If your girlfriend doesn't have the same taste in series

Differences in friendships are totally okay. She's the knitted sweater type, you're the fashion girl who always prioritizes style over comfort. She camps, you can barely count the number of stars on one hand. She's team beer, you're company Chardonnay. But in one thing, you find each other: in your favorite Netflix series.

The Netflix series is the new cassette tape. Remember how you used to press ‘play’ and ‘record’ at the same time really hard on your favorite songs and created a mixtape with your favorite songs so your girlfriend or new boyfriend could listen to it too? If you both like the same thing, your friendship is solid.

I literally felt friendships fall (in a good way) when it turned out that La Meglio Gioventù was both our favorite movie. By the way, these are my favorite Italian films, but that's beside the point. Such a small film, quite intense too (you need to sit through it for six hours) if that's the story that has touched you the most, then that says a lot.

At the office, I can sometimes be cautious with my advice because I might love Grace and Frankie so much, but do the 26-year-olds here feel the same? If it turns out they love the old girls in their beach house just as much as I do, I feel a bit uplifted. As if I'm not that old after all.

The same goes for The Crown; I can imagine it's a bit more of a series for me than for the faster types here, but they enjoy it and find it interesting, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I don't have that stale taste either.

Conversely, I also appreciated that I found The Bodyguard (the series, not the movie), which everyone was talking about, to be of an unprecedented level.

But I have also experienced giving someone I particularly like my favorite movie as a gift, and it didn't go down well. I thought it was such a nice and original gift. I'm giving you something that has particularly moved me. It was a DVD of Un homme et une femme, one of the most beautiful films ever made. His response after a week: ‘It doesn't touch me. Too slow. Too black-and-white.’ And then I'm a bit done, I believe. Because if you don't find that beautiful, will we ever find each other in friendship? You might as well just stop right away.

Relying on each other's reviews can be nice but also particularly dangerous. I remember that vacation on the Italian island of Ischia. Friends of ours had raved about a fish restaurant there. We had to go. It was on the other side of the island, as you always see, but that didn't matter because we wanted to go there. We rented a car with a driver because that fish obviously had to swim. We asked him to pick us up nice and late because tonight was ours. But when the soup still had to be thawed and we found another prefab case on our plate, we were disappointed. In the restaurant and also a little bit in our acquaintances.

So if someone doesn't respond to a series you've recommended, there are two options. Either that person hasn't had time to watch it yet, or it appealed to them just a bit less than it did to you. In any case, I would say: don't ask further. That's better for everyone.