My in laws’ favorite story, and always a crowd pleaser when my Indian husband tells it at parties, is about the first time I flew to New York to meet them after we’d been dating for a year.

Like most people meeting their partner’s family for the first time, I was nervous. But as a white woman from the Bay Area with Irish and Italian ancestry, I was also acutely aware of my whiteness. I was anxious that I didn’t speak Hindi. I worried about accidentally disrespecting traditions I didn’t know. And perhaps most pressing of all: my spice tolerance was embarrassingly low.

Truly, a little too much black pepper could send me into a sneezing fit.

I’ve always hated being that person at restaurants asking, “Is it spicy?” It makes me feel childish, like the adult who still asks their mom to call the dentist because they’re “shy.”

The irony is that I’m the least picky eater I know. There is almost nothing I won’t try. I love food, I love eating, and I adore cuisines from all over the world, including Indian food. Shout out to my original favorite, Thai. You will always be my first love.

But my husband had warned his parents that I was, in his words, a delicate “porcelain princess” and that for our first meeting, they should please keep everything very mild.

When we arrived at their apartment, I was immediately comforted by the smell of something delicious cooking in the kitchen.

There were all the emotions you’d expect: pleasantries, shyness, eagerness, curiosity. I wanted so badly to be respectful. Every family has their own rules and rhythms, whether shoes come off at the door, when you sit down at the table, who serves whom. I simply followed my husband’s lead.

We had flown in late from California and didn’t want to keep anyone waiting, so we sat down to eat fairly quickly.

As my beautiful mother in law began serving me dinner, I was shocked.

There was no spice.

Not mild spice. No Level 1.

No spice at all.

Nothing was heavily seasoned. She kept asking, “Is this okay? Are you okay?” with the gentle concern of a nurse checking if a patient needs more morphine.

In this case, the morphine was spice, and there was none.

Now, I know my mother in law is one of the best cooks I have ever met. Her meals are layered with flavors I didn’t even know existed. But this was an act of love. An act of caution. We simply didn’t know each other yet.

So she had toned everything down, the chicken, the rice, the lentils, even the naan.

That night, as my husband and I got ready for bed, we couldn’t stop laughing about it.

It felt like the most stereotypical and sweetest version of what happens when two people from different worlds meet in the middle. Two strangers trying their very best to take care of one another. Making small sacrifices out of politeness, kindness, and respect.

And of course, I ate everything and told her how wonderful it was.

We were learning each other.

Like a very sweet game of chess.

Four years later, our relationship is stronger in every possible way, but the way my mother in law cooks for me has become symbolic of something much bigger.

My husband always told me, “My family shows love through food.”

“So does mine,” I would respond.

Of course I understood that. I thought about my own mother cooking dinner every night, packing my lunches with little notes tucked inside, making special concoctions whenever I was sick.

Mothers are caretakers. They’re chefs, personal assistants, dry cleaners, chauffeurs. They somehow do it all.

But I didn’t fully understand what my husband meant until I became part of his family.

I’ve learned so much about food and family, not in a way that’s better or worse than how I grew up, just beautifully different.

I’ve learned that in America, we often feel compelled to fill every silence at the dinner table. Through my in laws, I’ve learned that it’s okay to simply sit quietly and enjoy a meal without rushing to comment on the weather just because stillness feels uncomfortable.

I’ve learned it’s okay to get messy. To have sauce on your fingers. To stop worrying about looking pretty while you eat.

Eating with your hands feels intimate and grounding. You feel the texture of the food. You think about how it was prepared. You notice the colors and the care that went into making it.

I’ve learned how much time these meals require, too.

A week before our arrival, my mother in law is already planning. Shopping. Making lists. Preparing ingredients. Something like dosas can take hours before they even reach the stove. We wake up, and she’s already been in the kitchen for three hours.

It is labor.

It is artistry.

It is love.

It’s also made me more heartbroken that so many Americans, and people in general, who don’t wish to understand, support, or respect other cultures will eagerly dine at trendy restaurants serving cuisines that aren’t their own, photograph the meals, post them online, and then support policies that suggest immigrants don’t belong here.

When I’m in New York with my in laws, I have never felt prouder to be married to an immigrant, to know a family that pursued the American dream in every sense of the phrase, and to better understand what that journey looked like for them.

Recently, we ate at Ambassador’s Club House, one of New York’s most impossible reservations to get. Thankfully, my father in law had connections.

Immigrants make things happen. I have had a front seat to this and it’s nothing short of miraculous.

As I looked around the restaurant, I saw white people laughing over martinis, discussing TikToks, taking photos of their meals.

And then I looked at my father in law.

His face lit up as dishes arrived at the table. He explained that certain recipes originated from the region where he grew up. He was delighted that they had honored foods from his childhood, foods that reminded him of home.

He looked like a little boy.

So joyful.

So proud.

So close to home while sitting in the middle of New York City.

As a white waiter carefully described each dish to him, I felt an overwhelming sense of pride.

That’s my family, I thought.

And they already know something I am still learning.

Food is never just food.

It’s memory.

It’s migration.

It’s identity.

It’s generosity.

It’s one of the oldest ways we say, I love you.

I’m still learning. But isn’t it beautiful that something as ordinary as sharing a meal can connect us so deeply?

We learn about one another through food.

Through the silences around the table.

Through recipes passed down over generations.

Through getting too full because someone insists, lovingly, that we have another helping.

Through realizing that being welcomed into someone else’s traditions isn’t about getting everything right.

It’s simply about showing up hungry enough to understand each other.

Thank you for coming to my Tess Talk.

#family #food #immigrants

Everyone loves music, right?

It would be genuinely strange to meet someone who said they simply didn’t like music. And I would argue that almost everyone secretly believes they love music more than their friends do.

Maybe you’ve had a transcendent experience with it. Maybe an album got you through the worst year of your life. Maybe music has always been your escape. Or maybe you’ve built your entire personality around the number of concerts and festivals you attend each year.

We’re strangely possessive over music. There’s an innate competitiveness to it. This is my song. I love this band more than you do. I knew them before they were famous. As if discovering an artist six months earlier gives you partial ownership of their discography.

I can say this because I’ve been there. Sometimes I’m still there.

When I see 21 year olds talking about how they’ve just discovered Third Eye Blind or Florence + the Machine, there is a small, embarrassing part of me that wants to roll my eyes.

When clips of “Sleepyhead” and “Daylight” go viral and the comments are filled with teenagers saying, Wow, millennials had it good, I want to grab them by the shoulders and scream:

WE SURE DID.

And then I have to ask myself: Why do you care?

Why does it bother you that a younger generation gets to experience the music and aesthetics of the Tumblr girl era that defined your taste in everything from clothes to movies to men?

Let them have it.

We had Obama Hope. We had whimsy. We had American Apparel. We drank 40s on the Golden Gate Bridge in Doc Martens while smoking clove cigarettes and pretending we were in The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

I loved that I got to have that. They should get to have some version of it, too.

My relationship with music is probably similar to that of any overly sensitive person: it has scored entire decades of my life. Relationships. Breakups. Moves. Friendships. Versions of myself I barely recognize anymore.

I will almost always say yes to a concert ticket. I’m lucky that I can say I probably go to a dozen concerts a year, which is a gift.

But music can also feel strangely heavy to me. I don’t really know how to listen to it passively. When I’m listening, I’m absorbing. I’m reminiscing. I’m contemplating. Sometimes I’m suddenly thinking about something that happened 14 years ago that I had absolutely no intention of revisiting that afternoon.

And then, every so often, music gives me an hour of almost meditative joy, something euphoric and deeply personal that somehow also makes me feel like I’ve left my own body entirely.

That intensity is probably why I’ve always loved it.

And it might also be why, for a while, I stopped listening in an intentional way.

Something happened to me in 2020. It became a hard year for music. Besides Folklore and maybe three or four songs I played obsessively, most likely because they reminded me of some toxic boy, because apparently even a global pandemic couldn’t cure me of that, I mostly stopped discovering new music.

Instead, I discovered podcasts.

And look: I am a podcaster. Podcasting has been my business for five years. I love podcasts! I’m incredibly proud that Claire and I have built a history podcast for women that reexamines stories we thought we knew. It is educational, and also a comedic escape for our listeners.

But podcasting, like basically everything else, has become completely oversaturated. Everyone has a microphone. Everyone has a take. There are podcasts devoted to what dairy you should avoid and podcasts where Joe Rogan tells millions of men what to be angry about that week. There is quite literally always someone available to talk directly into your ear.

In 2020, I found that comforting.

I discovered Bitch Sesh, Armchair Expert, Everything Iconic, which I still LOVE, and suddenly I could put voices in my headphones while I walked my dog, made dinner, cleaned the house, avoided the news.

Before that, I had almost exclusively listened to music while moving through my day.

Then podcasts took over.

And they became a little addictive.

Not because podcasts are inherently a toxic habit. Obviously. But eventually I realized that I wasn’t always putting one on because I wanted to hear what someone had to say.

Sometimes I was putting one on because I didn’t want to hear myself.

Anxious? Podcast.

Sad? Podcast.

Cleaning? Podcast.

Walking my dog? Podcast.

Overcaffeinated and vaguely existential at 11:30 a.m.? Someone, somewhere, had a microphone and was ready to save me from having an original thought.

It became a very efficient way of filling every empty space.

