by Jessica Pan
In short, they were there to compete for her attention.
In a Gladiator-esque speech, she proceeded to ask the men who were in relationships to leave and for the men over five foot ten to stay, and then she said, “I don’t enjoy the name Jimmy—can the Jimmys please leave?”
A lot of men fled the scene as soon as they realized what was going on, but a good few remained and competed in sprinting and push-up competitions to try to win her time and affection.
Natasha is a genius. We don’t have time to meet each person individually; better to gather them and eliminate the Jimmys as soon as possible. I needed to pull a Natasha and get my matches in one place so that we could all meet each other at the same time, find our potential friend soul mates in one night, and move on with our busy lives having brunch and going to yoga.
I’ve been doing this all wrong. Only an introvert sets up one-on-one dates. An extrovert would bring them altogether—happily! Right? I don’t know, but this is my haphazard guesswork at how they operate.
I compose a message that I can send to multiple people. This kind of debasement would normally take me weeks to muster, but I was changed. I was an extroverting, (fuck)-friend-dating machine.
“Hey I’m meeting some friends from this app for drinks at Simmons Bar in Clerkenwell at 6:30 p.m. next Wednesday! Would be great if you could join!”
And then I send it to thirty women. Like a boss. A carefree extrovert. My hesitance in being the one to ask someone out has been extinguished.
I wait with bated breath.
Then the declines roll in over the week: three have to work late, one has a softball tournament, two are busy with other plans, three are out of town, and two have food poisoning. Two cases of food poisoning? Adults playing softball? This was farcical.
I lie down on the sofa.
Spontaneity is dead. Friend-dating is hard. Food hygiene in the UK is shot.
On the day of the meet-up, I show up early. A few other women say that they will try to make it, so I can’t afford to be late for my own orchestrated mass friend-date.
I’m wearing jeans. A plaid shirt. Something that says, “Hi, it’s me, your casual new best friend.” I have rehearsed stories. I feel friendly. I relax my face. Look at me, I’m fun and easygoing and chill as fuck.
And then I wait.
And wait.
I sip a cider.
And wait.
Easygoing Extrovert Me is growing slightly antsy. And becoming more Apprehensive Introvert Me with every passing glance from the idle bartender.
Only one person shows up. Amelia.
I suddenly feel like I’ve been catfishing her.
Do I tell her the truth? That I invited thirty women and twenty-nine didn’t respond or bailed on me? That’s she’s literally the only person who said yes?
“Two other women were supposed to come, but they couldn’t make it at the last minute!” I say.
Amelia digests this information with grace and dignity. Then she orders a large glass of red wine. She works in consulting and is wearing a business suit. I feel ridiculous in my oldest pair of jeans. Next to her blazer and chic ballet flats, I look like a teenager she is mentoring on how to get her first job.
I ask Amelia what brought her to the Bumble BFF app. “I’m single and was looking for other single women to go to dating events with,” she says. “That’s why I came along to this group hangout.”
“Yeah, sorry about that . . .” I say.
“You’re married, right? Well, if you meet other single women you like, could you put me in touch with them?” Amelia asks.
What, like, matchmake you with friends who you’ll like more than me?
Cool, cool.
“Sure,” I say.
After two glasses of red wine, Amelia begins to soften. She talks candidly about her love life. She’s dated a “lot of losers,” but she wants to get married and have kids. She has the killer career, owns an apartment, and is from London, so she has lots of friends in the city. She tells me she admires me for being proactive and trying to meet more people.
“I have a very tight group of friends that I’ve had since I was a teenager,” Amelia says. “And I’m really, really loyal to them. I pride myself on that. But I think we’re outgrowing each other. When we hang out, it feels like I’m wearing clothes that don’t fit anymore.”
This is actually something I had started to hear from both men and women in their thirties. Lives and careers diverge at this age as babies are born, people move out of cities, jobs change. The friend you bonded with twenty years ago might not have much in common with you now.
Who hasn’t reunited with someone from their past only to realize the best parts of the conversation were when you two were reminiscing? You leave, disappointed and sad, knowing they feel the same way.
So much of this comes down to how much our circumstances change over the years. One friend back home is always urging me to get pregnant—I know she does this because she wants us to bond over motherhood, to make our very different lives similar again. And in New York, I recently met up with an old hallmate from college, Teddy. He cannot believe that I am married. It shocks him.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because you never dated anyone at college. Ever.”
Observing Teddy’s perplexed face, I realized that he could only see who I used to be. To him, I was frozen in time, a nineteen-year-old in perpetual unrequited love on our snow-covered campus, clutching my books and wearing too much eyeliner. He didn’t see me as someone who could change, or maybe he didn’t want to accept that I had.
Which is hard to swallow, considering he aspired to be the campus seducer and I just found out he’s been ordained a Buddhist monk. (Though, crucially, not in a branch of Buddhism that requires celibacy. Yes, I checked. Every woman—and man—in my graduating class checked.)
But hey. People change. On that day in New York, Teddy didn’t see me as who I am now. Or, at least, who I felt I had become. Being seen is something we crave out of friendship—that feeling of “This person gets me more than I get myself.” When we lose that with old friends, the magic is gone.
