I HAVE COMPLICATED FEELINGS about consistently sunny Los Angeles weather. On the one hand, I love it. On the other, I feel responsible for it with regards to outsiders. Credit where credit is due, however. My friend Rebecca, an L.A. native, is the one who articulated the idea of Angelenos feeling overcome with guilt whenever the weather doesn’t cooperate. She told me that whenever she has people come visit — especially in the months of May and June — she worries that it might rain and ruin whatever plans have been made. Or, that it might be – the horror – cold. 

People outside of L.A. don’t necessarily realize that it’s not uncommon for it to be overcast here, or chilly, which is why friends who come to visit express surprise and disappointment when it’s neither sunny nor particularly warm. L.A. isn’t SUPPOSED to be gray, and it isn’t SUPPOSED to get chilly (except, maybe, at night) and the obvious disappointment and frustration that visitors feel upon encountering less-than-ideal weather in Los Angeles feels like an implicit indictment of the city, and, by extension, me. 

Case in point: Earlier this year, a friend of mine from New York, Reyhan, who was headed into town with her husband during an especially frigid cold spell back on the East Coast, sent me the following text:

“Anna.”

I got a funny feeling in my stomach. People don’t use periods after your name unless it’s something serious. Something you’re in trouble for. It felt accusatory.

Reyhan explained that she’d seen the weather report for the following week and that there were predictions that it was likely to rain for 3 out of the 4 days she’d be in Los Angeles. I’d seen this same weather report but hadn’t said anything. I was having flashbacks to the times it poured cats and dogs during visits from my friend Lizzie and her grade-school-age son, thereby complicating our trips to Disneyland (November 2022) and Universal Studios (February 2024). (We had to buy full-body rainsuits at Target.)

“It could change,” I wrote Reyhan. “Don’t despair just yet. A few days ago the forecast was for six days of rain. Now it’s 2.5. So I’ll believe it when I see it.”

I continued to try to keep a positive attitude. Weather reports for L.A. — for anywhere, in fact — can shift from day to day, hour to hour. Still, I felt like I’d reneged on a promise, an implicit agreement; one that, however ridiculous-sounding, comes with the territory when playing to host to out-of-towners: The weather in Los Angeles will be nice.

Feeling guilty about L.A. weather – not just guilty but personally responsible – is a cross that many of us bear. The last time Rebecca had a visitor was in April when her business partner Amy came to L.A. from New York with her husband and two kids in tow. There was a lot on the line — plans for pooltime and visits to Little Tokyo and dumpling houses in the San Gabriel Valley — and Rebecca was glued to her weather app — she says she was looking at it every five hours — but things didn’t look promising. She started to feel, as she puts it, “pre-apologetic.” 

“Not because of [Amy], but because of me,” she says. Rebecca likens the importance of good weather to the experience of L.A. to that of the symbolism of the Brooklyn Bridge to New York City: It’s something you “show off about your city.” A pride of place. A point of distinction.

“I wanted them to have a great feeling about L.A. [but] I don't think they understand the level to which I take it personally, not realizing that in my heart I feel that I am the goddess of Los Angeles weather and that therefore I am responsible for that and people having a good time.”

Tess Lynch, a writer based in Los Feliz and the proprietor of the delightful LA Weather newsletter, in which she muses about the weather and her impressions of Los Angeles, says she apologizes all the time for less-than-ideal weather during visits from guests.

“I apologize for everything,” she says. “People will stay in like Marina Del Rey and they're planning to see people in Pasadena and you're like, ‘This was not well thought out’.;  And then they always come and it's like there's a lot of distress. It's dirtier than they expected. So you're kind of anticipating a lot of disappointment coming from a few different areas … The weather in general is something that you don't have to feel that way about.”

Lynch says she’s even apologized for it being too hot. (So have I, though I always follow that up with a cheerful, “At least it’s not humid!”)

“If you live in New York, you don't apologize when it's gross and gray. But when it's very hot, even if people decide to visit in August or September, I feel responsible for that as well and I apologize profusely. But why should we apologize that in our Mediterranean, borderline desert climate, it's hot?”

Further complicating matters is that Lynch loves the rain. It’s “awful to admit,” she says, but residents want it to rain in Los Angeles! The city needs it!

She laughs. “Sometimes I turn it on them and I'm like, ‘You brought it so it's actually your fault. Thank you.’”

It ended up raining when Reyhan was in California, but just for a day or so, not the predicted three or four. She seemed less grumpy about it — “everyone apologized,” she laughs — but she says she did have to make a surprise purchase of a rainsuit at the Glendale Galleria. I tried to find the silver lining in the situation. Rain, I said, is good for plants. (More flowers! Greener parks!) It cleans dirty streets and clears the sky of nasty, air-polluting particles, making it so clear that you can see tiny Santa Barbara Island from the top of Griffith Park. 

I try to explain that good weather is one way that Los Angelenos feel they can compete with East Coasters who claim, in a self-satisfied way, that their cities are superior. (Culture, food, etc.) Funnily enough, the weather has been pretty great this June.

“Everyone really wanted to believe in the promise of L.A. while it was literally pouring,” Reyhan tells me later. She’s laughing. “But it ended up being beautiful.”

Name is a name.