And even after the pandemic ended, even as I moved into what has been one of the happiest periods of my life, the habit stayed. I stopped checking New Music Friday. I stopped putting on albums I didn’t already know. I stopped giving music the kind of attention I once gave it automatically.

Something about listening to an entire unfamiliar album felt like...a lot.

Which sounds crazy.

Making our wedding playlist was one of the first things that brought me back. Going through old songs, choosing the music for the weekend, deciding which songs would soundtrack these enormous moments in my life, it reminded me how much music had always meant to me.

It also made me realize how little new music I had let into my life.

My “albums of the year” were usually Taylor Swift albums, or something else where I basically knew what emotional universe I was entering before I pressed play.

And then: ding ding ding.

Therapy.

I’ve been working on being more present with myself. Not automatically trying to drown out every thought while I fold laundry or walk my dog. Not treating silence like something that needs to be immediately fixed.

And strangely, part of that has meant getting back into music.

Albums I’ve never heard. Artists I somehow missed. Listening to an entire record from beginning to end without immediately reaching for my phone. Having enough patience to let something be boring for a minute before deciding I don’t like it.

Because music asks something different of you than a podcast does.

A podcast can keep you company.

Music can make you confront yourself.

And I wonder if this is something a lot of us have lost a little bit, not music itself, obviously, but the act of actually listening to it.

We’ve become so accustomed to filling every second of our lives with content that even music has started to become content. We buy the vinyl for the TikTok. We go to the concert and record the entire thing. We listen to the album so we can immediately make a video ranking its tracks or explaining why everyone else is wrong about it.

Everything has to be documented, reviewed, ranked, reacted to.

What if we just listened?

I’ve committed to listening to one album a day that I’ve never heard before. I literally just started, so please send recommendations. So far: Phoebe Bridgers, Stella Lefty, Gracie Abrams (that was one WEEPY) and now I’m starting The 1975 from the beginning.

And why haven’t I been dancing to “Sex” since 2013?

I regret everything.

I want to find songs that remind me of nothing because I haven’t made memories with them yet. I want to fall in love with albums slowly. I want to hear something without immediately needing to have an opinion about it.

Mostly, I want music to feel like music again.

Not content. Not background noise. Not something to post from a concert so everyone knows I was there.

Just something fun and emotional and occasionally devastating that I get to experience privately inside my own brain.

We deserve to feel that.

Anyway, podcasts are great. Especially our podcast, Right Answers Mostly.

But have you guys heard about music?

Thank you for coming to my Tess Talk.

#martinifeminism

My toxic trait is that I finally get around to watching a television show five to ten years after everyone else, have a visceral, borderline life altering reaction to it, and then discover that absolutely no one wants to talk to me about it.

This happened last year with Breaking Bad. The day after my wedding, I was literally drunk in a pool begging anyone who would listen to discuss Walter White with me.

It happened this year with Adolescence, when my friends essentially said, We cannot relive this traumatic series with you. Please move on.

And last night, it happened with The Queen’s Gambit.

When the final episode ended, I felt genuinely sad. Partly because the show is a masterpiece and I didn’t want it to be over. But underneath that was another, stranger feeling: an intense yearning to somehow go back in time and be a twelve year old girl watching it for the first time.

Because imagine being twelve and meeting Beth Harmon.

I had my own versions of her growing up, of course. I had Gilmore Girls, which taught me several things I still believe to be true: your relationship with your mom can be one of the great loves of your life; being ambitious is actually cool; and being quick and funny might be the coolest thing a girl can be.

I genuinely believed it was better to be funny than pretty as a teenager, and that was quite life changing.

I had Felicity, which delivered a somewhat more complicated message considering I, too, nearly followed a boy to another college. But I appreciated that it allowed smart, complicated, nerdy girls to also be completely boy crazy. We contain multitudes.

And I had the movies my mom pushed me toward, something I’m increasingly grateful for the older I get: A League of Their Own, Ever After, Anne of Green Gables, Pride and Prejudice…BBC version girlies, rise up.

You can probably see the theme.

Women could be ambitious. Women could be difficult. Women could be funny and obsessive and competitive. They could fall in love without making romantic love the central organizing principle of their existence. They could do things themselves, and they could take pride in being good at them.

Watching The Queen’s Gambit, I felt oddly hopeful that stories like this are still being made for girls who are growing up in a completely different media ecosystem than I did.

Because a twelve year old today isn’t just watching television. She’s also scrolling TikTok, where she is being fed an endless stream of women body checking in mirrors, documenting increasingly elaborate beauty routines, taking sponsored vacations, selling supplements, filming “what I eat in a day” videos and presenting highly curated lives as though the camera simply happened to catch them that way.

And it reminded me that representation in media isn’t just a nice thing to have. For young girls especially, it can genuinely alter the trajectory of a life.

There was a debate I recently saw on TikTok: Can art actually change your life?

We say that phrase so casually. A song changed my life. A concert changed my life. I saw a film in 70mm IMAX and it changed my life. Yes, a film, not a movie. I’m being SERIOUS now.

But I think art really can change your life, particularly when you’re young enough that you’re still collecting evidence about what a life can look like.

At twelve or thirteen, you’re entering the years when everything starts to shift. You’re beginning to understand beauty and popularity and sex and ambition and the strange new power of being perceived. You’re quietly absorbing information about what kind of girl gets rewarded and what kind gets punished.

And then maybe you meet someone like Beth Harmon.

Beth doesn’t organize her life around whether boys like her. She’s obsessed with chess. She’s ambitious to the point of arrogance. She is deeply flawed. She struggles with addiction and eventually fights her way out of it. She likes clothes and sex and being beautiful, but none of those things are the most interesting thing about her.

The most interesting thing about her is that she is good at something. Really good, in fact.

That matters.

Some little girl might watch Beth Harmon and become more interested in math or science because suddenly being the smartest person in the room looks glamorous.

Another might watch her prioritize her work over a crush and realize that caring deeply about being good at something is cool.

Another might simply absorb the idea that boys can like you without you having to make being liked by boys your life’s greatest accomplishment.

These sound like tiny things. They’re not.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in relation to body image, too, and how genuinely bleak the current landscape can feel for young women. They are watching influencers become smaller and smaller. They’re watching actresses lose dramatic amounts of weight without acknowledging it. They’re seeing bodies that would have once been considered worryingly thin presented as aspirational, attainable, even effortless.

And adults aren’t immune to this, either.

Hilary Duff recently launched a “Stronger, Not Smaller” campaign, and I’ve been watching her onstage with these incredible, muscular arms. I am a 35-year-old woman, theoretically old enough to know better, and I still caught myself thinking: Oh. It’s okay if my arms look bigger. Hilary Duff’s do.

I’m not trying to shrink.

Which raises a much bigger and more complicated question: Whose responsibility is it to influence young girls well?

When I was younger, I hated watching reporters ask Britney Spears some version of, “But are you a good role model? Parents are concerned about their daughters.”

She didn’t have to be.

She was a pop star. Her job was to make killer songs and execute even better choreography. She was barely more than a kid herself. The idea that she was somehow responsible for raising America’s daughters because she wore a crop top was always absurd.

But influencers complicate this argument.

Because an influencer isn’t only selling an album or a movie or a performance. In many cases, the product is her life.

She’s telling you what to wear. What to eat. Where to vacation. What supplements to take. How to exercise. How to decorate your house. What your morning routine should look like. What products will supposedly make you prettier, happier, thinner, richer, calmer, more desirable.

She’s selling aspiration itself.

And when that’s the product, I do think some responsibility comes with it.

When influencers build their platforms on radical transparency, showing us their breakfast, their workouts, their skincare, their relationships, their fertility journeys, their vacations, their cosmetic procedures, but mysteriously become silent about the thing that has dramatically changed their bodies, I think we should be allowed to question that.

Especially in the era of GLP-1s.

If your body is part of what you’re selling, and you’re presenting a dramatic physical transformation as the natural result of the lifestyle you’re recommending to millions of women, withholding a major piece of that equation can become genuinely misleading. For a twelve year old girl watching, the distinction between this is her body and this is what my body should look like if I’m doing everything right is not always obvious.

Which is why I have so much admiration for the women online who disrupt the illusion.

The ones who post the gorgeous bikini photo, and then post the one taken thirty seconds later without the pose.

The ones who show the angle, and then the angle without the flexing.

The spray tan and the pale skin. The smooth stomach and the roll. The cellulite. The bloating. The body when it isn’t being arranged for consumption.

It can seem almost embarrassingly earnest to say that representation matters. We’ve heard the phrase so many times that it’s begun to sound like corporate language.

But representation is not only about seeing someone who looks like you.

It’s about seeing possibilities for yourself.

A girl watches The Queen’s Gambit and learns that obsession can be intellectual. She watches A League of Their Own and learns that women can be competitive and loud and extraordinary. She watches Gilmore Girls and decides that maybe being the girl who reads isn’t social suicide. She sees a famous woman with strong arms and, for one afternoon, stops wondering how to make hers smaller.

Maybe none of these moments changes her life on its own.

But enough of them might.

Because when you’re young, you’re constantly looking outward for instructions on how to become a woman. And every woman you see, fictional or otherwise, is offering you one possible blueprint.

Some tell you to be smaller.

Some tell you to be prettier.

Some tell you to be wanted.

And every once in a while, if you’re lucky, one tells you to be good at something.

Those are the women who might actually save a girl’s life.

Thank you for coming to my Tess Talk.

