their business like a baby. I do not. And I think I’m better for it. I make decisions every day with surgical precision. I’m not seduced by brand vanity. I care about building something extraordinary — objectively.
Maybe that’s why I hate talking about my work. It’s cold, hard, exact. In my spare time, I want nuance and the wayward.
I’ve been on a real quest to rediscover my neighborhood. There are so many longstanding bars and restaurants I’ve never tried and they give me an excuse to dabble in bubbles outside my ever-shrinking one. I can sit down at La Ripaille and pretend to be someone entirely different — prove my thesis or refute it. So when I sat down at Entwine this week and the bartender asked if I was a writer, I didn’t give my usual caveat/spiel. I simply said yes and crossed my fingers and toes he wouldn’t ask too many follow-ups. I lucked out.
It’s hard to introduce myself that way — not because I don’t want to, but because it’s not my real job. It’s not the thing I’m known for, or applauded for, or funded for. Writing feels far more intimate than anything else I do — which is saying something, given how often I use the word mouthfeel in meetings. To call myself a writer is to admit I care about something that doesn’t pay me, doesn’t scale, and could be easily dismissed by the very people I secretly want to impress. If someone doesn’t like Amante, I can shrug because taste is subjective. But if someone doesn’t like my writing? That cuts a million times deeper. Because unlike everything else, I actually mean it. I’m entangled with it. And I think that’s what really scares me — not that people won’t take it seriously, but that they will… and still won’t care.
For a moment, I’m just the pretty writer with long blonde hair piled into a chaotic twist. I wear an oversized men's button-down, daisy dukes, and loafers — an aesthetically nonsensical combination that somehow conjures the laissez-faire French air I'm trying to muster. I like that version of myself and maybe that’s why strangers do too. That version is so much less scary. No one’s worried the ingénue at the bar is going to out-earn, outshine, outdo them in any capacity. I could be an influencer who just got back from Milan fashion week and has three brand deals lined up this week. Although even typing that makes me want to gag. But that girl definitely doesn’t think twice about a man feeling gobbled.
Sometimes I think I created this version — easy, lovely, a little aloof — just to be more palatable to the very people I wanted to love me.
I’m not here to rehash the “can women have it all?” debate. You don’t care. Neither do I. I’m here because I’m failing a one-woman Bechdel test of my own making.
I started writing this blog ten years ago, with many breaks along the way, because I was lonely and desperate to claw my way out of it. I started taking myself on dates. I wanted to see if I could make neighbors out of strangers on the barstool next to me. Most of those stories coincided with human connection because that’s our only real path to solving this loneliness epidemic.
The problem isn’t that I fail the Bechdel test in my head — though I might. It’s that I fail it in public. What I think about, obsessively…to a fault, is how we interact with one another. If I were living my most navel-gazing, indulgent life, all I’d do is write about how we talk to, or past, each other. What I’m supposed to think about is my career. The problem is my career, in my opinion, is uninteresting. All I want to write about is the machinery of human interaction — the way people miss each other, collide, connect. But people expect me to write about success, leadership, exits. How dull.
I am fluent in the language of love — well not fluent because I haven’t figured it out at all — but fluent at writing about it. Society dictates that successful businesswomen should write about business, that my MBA is wasted on anything otherwise. But I also think society has no interest in reading about my musings on business. No one cares. It’s flat and stale. Girl starts company. Girl struggles. Girl ponders whether it’s possible to have it all. It’s been written to death, and still no one cares.
But I’m pulled toward writing about what actually moves people — our capacity to care for each other even at our worst, even when we’re hurting each other more than we knew we could.
Perhaps my impulse to write about human connection is because the “field” has shown me that professional success isn’t always a plus for women. Distressed damsels and TikTokers? Sure. But a real job with real stakes? Intimidating. Less desirable. For all the world’s talk of progress, it hasn’t evolved at all.
To some, my career is impressive, sexy even. To others, very much not. That’s the rub. Maybe the solution isn’t to care less about work but to lead with what I actually care about. Being loving has made me better at my job. My industry runs on charm — flirting with bartenders, wooing investors. Some might call it corporate seduction. I call it emotional intelligence with a quarterly target.
Selling Amante is theater. I study my target and tailor the story. If it’s a cocktail bar I lean on the liquid’s malleability. We pair well with so many different base spirits, which is rather novel for this category. I talk about the more balanced flavor, and that the liquid is distilled with only a handful of ingredients. The pitch to an Italian restaurant is entirely different. I highlight things like our Italian winemaker and our Roman distillery. I could go on but I’ll stop there because, to reiterate, business is boring — it’s where good prose goes to die.
My job is to charm, but make it professional. It’s leaning forward at the right moments, and knowing when to lock eyes with a bartender. I make people fall in love — not just with me, with a story and the character I’m playing.
Business success is emotional intelligence. And emotional intelligence comes from paying attention to people. That’s why I write about them.
I am not a Taylor Swift fan. I take issue with how she goes about delivering her message. She turns every relationship into a public autopsy and sells souvenirs at the wake. She names names and weaponizes moments of vulnerability, showing no posthumous respect for the time they spent together. When she writes about love, it’s always love as victim narrative — she’s the wronged party, the misunderstood genius, the poor little girl who loved too much.
The thing is, she’s been undeniably successful because all she writes about is love. Swift succeeds because she gives people permission to be the victim in their own love stories. It’s emotionally satisfying in the moment — but ultimately hollow. Still, it’s a hollowness that clearly rings true. Her fans may not be growing from her music, but they feel validated in their grievances and that’s really all that matters. She’s built an unprecedented empire on emotional comfort food.