On the bus home, I flop down, exhausted. Would I find new friends who really saw me? Who understood me? I do not know. At the moment, I am confused about how I managed to get only one woman to show up on the group date.
How did Natasha get hundreds of men to come to hers in New York? I google her and discover that she’s an Instagram model with pillowy lips who was born to wear bikinis. Oh. That’s how.
If I messaged thirty women and only one showed up, odds are that for thirty to show up, I’d have to message nine hundred women. Which means I’d have to match with nine hundred women as well. Which means nine hundred “How is your week going? Yeah, I’m happy it’s the weekend, too” conversations.
Good God! I don’t have time for this. I could become an Instagram poet in that time. Or do my backlog of taxes (though I wouldn’t). I could start a catering business or train for and then drop out of a marathon.
I know that actual dating is way more brutal than this. I get that. But I’m married, so that challenge is off the table. Seeking genuine connections on friend-dates had made this my most personal challenge yet. And I wasn’t doing very well at it.
On the bus, I swipe through the app absentmindedly. I stop on a friendly looking woman standing in front of a lake. One of her favorite artists is St. Vincent, someone I listened to on a near-constant loop last winter. And one of her emojis is a dumpling. Is this a sign?
No no no. The point isn’t to go on a hundred friend-dates with a hundred women. It’s to find a few whom I really click with, who go on to become good friends.
At home, I tell Sam I’m done with friend-dating after my wine date with Amelia. I’m unlucky in friend-dating, and that is that.
“How many friend-date
s have you been on?” Sam asks.
“Six.” (There was also an unfortunate friend meeting at a bar trivia night: I yelled a lot, we lost, and now she knows too much about how little I know about European history.)
“Just go on one more,” Sam says.
“Fine. I’ll go with her,” I say, looking at the profile on my screen. It’s the dumpling emoji girl.
“What’s her name?” Sam asks. I glance down.
“Lucky. Her name is Lucky,” I say.
“Lucky number seven!” he says. “You’ve got to do it.”
I swipe right on her. Ding—we’ve matched.
Lucky and I arrange to meet for dumplings at a Chinese restaurant and then see a comedy show in central London. If I’m going on a friend-date that might bomb, I’m at least going to get some dumplings out of it.
Lucky gets the flu. Our date is canceled.
Which reminds me to get the flu shot, thereby perhaps preventing me from contracting the flu, in which case it is very lucky—for me. Not for our friendship.
And then it happens. Abigail, my very first friend-date, gets in touch and wants to hang out.
We decide to go swimming in the Hampstead Heath ponds. And that’s how I end up getting a bikini wax. For Abigail. Because she’s worth it.
A week later, both of us in black one-piece swimsuits, me, with a freshly waxed bikini line, stand on the pier. Abigail’s never swum here before. Because I had been here before with Jessica, who had talked me through getting into the cold water for the first time, I give Abigail the same advice: don’t jump in, as it might cause you to gasp for air and accidentally inhale water. Go slowly and breathe slowly and steadily. But keep going.
Abigail gets in and begins to swim the entire length of the pond. I slowly follow after her and then float on my back. Afterward, we walk through the Heath, and she invites me into her house in Belsize Park to give me a book. A few months ago, this woman was a total stranger; now I am in her house, reading her book and discussing her writing.
I know I’ll see Abigail again. In searching for that easy intimacy of youthful friendships, I’d discovered a more mature version. We aren’t likely to stay up all night talking, swap clothes, or spend every weekend together, because at this stage in our lives, we are too busy. But in a big, lonely city, knowing there’s another person out there, even just one, whom you can reach out to and say, “Want to grab a bite?” and you know they’ll show up, make you laugh, and listen to you, feels like a precious gift.
Plus, Abigail has her shit together. Abigail would know how to get rid of a body.
✽ ✽ ✽
Studies say that it takes six to eight meetings to feel like someone is our friend. When was the last time you saw someone new whom you didn’t work with six to eight times in a year? Unless you’re dating, on a sports team together, or roommates, the answer is never.
By this definition, my best friend is my local bus driver.
Other research says that, on average, it takes fifty hours of time with someone before you consider them a casual friend and ninety hours before you feel comfortable upgrading them to “friend.”
Fifty hours? I’m not so sure. Add a little light trauma and you can get there ten times as fast. At journalism school, I was paired with a classmate to work on a TV report. You can bet that a few hours of sobbing in the editing suite brought us together like nobody’s business. Same goes for surviving turbulent plane rides, sadistic teachers, and punishingly long jazz concerts. If you make it out alive, you are usually bonded for life.
Personally, I think meeting someone you really connect with twice, for a few hours, followed by extensive, emotional texting, is enough to feel like friends. And I think I’m on my way with Abigail.
Sometimes, new friends will ghost you. You never know what’s going on in someone else’s life—someone in their family could be sick, they could be going through something big that they need to focus all of their energy on, they could be recovering from heartbreak. We might never know.