#martinifeminism

There was a sudden shift in the way we talked about Los Angeles.

Not the city itself. The mythology.

Somewhere after 2020, LA stopped being the place people dreamed about and started becoming the punchline. Every conversation about moving here became a conversation about why someone shouldn’t. The traffic. The influencers. The cost of living. The lack of culture. It was as if we had all collectively agreed the experiment had failed.

When I moved here in 2014, that wasn’t the narrative at all.

The dream was still very much so alive.

Girls was still on HBO, and while I wasn’t moving to Brooklyn after I graduated a liberal arts school to wear a fedora and have my parents fund my indie album, I was moving to another city where it felt perfectly acceptable, expected, even, to spend your twenties piecing together three jobs while chasing one impossible career. I lived in too many apartments (one with a rat problem), auditioned constantly, survived on Trader Joes frozen foods and Alfred Coffee, and because I vaguely resembled Allison Williams, I made looking like Marnie Michaels a cornerstone of my personality.

There was something undeniably chic about struggling back then.

Not because being broke is glamorous, it isn’t, (although white girls in their 20s with a trust fund like to pretend it is) but because everyone around you was betting on themselves. My coworkers and I had a group chat that was just asking for switching shifts due to auditions and being on set. The bartender you kind of wanted to hook up with at your local bar was writing a pilot. You flirted a little extra with him, thinking he might cast you in it if it made it. Your roommate had an Etsy business she was convinced would become the next big thing. Everyone was making something. Everyone was chasing something.

The city buzzed with people who hadn’t made it yet.

You’d sit in seventy minutes of traffic to drive to North Hollywood for an audition that lasted all of thirty seconds. You’d walk into a room full of women who somehow all looked exactly like you, say one line:

“Hey, don’t forget about me, stranger.”

To three men who barely looked up from their laptops, say “thank you” like how a man you’re having sex with when you’re 19 says it when the subtext is “please leave”. You then drive another forty five minutes to your day job in West Hollywood and flip off two different people. And feel sort of guilty about it.

At your day job, you’d get yelled at by wealthy moms and C list celebrities (I have a list), clock out, spend an outrageous eight dollars on a smoothie (which, at the time, felt criminal), and somehow end up at The Phoenix or Laurel Hardware because someone heard a casting director was there.

Usually, there were not there. Shocker.

It didn’t matter.

We all acted like we belonged there.

LA has always been a little trashy.

Spray tans. TMZ helicopters. Sunset Boulevard billboards advertising morally corrupt reality television. Venice Beach bodybuilders. People telling you to lose weight and get a bigger butt if you needed to make it.

But it was our trashy.

Then the pandemic happened, and almost overnight the conversation changed.

Suddenly everyone had the same take.

“LA isn’t cool anymore.”

I hear it constantly now, usually from people who either moved away or never lived here in the first place. The city became shorthand for everything shallow. The influencer capital. The place where everyone flakes. The city that somehow lost its soul.

Has LA changed? Of course.

The pandemic hollowed out neighborhoods. Restaurants closed. Nightlife shifted. Hollywood productions left for tax incentives elsewhere. Downtown never quite became the Manhattan people insisted it would back in 2013.

But somewhere along the way, I think we confused inconvenience with decline.

LA was never supposed to be easy.

It has always been a city that asks something of you.

It asks you to drive ninety minutes to have dinner with your best friend.

It asks you to make plans weeks in advance because no one is casually “popping over.”

It asks you to build community intentionally because you aren’t going to accidentally stumble into it the way you might in New York.

The effort isn’t evidence that the city is broken.

It’s the point.

My friend Hannah Aaron Brown recently said you should romanticize your time in the car because it’s the only place where nobody can ask anything of you. You pick the music. You control the temperature. You don’t need to text anyone back. No one’s talking over your podcast. It’s one of the only places where you get to exist completely on your own.

I’ve started thinking about that every time I’m sitting on the 10.

Maybe traffic isn’t why LA stopped feeling cool.

Maybe we just stopped romanticizing it.

Because I can spend a Saturday morning wandering through a museum, drive twenty minutes and put my feet in the Pacific, eat tacos from a truck that deserves a Michelin star, and end the night at a friend’s backyard script read where you have some wine and get to be creative with other creatives.

Tell me another city where that feels ordinary.

Yes, the film industry has changed.

But this is still Hollywood.

People still move here with impossible dreams every single day.

Tech is booming. Startups seem to be born over coffee. Every other person you meet has a screenplay, a podcast, a clothing brand, or a business they’ve been quietly building after work.

There is an optimism here that borders on delusion.

I mean that as the highest compliment.

And yes, it’s expensive.

So is New York.

So is San Francisco.

So is London.

Cool cities have never been cheap. They’ve always been magnets for people willing to risk comfort in exchange for possibility.

Maybe what I’m really tired of isn’t people criticizing Los Angeles.

It’s the certainty with which they dismiss it.

Coming from the Bay Area, where I knew I didn’t want to work in tech, finance, or climb some corporate ladder, LA felt like the first city that looked at me and said, Oh, you’re one of the weird ones too. Welcome, honey.

I was suddenly surrounded by actors, writers, comedians, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and people with five different side hustles held together by blind confidence and way too many margaritas.

Those were my people.

My life looks different now.

I’m not juggling three jobs anymore. I’m not sprinting from auditions. I’m not hoping to accidentally make eye contact with some casting directing who will say: oh she’s pretty, let me put her in my movie!

But I still know those people. They’re everywhere. And I respect them.

My friend is getting back into acting classes after a ten year break, realizing it’s why she wanted to come out to LA in the first place, and she’s continuing her education in the arts and it’s so inspiring.

My husband and I are finishing our first feature length screenplay together, and honestly I’ve never had so much fun collaborating with someone.

A woman I am starting to know more professionally and personally just came out with her own dating app, highlighting places in LA to meet, and prioritizing women.

People love to say Los Angeles lost its ambition.

And whatever the case may be, what makes a city cool anymore isn’t really the vibes, the restaurants, the people. It’s your people. It’s your community.

And if you’ve found that, you’ve made it.

Thank you for coming to my Tess Talk.

#martinifeminism

My headshot, 2016.

Thirty five is the age where my life feels the most stable it’s ever been, while my inner monologue still often sounds like a teenager asking for an adult at times.

I’ve been thinking about why 35 feels different, because it does.

Every birthday, I think of the Britney lyric, “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman.” Even now, there’s a passage of time that still doesn’t completely make sense to me.

I am married, but there are still moments where I look over at my husband cooking dinner and think, holy shit, there’s a boy in my house. And he thinks I’m pretty?? And texts me back? Crazy work.

I own my own business with my best friend. We’ve been grinding for five years, making decisions, signing contracts, building everything from scratch. And then the second we’re doing taxes or reviewing something with our lawyer, I get a pit in my stomach and immediately want to call my brother because I’m like, this is a grown up job. You do it for me?

Yes, I am the baby of the family and always will be.

I have a dog who I keep walked, fed, medicated, hydrated, and happy. I’ve fully adopted the mentality most pet owners do: his happiness is above mine. That feels incredibly adult. And at the same time, I’ll have intrusive thoughts about the passage of time, about outliving him, and suddenly I almost want him to comfort me.

(And yes, he does in his own way, because he’s the bestest boy like every dog.)

Sometimes after my yearly skin check, eye exam, physical, and breast exam, I call my mom and say, “I did it!!! Aren’t you proud?” It’s the same feeling as driving somewhere by yourself for the first time, or walking through an airport alone, hell, even making an appointment at the dentist office and thinking, isn’t it wild that I’m an adult now? At one point, all of this felt terrifying. I avoided it like the plague, and now it’s routine.

Fascinating.

Every once in a while, I still have the urge to look around the room for the real adult.

Then I remember it’s apparently me.

This is not to discredit myself. I am smart, capable, helpful, and resourceful. But I’m sure this is a universal feeling of millennial in their 30s/40s, with or without children.

I also think COVID stole about three to five years from all of us. When the pandemic hit, I was 28. Then suddenly the world reopened, and somehow I wasn’t 29 anymore. I was in my thirties. It felt like I skipped the chapter where I slowly became an adult. One day I was crying over situationships, and the next I was discussing retirement accounts and begging my friend to make the dinner reservation at 5:30pm, not 7:30pm.

Never 8pm….

We’re also online far too much. We’re constantly comparing our present to a curated version of our past. It’s no wonder so many of us romanticize being 24.

Hence the existential crisis.

Or, if you’re me, the Substack essay.

Because I’m trying to understand why 35 somehow feels like you’re 100 years old and 16 years old at exactly the same time.

The funny thing is, this is also the safest I’ve ever felt.

I’m more grounded. More supported. I care significantly less about what strangers think of me. I say no with one sentence instead of an apologetic paragraph. My people pleasing has quieted down. I am the strongest I’ve ever been physically. I am back in therapy, which is life changing, after I took a three year hiatus.

But there are trade offs.

Hangovers feel approximately 900 years long. Sometimes I miss the body I had at 30. There’s also the much less vain part of aging: bones crack more, illnesses take longer to recover from, and suddenly the people you love are getting older too. There is nothing you can do about this one, and it stings.

To quote my queen Hilary Duff:

“Now on the other side
Of cherry flavored ChapStick
There's some greyish highlights
Reminding me that nobody runs faster than time
It's heartbreaking and reassuring
It's sinking in
I'm sinking in.”

Then comes the bigger question.