I strive to write about love in a way in which I can pick myself apart just as much as I do another person. We’re all to blame. We should all own our part in the wreckage. Studying love should be archaeology — digging through your own buried motivations as much as the fossils of those we died next to, metaphorically speaking. I want to understand the machinery of connection, not just document the funeral.
My point though is that all great songs are ultimately about love, and there’s a reason for that. It simply has the greatest centrifugal force. The biggest battles have been fought over love. Just ask Helen, Cleopatra, and Guinevere.
Love is why we wake up in the morning — and why we can’t get out of bed.
Love is the only thing that’s ever really mattered. Everything else is just how we fill the time in between it or until we find it. Human connection, magnetism, and cold hard pheromones are the things we all have in common.
The problem with being impressive (pardon the arrogance; or don’t) is that it’s often mistaken for compatibility. I went on a few dates with someone last summer. I was so excited for the first meeting. He sounded nearly perfect: classically tall and handsome, Jewish (naturally), and didn’t grow up in New York (thank god). I even managed to look past the investment banking career when the setup was first pitched to me, because everyone has flaws.
He chose Little Branch. No notes. In fact, it made me laugh. The last time I’d been to Little Branch was years prior, on a summer evening with my dad after one of our Monday night dinner dates. There was a line, maybe eight people deep. My dad looked at me and said, “No, we’re not waiting in that.” He went up to the bouncer and offered him something — $20, maybe $50. The bouncer handed it back and said, “No, we don’t do that here.” My dad turned to me and said, “New York is dead.”
So I already had a good story, good first-date fodder, in case there were any lulls. There weren’t. We talked and talked in a way that felt like friends.
He was a little boring. I knew it after the first meeting. Still, I gave it a few more tries, just to leave no stone unturned. He was attentive, thoughtful. He planned perfect dates and made me feel wanted. I felt wined and dined, courted even.
But there wasn’t a single cell in my body that was ever excited to see him. We looked good on paper and probably even better in a picture. But I felt nothing just like Diana in A Chorus Line (that’s a niche reference, sorry). He admired my ambition, loved hearing about Amante, thought I was even more spectacular because of it. But admiration is not connection. This is the contradiction I live with — I’ve become impressive in ways that make me less lovable to the very people I want to love me. And the more impressive I become, the further I drift from what I actually want. And we didn’t have that invisible, human spark — that ineffable current that makes the earth keep rotating.
But that’s rare. I often wonder if, deprogrammed, I actually wanted professional success or just learned to want it. I try to tamp it down, but the squeaky voice always speaks up. Some men look at me like I might eat them alive. A different body part for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Their eyes glaze, then widen, and I know I’m not the archetype they were hoping for. Which is too bad. Because at my core, more than part of me wants to be a domestic housewife who cooks, gardens, and helps with homework.
I first had a hunch that, secretly — maybe even shamefully — all I wanted was to be a really good mom when my little brother was born. I was ten. I’d always wanted a little sister. I got Ari instead. He came home from the hospital and my world changed. I would tiptoe into his room when I got home from school every day and rattle his crib to wake him up when I thought no one was looking. I just wanted to be his mom. Or maybe anyone’s. And maybe that’s the most dangerous kind of wanting — the kind you carry quietly, while the world applauds you for other things.
Our 10-year age gap certainly contributed. Structurally, I was already so much older. I sort of felt like his parent, like I had a hand in raising him. That kind of joy is nearly impossible to articulate.
The older I got, the more certain I became that I was put on this planet to be a mother. I don’t say that in a desperate way because it’ll happen when it happens either with a partner or on my own. Sure, I want professional accolade too, but I don’t think I can tell you with any believability that I want that more than I want to be a mother.
Business, in the larger sense, feels made up. It is made up. We concocted this whole social construct around financial success, entrepreneurship, and power. Women in business have an even greater burden to perpetuate it out of fear of being labeled weak — a girl. Reproduction, family, and ultimately, love, are anything but made up. Those things are science, they’re the most spectacular facts of life; our place on this planet completely hinges on them to exist.
I adamantly believe wanting to be a mother doesn’t diminish my professional competence. If anything, the same emotional intelligence that draws me toward motherhood is my competitive advantage in business. Understanding what drives people, wanting to nurture and connect — these aren’t weaknesses, they’re precisely why I excel at my job. I’m not someone who’s checked out or half-hearted about work while waiting for my ‘real life’ to begin. If anything, it’s the whip that makes me work harder, if it’s true we can’t have it all at once.
So maybe you can’t have it all. But maybe my mother was answering the wrong question. Those women asked about balancing career with family, assuming the career was the given. What they should have asked was: What happens when the thing you’re supposed to want professionally keeps you from the thing you actually want personally? What happens when success becomes the very thing standing between you and happiness?
Still, knowing this about myself makes every business decision feel like borrowed time. I’m building a business I’m obviously so committed to making succeed, while idling for the life I actually want to begin. I’m living a life that I know is impressive to other people in the waiting room for the life that will actually be meaningful to me.
Some days, the waiting room is silent. Just me and a stack of Highlights magazines, maybe a Scholastic catalog — neither with anyone in their target demographic. Other days, it’s packed. Women waiting just to get on the list to sit there with me. Because, with rare exception, it’s what we all want: a seat in the waiting room — or better yet, to be the next name called by the nurse. The nurse keeps calling other names, but I’m too afraid of confrontation to ask if she forgot mine.