As Rachel B., my mentor, says, “You can’t expect someone to behave like your friend before you’re actually friends. I’m not saying people should be mean, but they don’t owe you anything. So try not to be too hurt if they don’t get in touch or reply.”
While friend-dates can be nerve-wracking, I’m once again shocked that strangers are lot nicer and more normal than we expect them to be. No one outright rejected me when I “asked them out.” I didn’t “meet a bunch of weirdos.” Not one. Nothing sordid. Zero dick pics. No vag shots.
And taking the first step might feel awkward, but literally nothing in life happens if someone doesn’t make the first move. You lose nothing by offering a casual invite for coffee or a drink. Moving from the app to texting makes this much easier. If they say no, that’s fine. At least you know.
And I know, too. I mean, I was pseudo-rejected by twenty-nine women in one night.
But I survived.
One night I message my childhood best friend, Jori, who is awake in Houston with her two kids. It’s 3 a.m. in London.
“I don’t know why this is so hard,” I say to her.
“That’s because what you want is a shared history,” she replies.
She’s right. I’d been judging these brand-new friends against the chemistry and warmth I had with my oldest, best friends. The ones who still saw the old me but accepted the adult version of me. What I’d really been searching for was inside jokes and the closeness of a shared history, which takes years to create.
✽ ✽ ✽
Sometimes, though, friendship is like love. You can’t plan for it. It finds you in unlikely places. Or in the most obvious place imaginable.
One evening, I get back from a run and am doubled over, recovering and panting, in front of my building. The entrance opens, and a woman walks out, taking out her trash.
“I’m not loitering,” I tell her when she gives me a funny look.
“Oh, I didn’t think you were loitering,” she says. “I thought you lived here.”
“Oh. I do. I do live here. On the third floor.”
We introduce ourselves. Her name is Hannah, and she’s from the Netherlands. As she turns to go back inside, I say, “Hey! Do you want to swap numbers? Just in case . . . there’s a fire or something?”
I can tell my year was already changing me. Talking to strangers has made me less shy, and my experience on the friendship apps means that I am fine making the first move, even though I still had to make it weird with the whole fire thing. A few weeks later, Hannah and her husband have Sam and me over for dinner in their apartment because we stored a package for them when they were on vacation. Hannah has hundreds of books, and I leave her apartment with an armful to borrow.
It isn’t until a few more months later when Hannah texts out of the blue saying, “Want to grab coffee with me right now?” And I do.
The elusive perfect friend-date: spontaneous, with good coffee, great conversation, and no commute. We’d also had the spark, both having read several of the same books, both of us the same age, both of us struggling with similar things.
She’d been living downstairs the entire time. But if I hadn’t gone through so many friend-dates and false starts, I know I wouldn’t have asked for her number when we met. In fact, given how I normally treated my neighbors in London and how insular I was before this all began, I probably would have just pretended to be loitering.
Hannah and Abigail are beginnings. That’s something. No girl squad, but a tiny little social life, just like A. N. Devers wanted. And I didn’t have to become a rare-book dealer. In a big, lonely city like London, for a shy introvert like me, it feels like a lot.
six
Crowd Control
or
Networking
INT. BAR. NIGHT.
WOMAN stands at bar, clutching a drink in h
er hand. She turns to the MAN next to her, who makes eye contact. She gives him a tight-lipped smile.
MAN: Hi.
WOMAN: Hi.
MAN: So . . . do you know anyone here?
WOMAN: I know a guy who helps run this event. Robert?
MAN: (inaudible)
WOMAN: Sorry, what’d you say?
MAN: Oh, you’re gay? You know, I thought so!
WOMAN: Huh?
MAN: You just said you’re gay. So you’re gay?
WOMAN: No—no, I didn’t say that. I’m . . . I’m not gay.
Pause
MAN: So, what brings you to London?
WOMAN: It’s a long story, but I married a British guy.
MAN: Oh. Oh really?
WOMAN: Um . . . yep. I did.
MAN: Wow. WOW.
(low whistle)
MAN (CONT’D): So you’re one of those people.
WOMAN: What? What people?
Man’s friend walks up.
MAN (to friend): This girl just told me she came to London because she married a rich guy!
WOMAN: What? Rich guy? NO! British guy! Not rich. He’s British! BRITISH.
FADE TO BLACK
✽ ✽ ✽
A variation on this sequence, ad infinitum, makes up the majority of my experience in networking situations. What I wanted to do after this conversation was say, “I left my oven on—BYE!” and immediately flee the scene.
I’d arrived at that event to try to make some professional connections. I’d tried my best. But, sometimes, it all goes horribly wrong even when we are trying our best. So why bother at all?
Because even if we’re smart and hardworking, a big factor in professional success is who you know. Research has shown that it is our outer circle of acquaintances, also known as “weak ties,” that brings about the most change in our lives. A “strong tie” is our close friends and family, who are likely to have similar connections and knowledge as us. It is the weak ties, the people we are only loosely connected to, who are actually more influential on our lives. They bring new information, advice, and perspectives: new job prospects, commissions, fresh inspiration, or collaborators that we would otherwise have never discovered.