What do I want my next 35 years to look like?

I suppose that’s what makes this age feel so different. It isn’t just about getting older. It’s about realizing you’re probably somewhere around the middle of your life, which is both deeply intimidating and strangely exciting.

And while I occasionally miss my tighter thighs at 23, being able to go out drinking without a care in the world from Thursday-Saturday, not be obsessed with cleaning the kitchen twice a day, or getting that rush from a crazy day job, where you feel like you’re in “Sweet Bitter” you genuinely couldn’t pay me to go back.

Whenever people try to comfort women turning thirty, they inevitably say, “Well, Carrie Bradshaw was 32 when Sex and the City started.”

Which is comforting for about six seconds.

Then I remember Carrie lived alone in a Manhattan apartment she somehow afforded by writing one newspaper column, had a permanent six pack, 400 pairs of designer shoes, three best friends who would drop everything for brunch, and an endless line of men waiting to date her.

I’m not sure she’s the benchmark.

Not that any of those things are the answer to happiness anyway. That’s sort of the point.

Maybe adulthood isn’t waking up one morning and finally feeling grown.

Maybe it’s realizing you’ve been the adult for years, you just keep forgetting to give yourself the credit.

So here’s to our spiritual age, whatever that may be. Sixteen. Thirty five. Eighty two.

All we can really do is keep growing, keep laughing at how ridiculous it all is, and try not to spend too much time wishing we were someone we already survived being.

Thank you for coming to my Tess Talk.

#martinifeminism

Hailey Bieber went on record recently saying that Pilates is over and done with, and strength training is in.

When she said that, I heard alarms.

Fire trucks.

Babies crying.

And the sound of every Pilates instructor in Los Angeles driving their car into a tree.

I have always found workout trends deeply comical. The way we become mindless zombies, following wellness influencers with no credentials or trying to mimic a billionaire’s workout routine, convinced that if we do exactly what she does, we’ll somehow end up looking exactly like her, thus achieving all happiness and no longer having problems of our own.

It reminds me of 2016 and the SoulCycle era, which was a true cult. I actually worked for a competing spin studio, one I won’t name because, speaking of souls, it took mine with it.

The messaging I heard every day was: don’t lift heavy weights, women need intense 60 minute cardio sessions at least five days a week, and, of course, “Oh, no matter what you do...scoop out your bagel.”

Isn’t it crazy how much we used to fear carbs and FRUIT? Fruit, people. Why did we need to bring apples into this, they never hurt anyone?

I remember being genuinely afraid to lift five pound weights. I stuck to threes because I didn’t want to “bulk up.”

Bulking up was basically waterboarding in 2016.

Here is the thing: I’m genuinely glad we’re learning more about women’s bodies in 2026. Women’s rights may be going backward, but at least exercise science is moving forward.

*Laughs to keep from crying*

We now know endless cardio isn’t a requirement, 10,000 steps isn’t some magical number, (5,000–7,000 steps is beneficial for most people), taking rest days actually can help you tone your muscles (Women may require slightly more active recovery around menstruation due to hormone shifts, with total weekly active days typically kept at 4-5), and strength training is one of the best things we can do as bone density naturally declines with age. (This starts as early as 35.)

When I work out now, I don’t do it to get skinny, which is an incredibly freeing shift.

I think about my mom, who’s in her 70s and can still bike around Los Angeles. She’s rowed more than five million meters at her gym, and I know that if I have children one day, she’ll be able to pick them up, chase them around, and trust her body.

My motivation has shifted from vanity to longevity.

And honestly? That’s a much better reason to move.

But back to Hailey Bieber.

She was the queen of Pilates. She swore by Pilates. Hell, she was practically the brand ambassador for Pilates. She talked about how it helped her stay lean and strong, improved her mental health, and carried her through pregnancy.

As someone who’s been doing Pilates since 2020 and it made me really fall in love with fitness in general, I felt oddly validated.

So hearing the conversation suddenly shift to “Pilates is out, strength training is in” is fascinating. Not because strength training isn’t wonderful, it absolutely is, but because of how quickly we’re willing to abandon one thing for another simply because a hot celebrity with a six pack says so. Gosh, maybe even an eight pack based on her last instagram story….

I’m certain there are women already questioning whether they should cancel their memberships.

Mind you, we’re talking about a privileged celebrity who has access to a personal trainer, a private chef, assistants, recovery treatments, cosmetic procedures, and resources that most people will never have.

I’m not saying Hailey uses every treatment available. I think she’s incredibly disciplined and also has great genetics.

That’s not really the point.

The point is that we keep trying to replicate outcomes without having access to the circumstances that created them. And just want to copy attractive people so we can look exactly like them? Isn’t that so boring? And for what?

Something I heard last year that has really helped me with the rise of body dysmorphia is asking yourself “why?” a total of 6-8 times.

Why do you care about looking like everyone else? Why do you need this certain type of body that is trending right now?

Keep asking yourself “why?” after every response. You usually end up with the conclusion of “this does not matter at all.”

The comforting thing about trends is that they disappear almost as quickly as they arrive.

Because that’s all they ever were.

Trends.

If Hailey Bieber gained X number of pounds next year, was proud of it, flaunted it, and suddenly started talking about body acceptance, stomach rolls, and cellulite, there is a decent chance the internet would begin romanticizing that, too. Many people would try to gain weight to look more like her. It’s the truth.

Bodies have always been trends.

So isn’t it liberating to know that whatever we’re chasing today will probably be unfashionable in five years?

People got BBLs in 2015.

People inflated their lips until they barely looked like themselves in 2017.

In the ‘90s, people over plucked their eyebrows leaving many millennials with no more hair there and spending a lot of money on eyebrow tints.

In the ‘50s, curvy hips were the ideal. Thighs that touched. No one was thinking about triceps.

In Ancient Greece, fuller bodies were associated with beauty, femininity, and abundance.

The target is always moving.

So let’s stop pretending we need to cancel our pilates memberships or completely reinvent our routines every time an influencer, billionaire, or celebrity decides they’ve found the new answer.

We will never have access to the lives they have.

And that’s okay.

Isn’t the more interesting goal to look like yourself? To wake up, do something you love every morning, move when and how you personally like to move, and respect your intuition when it comes to exercise? And also accept that our bodies really do not, or should not, change that much no matter what we do, except for pregnancy/postpartum of course.

I genuinely think that in five years, looking extremely thin from Ozempic may no longer be aspirational. Maybe Botox won’t feel as chic. Maybe natural faces will come back. Maybe they won’t.

The trends will change.

They always do.

Strength training isn’t the answer to happiness.

A flat stomach has never gotten anyone closer to their dreams.

Cellulite does not make you less successful or desirable.

Counting your calories every meal and restricting at restaurants will take years off your life.

And as much as the internet might convince us otherwise, none of us are going to become Hailey Bieber.

So you might as well look like yourself.

It’s hotter.

(But like…. I adore you Halie, and you’re so hot and cool and please send us Rhode, we truly post about it all of the time on Right Answers Mostly so….)

Enjoy your life, babes. Eat the bagel and keep doing pilates if you’re into that.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

.

I distinctly remember watching Olivia Wilde in the 2013 movie Drinking Buddies and having my brain chemistry permanently altered over what it meant to be a cool girl.

I think every woman has a version of this moment. Maybe it was seeing a girl in real life effortlessly hanging with a group of guys, asking about a pass interference call like she was born on the fifty yard line. Maybe it was Megan Fox in Transformers. Maybe it was a friend who somehow made self deprecation, hotness, and male attention look completely effortless.

It always felt a little aspirational.

And, if I’m being honest, a little heartbreaking.

When I watched Olivia Wilde in Drinking Buddies, I was in a trance. She rode a bike. She drank beer. She worked at a brewery. She hung out almost exclusively with her male coworkers. She had avoidant attachment before we all had therapy language for it. She didn’t really get along with Anna Kendrick, which, at the time, I appreciated because I’d maintained a completely one sided rivalry with Anna Kendrick in my own mind for years.

From about 2013 to 2016, I based almost every female character I wrote on her.

That was the era, wasn’t it? Pre-Me Too. Pre-Hillary heartbreak. Before “Girl Boss” became both an aspiration and eventually an insult. We loved a thin, hot blonde actress pounding IPAs while making us believe she somehow existed outside of traditional femininity.

Looking back now, I don’t even think she’s a poorly written character. There are beautiful elements to her. Like all cool girls, she’s balancing her own identity with the impossible task of being desirable to men while never seeming like she’s trying.

She just lodged herself in my brain.

Eventually I found another favorite: Rashida Jones in Celeste and Jesse Forever. Almost the anti cool girl. Too honest. Too self aware. Endearingly nerdy. Clumsy. Completely trapped by her own flaws instead of pretending she didn’t have any.

Those two women have stayed with me ever since.

Then Olivia Wilde directed Booksmart.

I swear the entire internet had a collective orgasm.

Wait... someone this hot can direct a movie that’s this funny?

I always laugh thinking back on the discourse because we still cannot process the idea that women might possess beauty and brains simultaneously. A tale as old as time. Everyone immediately opened IMDb looking for the male screenwriter who surely had to be responsible.

Alas.

A screenplay by a woman. Directed by another woman.

Talk about girl boss, am I right?

I adored Booksmart. More than anything, I loved that she perfectly captured female friendship. High school. Popularity. Theater kids. That weird feeling of walking into a party convinced you’re about to scare everyone away simply because you once did community theater.

I loved watching someone who had spent years being cast as “the hot girl” finally make something so specific, so funny, and so memorable.

So when I saw the trailer for Don’t Worry Darling, I was thrilled.

It felt like such a departure. Bigger. Stranger. More ambitious.

I’ve always thought Olivia Wilde has incredible taste. Whether it’s the Uber scene in Booksmart or the way she shoots a kitchen full of eggs in a pristine 1950s house, she has an unmistakable eye. She must have the greatest Pinterest board alive because I could honestly watch her make aesthetic decisions for hours.

And I loved the movie.

Sure, Harry Styles was miscast. Oof the accent, babe.

Florence Pugh certainly wasn’t. She is one of the greatest actors of our generation.

I also think the film doesn’t get enough credit for what it was actually trying to say. It tackled male loneliness and incel culture before those conversations exploded into the mainstream. It explored trad wife fantasies years before TikTok rediscovered them. I genuinely think it was ahead of its time.

But of course, no woman gets to have an uninterrupted professional run for more than about a decade before something has to humble her.

In Olivia’s case, it was dating a younger man while being a mother.

Personally?

I love seeing hot women date younger men.

Mostly because men have been doing it forever.

Also, and I say this with complete sincerity, there’s something undeniably fun about dating someone younger. (An actual adult. Let’s all calm down.) Younger men tend to absolutely worship you.

He was twenty six.

She was thirty six.

It’s barely even worth mentioning.

Also... it’s Harry fucking Styles.

Can you imagine? Anyway…*wipes away sweat*

I was honestly happy for her. She was directing her second film, dating one of the biggest pop stars on Earth, and seemed to have escaped a relationship with Jason Sudeikis, a man I have personally side eyed ever since she was served custody papers while promoting her movie onstage at CinemaCon.

Maybe that’s unfair.

Maybe it isn’t.

Either way, what a fun chapter of life. Mid thirties. Directing your second feature. Falling in love when you probably weren’t expecting to.

Except women apparently aren’t allowed to have fun if they’re mothers.

Because if you’re in London with Harry Styles, then obviously you’re abandoning your children.

Or you love him more than your children.

Or you’re breaking Jason Sudeikis’s heart.

Never mind that he was also dating someone younger.

Never mind that no one was asking him if he’d tucked his kids into bed before going on a date.

Then came the Don’t Worry Darling circus.

Suddenly the movie itself barely mattered.

The conversation became whether she hated Florence Pugh.

Whether she was sleeping with Harry.

Whether she was a bad boss.

Whether she was a bad mom.

Whether she deserved to be embarrassed.

Who knows how much of the behind the scenes drama was actually true.

But I remember feeling strangely devastated for her.

Not because I thought she was perfect.

Because it felt like we collectively decided to stop talking about her work altogether.

Instead, we turned one of the most exciting young female directors into an internet punchline.

I genuinely thought she was on track to become the next Greta Gerwig, a filmmaker women would point to for years as proof that we could tell big, ambitious stories, too.

Instead, we treated her like high school gossip.

And then...

The Invite.

It’s incredible.

She’s back.

I find celebrity culture fascinating because “cancelation” often has less to do with morality than momentum.

People already seem to be changing their minds.

Suddenly she’s brilliant again.

A visionary.

An Oscar contender.

I hope she wins everything.

But I can’t help wondering...

What if this movie had been bad?

Would we still be punishing her for Don’t Worry Darling?

Or would we have simply found something new?

Because we do this over and over again with women.

We chart their worth alongside who they’re dating.

Whether they’ve gained weight.

Whether they’re spending enough time with their children.

Whether they’re aging correctly.

Whether they’re grateful enough.

Whether they’re likable enough.

The thing about the cool girl is that she was never actually allowed to stay cool.

She could drink beer with the boys, ride her Portland bikes, date the pop star, direct the blockbuster, win the awards, but the second she stopped making everyone else comfortable, we reminded her that she was still a woman first. Before she was a filmmaker, before she was an artist, before she was funny or brilliant or ambitious, she was expected to be likable. Maternal. Grateful. Humble. Perfect.

And maybe that’s why I still think about Drinking Buddies. Not because I wanted to drink IPAs or flirt with my male coworkers, but because I thought the cool girl had escaped all of that. I thought if you could be effortless enough, pretty enough, detached enough, talented enough, you’d somehow graduate from the rules the rest of us lived by.

Turns out there is no graduation.

The rules just change.

Now I look back at Olivia Wilde’s career less as the story of a woman who “fell from grace” and more as a case study in how quickly we revoke permission for women to be complicated. We build them into fantasies, then resent them for acting like actual people. We want them to be aspirational, but never messy. Successful, but never threatening. Sexy, but never sexual on their own terms.

And maybe that’s the real death of the cool girl.

Not that she stopped existing.

It’s that we finally realized she was never free in the first place.

Thank you for coming to my Tess Talk.

After watching the Summer House reunion last night, I had a lot of feelings.

I’m grossed out by West, disappointed in Amanda, proud of Bailey, and often deeply confused by Ciara, while still empathizing with her.

Now, I know this is a terrifying opinion to announce on the internet, and I do want to explain myself, because I honestly think this situation is more nuanced than people want it to be.

I was frustrated by all the interruptions during the reunion because I actually wanted to hear everyone fully explain themselves. I kept thinking: Ciara, let them talk. Let them show themselves as the villains. You don’t have to do as much work because eventually people reveal themselves.

And honestly? I respected Amanda more in the moments she stood her ground. Because if you’re going to ruin your friendships, career, and public persona, at least do it with conviction and integrity.

What frustrated me most was that we never really got an answer to the question Andy asked:

“If they hadn’t lied, and Amanda had told you upfront she was having confusing feelings, would that have made a difference?”

Because the real crime here isn’t necessarily developing feelings for your friend’s ex and your own co-worker after a toxic marriage and very public divorce. The real crime is the lying.

Am I surprised Amanda fell for a man who preys on emotionally vulnerable women? No. Am I surprised they hooked up in the strange Stockholm syndrome environment that is Bravo? Trapped in a house together, under public scrutiny, constantly intoxicated and emotionally stunted? Also no.

Lindsay and Carl got engaged, for fuck’s sake. These people would fall in love with the cardboard cutouts of each other at this point. Or make-out with a can of Loverboy if it validated them.

It’s basically summer camp for emotionally unstable adults with cameras. I love my Summer House family, but let’s be honest…these are not people to look up to for your romantic life.

Feelings happen. Hookups happen.

But the lying? The texts Ciara read were diabolical. The way Amanda gaslit her was honestly hard to watch. And then, on top of all of it, making Ciara feel like she was somehow the one doing something wrong?

That’s the cruel part.

There’s something inherently dark about repeatedly lying to someone you claim to care about and then making them feel crazy for sensing the truth. I am obviously Team Ciara in that regard.

Personally, I would never hook up with someone my friend had history with. It’s just a boundary I don’t cross.

But I also understand that not everyone has the same boundaries, and relationships are nuanced. If it works for you, it works for you.

Obviously Ciara is still hung up on West, for reasons I genuinely cannot understand beyond the fact that West is an incredibly manipulative person. Lindsay actually said it best: he’s so good when he’s good. I almost fell for it too. It’s not her fault, especially the first time they dated. But fool me once…shame on you. Fool me twice….

But facts matter. And unfortunately, so do timelines.

West absolutely breadcrumbed Ciara two years ago. He invited her to weddings, slept with her, blurred emotional lines, and clearly enjoyed the validation of her feelings while knowing she was fragile and falling for him.

Gross. Truly gross.

But even through all his mumbling and evasiveness, he did repeatedly say he was not ready for a relationship and could not be her boyfriend. Multiple times. He said it two summers ago and he said it this summer again.

Yes, actions matter more than words. I get how hearing that, but then also watching back footage of him drunkenly saying how “magical” their time was together is inherently confusing. But the words were there, and I think Ciara ignored them because she wanted the actions to mean something else. We’ve all been there.

So when he ultimately ended things because he didn’t have deeper feelings for her, and then Ciara essentially spent two summers policing who he could hook up with on Bravo, you do start to wonder: is that fair?

I hate advocating for a straight, white male with fairness, but once again: nuance.

Obviously the feelings lingered. And yes, Amanda should have known this was emotionally loaded territory.

But West has never really cared about Ciara in the way she cared about him. Hearing statements like “he’s my best friend,” and “he’s the person I love the most in the house” were truly some of the most cringe statements I’ve ever heard on Bravo, and deeply triggering.

There is no other word for that sentiment besides: delusional. And we cannot pretend otherwise!

He wanted her off the show. He wrote shady things about her publicly. He never seemed in love with her, just attracted to her. And while I deeply empathize with Ciara because I have absolutely been that woman before, at some point you do have to ask:

How long are people supposed to organize their lives around your unresolved feelings?

Would this still be unacceptable two years from now? Ten years from now? If Ciara had moved on completely with a new relationship, would everyone still be outraged?

Does everyone have to wait for Ciara to heal before they’re allowed to move on too?

That’s where the conversation starts getting complicated for me.

Because as awful as Amanda handled this, and she absolutely broke girl code, if she and West genuinely have chemistry beyond sex, then… okay? They are in Rome together right now, clearly falling in love and they don’t care about the public reaction.

That doesn’t make them good people. It doesn’t mean Ciara owes them forgiveness. It means the friendship is over forever, honestly, rightfully so.

In terms of West betraying Kyle, ladies, we have to use common sense here. Even though Kyle is having a great season and is suddenly the victim, we are too smart to believe that is true. Kyle has been cheating on Amanda for a decade. I don’t think we should be putting him on a pedestal and saying “Well, what about Kyle’s feelings and his betrayal"?” He is not the moral compass we wish he could be, as much as we love our liberal King. We can probably disregard that at this point, even though yes, it’s shitty of west. Everything West does is shitty. We know this.

Feelings are messy. Especially in this bizarre reality TV vacuum where everyone lives, works, drinks, fights, and performs together constantly.

And let’s not act like Bravo hasn’t always operated this way. Lindsay dated Carl after Danielle. Do we remember the early seasons of VPR? People cross lines and get incestuous on TV. It happens.

What makes this unforgivable isn’t the attraction.

It’s the deception.

That’s the betrayal. That’s the cruelty. That’s the part that actually destroys trust.

But two people unexpectedly falling for each other?

I don’t know. West and Ciara both wear baggy clothes and seem to love the brand Elwood, maybe they are soulmates, what do we know? They like each other and clearly have for close to a year as feelings brewed and the emotional affair started.

Why is that the part we’re pretending is shocking? Have we all been watching the same shows on Bravo? This is text book.

It’s unfortunately icky, but it’s why we watch these shows and why we keep coming back.

We’re living through what feels like a culturally specific version of hell. Trump is somehow still in office, RFK Jr. is telling parents to stop vaccinating their kids, ICE is raiding families across the country, Spencer Pratt is running for mayor, gas is allegedly about to run out, we’re funding wars that feel completely unnecessary, and we can’t even watch Taylor Frankie Paul’s season of The Bachelorette.

Don’t even get me started on this damn cruise ship virus. I cannot take that on right now.

But during times of political distress and cultural chaos, pop culture always becomes heightened. Music matters more. Television matters more. Community matters more. People crave distraction, conversation, fantasy, connection.

Take Summer House, for example. Two people making a stupid decision to hook up has united millions of viewers, given us a genuinely lovely distraction, and somehow opened conversations about loyalty, friendship, emotional labor, and racism toward Black women. Honestly? That’s kind of culturally valuable.

And historically, when times are tough, women keep culture moving. We keep the economy alive. We buy the movie tickets, plan the dinners, text the group chat, organize the vacations, stream the music, start the discourse.

Which is why I believe we are finally getting what women truly need, and thrive on right now:

The crush is back.

Shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty, Heated Rivalry (we’ll give that one to the gays too, thank you boys), Emily Henry books and adaptations, and Off Campus are proving that if there is one thing capable of keeping entertainment alive, it is yearning.

We love watching men yearn for women. And we love yearning right back.

When women are crushing hard, the economy thrives. We drag our friends to the movies. We buy concert tickets and scream at the top of our lungs to subconsciously beg for Harry Style’s attention. We go to dinner afterward just to dissect eye contact between fictional characters. We order the third martini because the conversation has become spiritually important. We could go on for hours.

And this doesn’t end with age.

The way women talk about Conrad in The Summer I Turned Pretty looks almost identical to how women talked about Nathan and Lucas on One Tree Hill when I was 15, or Edward and Jacob in Twilight when I was 18.

Women have always been curious, horny, romantic, hopeful, and desperate for a goddamn crush.

Luckily, I’ve been blessed with some pretty good crush stories myself.

I’ve had the high school crush who became my first boyfriend. I’ve had enemies to lovers, an Anastasia moment if you will. And now, in my marriage, I luckily landed friends to lovers, which honestly feels like the strongest romcom structure of all and is my personal favorite.

But I also think we are still deeply trapped in an epidemic of choosing toxic men.

Raise the bar, ladies. I had to tell myself this for a good decade.

We literally watched this happen in real time with West on Summer House. Everyone fell for him. Then we realized: oh. He sucks. And for a second, we almost fell for it again.

And unfortunately, I still see women in terrible relationships constantly. I’ve lost friendships over it. I’ve watched smart women shrink themselves for emotionally unavailable men who cannot communicate, cannot commit, and somehow still think being “chill” counts as a personality.

The patriarchy sneaks into our romantic lives whether we like it or not.

And while I’ve had sweet crush stories, I’ve also had relationships with men who ghosted me, lied to me, cheated on me, breadcrumbed me, and made me question my own intuition. The list goes on forever because most women’s lists do.

Which is exactly why we escape into crushes.

A crush is almost like holding a bowling ball close to your chest. It feels heavy, powerful, consuming. You carry it around carefully until eventually you let it go.

And when you release it? It’s a high unlike anything else. You don’t know where it’s going to land. You don’t know if you’re about to embarrass yourself or strike gold. But the anticipation itself feels incredible.

As heterosexual women especially, we are raised on consuming men. In every way, shape, and form.

From Disney movies as children, to CW shows as teenagers, to posters of Chad Michael Murray, Shane West, Paul Walker, and Leonardo DiCaprio on our bedroom walls, we are taught from an unbelievably young age to center romance and lust after men with charm and eye contact. And the men who don’t even look at you at all, because they are dark and brooding, which makes it 10x more interesting, right?

(Wrong, babe. It’s so wrong!)

By the time many women fall in love for the first time, they’re already exhausted.

We’ve been carrying bowling balls for men our entire lives, trying to figure out where fantasy ends and reality begins.

And eventually, usually around 17-19, you realize: no, sex does not happen like a rom com. They don’t do these romantic gestures like you’ve been waiting for. They don’t always choose you. Sometimes they deeply disappoint you.

So you return to the crushes.

You reread your favorite romance novel. You rewatch your comfort show. You revisit the fantasy because fantasy is safer than heartbreak.

And yes, it looks different now at 35. I’m happily married, so I’m not consumed by celebrity crushes the way I once was. But I still understand the feeling completely. I still understand the tiny butterflies you get when a fictional man says exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment, and then the song choice is so nostalgic you almost want to scream on your couch, with a pint of ice cream in hand. We’re all the same, really, which is beautiful.

If you’re single, stuck in a bad relationship, overwhelmed by the news cycle, or simply exhausted by the world, a crush becomes emotional survival.

And honestly? I think that’s why crushes matter culturally.

They make people leave the house. They create conversation. They inspire art, fashion, television, playlists, texts to your friends at midnight. They remind women that longing can still feel exciting instead of humiliating.

Crushes might not solve anything structurally.

But they do make life feel a little more alive. And yes, help the economy.

So please, if you are a screenwriter, author, musician, lyricist, please keep the rom coms coming that we all need so desperately right now. I truly believe the more culture we have that allows women to yearn, fantasize, and feel something, the better off we all are.

Thank you for coming to my Tess Talk.

This morning, I watched a five part TikTok rant from a man explaining why he hates Blake Lively “with a passion,” and why her appearance at the Met Gala was supposedly tone deaf, obnoxious, and unforgivable. It was full of mimicking her facial expressions, mocking her dress, and doing voiceovers of the way she spoke to the men helping her with her gown.

And as I scrolled through the comments, I found myself wondering what people still think of Mrs. Lively. I expected lingering discomfort around her, maybe skepticism, but not this level of rage a full year later.

Immediately, I started thinking about the women the public seems to hate forever. Women branded “pick me,” fake, manipulative, evil: Meghan Markle, Amber Heard, Blake Lively, of course.

There was also a time the internet hated Hailey Bieber, Anne Hathaway, and Jennifer Lawrence, calling them try-hards, man-stealers, annoying victims, crybabies. Remember that? Remember how cruel we were to these now beloved women? Interesting how it seems to be a trend…

Personally, I love women who challenge society simply by asserting basic rights: speaking up about workplace harassment, leaving abusive relationships, existing publicly without perfectly packaging themselves for consumption. We demand perfection from women while leaving no room for messiness, contradiction, emotion, history, or humanity. No room to say: this man made my life hell, and I’m going to hold him accountable for it.

Why is that still considered so unacceptable?

And let me be clear: I don’t love Blake Lively because of her personality. I’m not interested in joining the pile on of irrelevant insults, but yes, I’ve seen the clips and interviews people reference. I’m probably not dying to grab martinis with her on a random Saturday night, you know what I mean?

But I will always support women who stand up to men who behave inappropriately, because we all know it’s a losing battle. Women sacrifice their likability, public image, careers, and peace in the pursuit of justice, compensation, or even basic respect.

Oh, a woman asking for money? I know, I know. Everyone’s about to get furious in the comments.

It always makes me wonder: what does the perfect female victim in Hollywood actually look like? After following this trial closely and covering it on my podcast, Right Answers Mostly, I think I’ve figured it out.

She has to be shy and modest. But not performatively shy. Naturally beautiful, but not too aware of it. Vulnerable, but never dramatic. She has to be dating the right man too: someone the public loves, someone who’s done his own fair share of toxic things, maybe a racial slur here, cheating there, accidentally endorsing Trump in 2016, but has since been redeemed into a “good guy.” Liberal enough now. Charming enough. Women love when a bad boy is changed, no matter what he did before. It is very important she is attached to the right man.

She needs at least two to four beloved movies on her résumé so people feel she’s been properly validated by the studio system. Talented, but effortless about it. Never someone who appears to want fame too badly.

And speaking of effortless: she can’t have too much Botox, or people start asking why her face doesn’t move “if she’s an ACTRESS,” but she also can’t age naturally, or TikTokers start making before and-afters with captions about how she’s “let herself go.”

She needs to be thin, but “healthy.” Though in Hollywood, “healthy” is often just code for “slightly less thin than before,” so ideally somewhere between a size 2 and 4, because apparently a 6 is offensive, and a 0 means she’s starving herself.

And if she’s friends with Taylor Swift? Forget it. Then she’s a loser fangirl. No, she should be friends with the cool Hollywood women: Dakota Johnson, Kate Hudson, women who theoretically drink beer and watch football with the guys.

Most importantly, during the trial, she cannot appear too affected by it. She cannot let it consume her life or define her identity. Feeling violated has to remain a side plot. Something she deals with quietly, gracefully, while continuing to smile on red carpets and promote projects like nothing happened.

So where does that leave us with Blake Lively?

Why can’t two things be true at once? Yes, she may seem annoying. But are annoying women suddenly disqualified from deserving dignity, safety, or basic human rights? Are they not allowed to feel uncomfortable on set, harassed by a co-star, unsafe while postpartum on a movie set, environments we already know are rarely designed around women’s comfort to begin with?

And as women, whether we’ve experienced harassment or not, why are we so angry at her specifically? Maybe because many women never had the privilege of hiring lawyers or fighting back publicly. Or maybe because we look at a blonde, wealthy, conventionally attractive cis woman with a seemingly perfect life and think: she doesn’t deserve sympathy too.

But it genuinely baffles me how often the strongest visceral reactions come from other women.

And yes, privilege matters. A wealthy white actress will always receive more protection, resources, and public sympathy than Black women, queer women, trans women, or women without money and connections. That inequality is real and infuriating. But deciding only certain women qualify as believable victims does not dismantle that system, it reinforces it.

Because once we start saying “not her,” we reinforce the exact systems that allow men to keep doing this in the first place.

Research consistently shows that false allegations of sexual harassment and assault are rare, with most studies estimating that only 2–10% of reported claims are deliberately fabricated. Sexual assault and harassment remain dramatically underreported crimes. These are facts, not culture war talking points, not “fake news.”

And honestly: why would anyone willingly subject themselves to this? If the answer is “attention,” then you’re saying the attention is worth being called a liar, manipulative, attention-seeking, deserving of death.

When did we lose all nuance and compassion for women? And when, exactly, do we get it back?

I am so sick of women like Blake Lively receiving more hatred online every day than men like Donald Trump, Spencer Pratt, or Joe Rogan. These are the men we should be observing, criticizing, and rejecting. Instead, women standing up for themselves become national punching bags while the men who helped create the culture around them move through the world almost untouched. It is exhausting, unfair, and honestly frightening how much energy we spend dissecting women while barely interrogating the men shaping the conversation in the first place.

Thank you for coming to my Tess Talk.

I grew up in the Bay Area in one of those houses you see in an 80’s movie and think: someone actually lived there? Angular walls, yellow and red color combinations, glass-tiled bathrooms. Laserdiscs of Help! by The Beatles, scattered on a multi-colored rug, Warren Zevon CDs in a Sharper Image rack. Hell, I was born at home in that house on tie dye sheets.

When I wasn’t there, I was in a Victorian. Joni Mitchell playing on a cassette, a plum tree giving us much needed shade, picking fruit on Sundays while watching Practical Magic or Ever After. Let’s all sigh as we feel warm and cozy.

At my dad’s, it was modern with a masculine edge. At my mom’s, colorful, whimsical, dreamy.

And I know I’m not alone in this. Millennials had a uniquely textured, almost magical childhood. It’s not just our homes we lived in, or the music we screamed in the car, or the $7.99 movies we went to go see in theaters. It was the feeling.

Somewhere along the way, we traded taste for optimization.

We’re nostalgic for that time because it was simpler. No one was talking about upper blephs. Trump wasn’t in office. People on dates made eye contact instead of checking their step count or the score of a game.

Side note: I probably walked 5k steps a day growing up and somehow turned out fine. We’re okay, guys.

We had the best TV shows, iconic fashion people are still trying to replicate, like Carolyn Bessette and Sarah Jessica Parker. When I try to explain that era to GenZ, I feel ancient.

But at what point did our taste, the way we design homes, make movies, even present things on Amazon, become so…soulless?

Yes, we’ve been through a lot. I know, every generation says that and we are lucky in so many ways. We didn’t live through the Great Depression or the Cold War. But we were too young to process 9/11 and airports became horrifying by the age of 10, we watched our families struggle during the 2008 crash, and then experienced Trump, not once, but twice, during some of our first voting years. And all right when people finally told us, “Wait, girls ARE bosses!” What a waste. I bought so many stickers that said that. I wonder where they are now.

We had blissful, formative years until around 2016. I feel lucky for that. The world we grew up in had charm. We drank 4-12 drinks a night maximum in our business casual looks at the club, listening to MGMT and Band of Horses walking back to our house alone, too drunk, when Instagram Stories and Tweets were the only thing we cared about on the internet.

And I’m not saying our generation lacks talent. We have incredible artists: Rihanna, BEYONCE, Issa Rae, Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle. Chance the Rapper. Lena Dunham. Zendaya. Barely, but we’ll take it.

Hell, we have a millennial coin the phrase “That’s hot.” who else has done that? No one from the 70s, I’ll tell you that much! And of course, Taylor Swift completely reshaped how we think about songwriting.

But still.

I walked out of a matinee of The Devil Wears Prada 2, which, to be clear, I enjoyed. It was fun. I laughed. I want Emily Blunt’s face. Female led movies saving the economy again, we love to see it.

But all the jokes were quite depressing. AI. Work. Trump’s America. Robots. Ubers. Calorie counting and Ozempic. Finally, a lot of callbacks to the original from 2006. A year where everything felt so damn funny and fresh.

Have we lost originality? Wit? Charm?

Why does everything look the same?

Why do Airbnbs across the world now have the exact same beige boucle chairs, arched mirrors, and a framed print that says something like breathe?

Why does every Netflix thumbnail feel like it was focus grouped into oblivion, flattened into the same moody lighting and algorithm approved faces?

Why are we all living in white houses with minimal furniture and Alexa in every room, like outsourcing personality? Why do we all buy art from the same three websites and have someone from TaskRabbit hang it, just to feel like we’ve done something?

Even our “individuality” feels pre-approved, like Erewhon smoothies with different names but the exact same ingredients.

Maybe the answer is trauma. We’ve been through some shit. We’re in some shit.

But it’s also rare now to watch a truly great streaming movie. Everything feels flattened. Sequels outperform original ideas. In my neighborhood, a modern farmhouse goes for $3 million, while a 1920s bungalow gets torn down because no one wants to do the work, or trust that it’s worth it.

We’re cautious. We don’t trust much. Maybe our pets, maybe our parents if we’re lucky. We’re anxious, over optimized, and…a little boring.

I thought the same thing watching The Met Gala yesterday. (A whole different story.)

People seem so afraid to take chances, to look…ugly. We are obsessed with unity, but not in a 2008 Obama Way. In a: we all are striving to look like the same AI robot.

So let’s bring back phone less dates. Real faces that move. Rolls on our stomach when we sit down. Vinyls scattered all over our living rooms. Personal style that isn’t just copying Alex Earle. Original screenplays.

Let’s make unique things. Tell jokes that push people a little, not 2010 Judd Apatow level problematic, but still. Let’s joke again, not just to monetize, but to laugh.

Buy the weird, colorful house. Get messy. Talk to each other. Don’t be afraid to look insane at the Met Gala. (I know, so many of us are already invited and planning our 2027 looks of course.)

Do something your parents would actually be proud of, honor your whimsical childhood and stop shopping for all beige couches and matching pillows.

Because taste was never supposed to be efficient.

Thank you for coming to my Tess Talk.

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This Monday, The First Monday in May, we’re covering the Met Gala on our history and pop culture podcast, Right Answers Mostly. Last week, we recorded an episode on its history throughout the years: its mythology, its contradictions, and this week we’ll be live on our socials, offering our critiques from the comfort of our couches. Sweatpants on, Thai food in hand, probably a joint in rotation, surrounded by girly commentary.

And I already know: the internet is going to be furious.

Because the Met Gala has always existed in tension. It is, undeniably, a grotesque spectacle of wealth: a glittering presentation of the world’s most powerful figures: some iconic, some questionable, all just… quite damn rich and privileged, parading themselves up a staircase in couture that costs more than most people’s annual salaries.

But this year, you could cut the tension with a knife. It’s more political. Less escapable.

The decision to center Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, not just as attendees, but as honorary chairs, feels, at best, tone deaf, and at worst, symbolic of everyone just sucking up and buying in. Not to be too bitchy, (yet here we are, it’s Taurus Season) but neither are exactly the faces of fashion or good taste. Their presence feels less like a celebration of fashion, and more like a memory of when Hunger Games first came out in theaters, but Anna Wintour is casting. Chilling.

And people are responding accordingly. The boycotts, the discomfort, the disillusionment, it’s all valid. We are living through what increasingly feels like a second Gilded Age in both Hollywood and in D.C, where wealth is flaunted and rewarded. It’s like high school, but everyone is a billionaire. You get to sit with the cool kids if you tell the bully they’re pretty, and hand over the second half of your sandwich. Even if you’re starving. And the sandwich was probably around $30.

But, her emails… Sorry, I had to.

What feels especially disorienting is watching celebrities, people we once understood as politically aligned, quietly orbit that kind of power. Seeing Leonardo DiCaprio summering on yachts with this couple, or Katy Perry cozying up to the billionaires, while maintaining this image of having progressive values. It makes me uncomfortable. These are individuals who post, who endorse, who signal all the “right” things.

But we are in a moment where signaling feels insufficient. Where sucking up to power reveals more than any Instagram story ever could.

Now put on Chainsmokers or perhaps Calvin Harris, and let’s all remember: there was a time, not that long ago, when celebrity objection felt louder. More unified. Think back to 2016, when resistance to MAGA politics was vocal, visible, and, at times, even risky. It was frightening, yes, because the unimaginable happened, and I personally could not stop sobbing watching Hillary’s concession speech, but that’s for another time…but there was also clarity. Lines felt drawn. Now, those lines feel blurred. I mean, remember Jeff and Lauren’s wedding in Venice, Italy? Remember the attendees? I think that was the first moment I really realized celebrities are not who they say they are, and also…not the heroes we want them to be.

Now, look. I’m a die hard liberal, someone who actively pushes back against everything these people represent. But at the same time, if I were handed a first class, all expenses paid week in Italy to go to this wedding with my husband… I don’t know if I’d say no instantly. That’s the uncomfortable part. That’s the honest part. It’s not what I stand for, but the allure is powerful. We live in a culture where wealth isn’t just admired. It’s deeply, quietly desired. And Italian wine and pasta just tastes so much better. I don’t even get a hangover there from more than three + glasses! The conundrum!

So where does that leave us as women? As people who care about politics, ethics, and culture?

Because here’s the contradiction: fashion itself has never been apolitical. It has always been a site of resistance, identity, and expression. Many of the most influential designers shaping the industry have been queer, immigrant, or otherwise marginalized voices pushing against dominant power structures. Think of Alexander McQueen using runway as protest, or Dapper Dan redefining luxury from the margins. Fashion has long been a language through which politics, class, gender, and rebellion are articulated.

And yet, historically, it has also been dismissed, precisely because it is associated with women and queer communities. Frivolous. Superficial. Not serious. The devaluation of fashion is, in itself, deeply gendered.

So when we talk about boycotting the Met Gala, we have to ask: what exactly are we rejecting? And who, ultimately, are we silencing?

Because for many of us, watching red carpets wasn’t about wealth or billionaires, it was about connection. It was girlhood. It was sitting with your mom, or your girlfriends, dissecting looks, forming opinions, engaging with fashion as art. It was playful, yes, but also participatory. Cultural. Communal.

And art, whether people like to admit it or not, is always political. From the suffragettes using white dress as a symbol of resistance, to Black women like Lupita Nyong’o and Zendaya wearing natural hair and braids on red carpets that have historically privileged Eurocentric beauty standards, fashion and aesthetics are not separate from politics.

It is politics, rendered visible.

Which is why the current moment feels so fraught.

Because now, even engaging, watching, critiquing, participating from afar, feels like it comes with the internet telling you that you are indeed, a shitty person. As if there is no longer space to hold contradiction. As if appreciating beauty, or artistry, or even spectacle, is inherently MAGA and immoral.

And maybe that’s the real question at the center of all of this:

Can we exist in nuance anymore? Can both things be true as we are high watching The Met eating Pad Thai with Shrimp? If I’m being crazy, perhaps a Thai Iced Tea that will inevitably keep me up all night?

Can we critique systems of power while still engaging with the culture that surrounds them? Can we call out excess while also acknowledging artistry? Can we, as women, who have historically been told that what we enjoy is trivial, refuse that narrative, and still demand more from the institutions we’re watching?

Because I don’t think the answer is always avoidance or boycott. Not blind admiration, sure, not total rejection, but watching with awareness.

So yes, we’ll be watching. We’ll be critiquing. We’ll be laughing, probably judging, definitely overanalyzing. Giggling with girlfriends and all going around saying “What designer would be your dream to dress you?” Texting with my Mom back and forth, awaiting her highly comedic commentary about these insane people and this insane time we are living in.

And if that makes the internet mad, I won’t share my pad Thai.

Obviously, the Summer House scandal has taken the world by storm. When the news broke, I was in the middle of a genuinely terrifying health scare. Two weeks in bed, unable to walk, cycling through worst case scenarios. And I remember thinking, very clearly, I’m so glad this is happening right now so I have something to care about.

That sounds unhinged, but it’s true. I know people who literally called out of work just to process this with their friends.

It’s not that I enjoy watching people suffer or be publicly humiliated, but let’s be honest, Bravo is my family. I know this cast better than some of my actual relatives, and from a psychological standpoint, this has been fascinating to dissect.

I went on a real journey with West Wilson. At first, he confused me. His fashion alone was… unsettling. I clocked the chemistry he had with Ciara Miller, but I wasn’t buying it.

The whole “I need to figure my shit out before I commit” line? Please. That sentence haunted my 20s. I knew this man. Too well.

But then, like so many women who are embarrassingly susceptible to even the smallest hint of straight male decency, I learned his mom was a gynecologist and that he was liberal, and suddenly I was like… okay, maybe?

Which is insane to admit, but the bar is so low right now it’s basically underground. We’re out here hoping for a man who understands what a luteal phase is and believes women deserve basic human rights.

Watching Ciara absolutely obliterate him in season nine was deeply satisfying. And beyond that, I have so much respect for how she moves through the world. She’s careful with her heart, emotionally intelligent, and willing to have difficult conversations, especially about race, with a privileged white cast, on a national platform. She’s vulnerable, but she’s strong. She’s a true girls’ girl.

And that brings us to the “girls’ girl” conversation. Here we go.

Because I used to really like Amanda Batula. She wasn’t a leader, but she seemed nice. Cute clothes, great body, fun energy.

But I heard something about a year ago that stuck with me: “Nice” is the worst thing you can be called.

Nice is neutral. Nice is passive. Nice stands for nothing. And if you don’t stand for anything, you fall for everything.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized I don’t actually like “nice” people. I like people who are kind, intentional, and honest.

There’s a big difference. It is sneaky, but it is obvious.

Rewatching the show, it’s hard not to see Amanda as someone deeply dependent on male validation. The way she looks for attention: compliments, touches, acknowledgment, it’s uncomfortable. Not because it’s foreign, but because it’s familiar. And I do think that we all need to admit that.

At some point, most of us have been there. When your worth feels tied to a glance across a room, a text back, a guy choosing you over someone else. That phase usually lives somewhere between your teenage years and your 20s.

And ideally, you grow out of it. You realize that if your self worth is built on male attention, you will always feel empty. Always chasing, never full.

But Amanda hasn’t outgrown it.

And to be clear: I do not support the internet absolutely tearing her apart or threatening her life. That kind of behavior is deranged, full stop. If something actually happened to her, we would all have to sit with the reality of how cruel we’ve become. Thank you, internet.

There’s also a larger conversation happening, especially from Black women about how this situation is being received and who is being protected, believed, or villainized. That’s not my lane to speak on, but it is something worth listening to, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

What I do think this situation exposes, though, is something deeper about loyalty between women.

Because when a woman betrays another woman, especially one who has been loyal, supportive, patient, and stood by you through your own toxic relationship, it doesn’t just feel like a mistake. It feels cruel. It feels intentional.

And when you look at who West actually is: noncommittal, inconsistent, unreliable, it becomes even more disturbing.

Because what it signals is this: some women will risk everything, friendships, integrity, self respect , for the possibility of a man who offers them nothing.

And nothing triggers women more than watching another woman choose the wrong side. Not just because it’s frustrating, but because it sends a message: that loyalty to men still comes before loyalty to each other. STILL, in this day and age?? In this patriarchy?? Hell, in THIS ECONOMY??

That is the real loss here. It is so triggering when all we want is an escape of what our world stands for, which is undeserved male leadership, and chaotic male destruction.

Because every time a woman chooses male validation over female friendship, it reinforces a system that was never built for us to win. It isolates us. It turns us against each other. And eventually, it leaves us alone, fighting over crumbs.

Men don’t ruin women.

But the way we’ve been taught to center them? That does.

And until we unlearn that, until we start choosing ourselves, and each other, with the same intensity we’ve been taught to choose men, this cycle will keep repeating.

And to be clear, this isn’t about blaming women for falling into this pattern. We were taught to. Conditioned to see potential as promise, to interpret inconsistency as depth, to believe that if a man is just self aware enough, he’s worth waiting for. We romanticize the almost, the maybe, the “he just needs time.” But the truth is, men like this don’t change because we understand them better, they change when there are consequences for staying the same. So how do we stop falling for this guy? We stop confusing awareness with growth. We stop giving credit for words without action. And most importantly, we start choosing the women who show up for us, consistently, clearly, and without conditions, over the men who don’t.

This is bigger than Team Ciara vs. Team Amanda. We’ve seen how that story ends: LC vs. Kristen, Angelina vs. Jennifer, the tired “good girl vs. bad girl” narrative that always circles back to slut shaming and women turning on each other.

This isn’t about picking a side and going to war. It’s about looking inward, examining the ways we’ve been conditioned to compete, to compare, to center men, and doing the harder work of breaking that pattern within ourselves and within our friendships. And part of that work, especially in situations like this, means actually listening to and prioritizing Black women’s perspectives, because too often, they’re the ones most impacted, most disrespected, and the least protected in these dynamics

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