Praise for MWF Seeking BFF by Rachel Bertsche
“Genuine, funny and thoroughly inspiring, MWF Seeking BFF is a tribute to female friendships and a must-read for anyone who has ever found herself sunk into her couch and scrolling through the phone list feeling like there’s no one to call for a last-minute drink or Sunday brunch.”
—RACHEL MACHACEK, author of The Science of Single
“MWF Seeking BFF is funny, charming, and so relatable. Throughout Rachel’s journey to develop more meaningful, enduring relationships with other women, I found myself wishing she had my number.”
—ROBYN OKRANT, author of Living Oprah
“I guess you could say Rachel had me at ‘Hello’—I found myself totally invested in her honest, earnest, oftentimes hilarious quest for meaningful female friendship. Whether you’re actively seeking a ‘BFF’ yourself or simply recognize the value in making quality connections with other women, MWF Seeking BFF underscores the profound rewards we women stand to reap when we simply open up, reach out to one another, and go for it. A smart, fun, and inspiring page-turner that will surely resonate.”
—KELLY VALEN, author of The Twisted Sisterhood
MWF Seeking BFF is a work of nonfiction.
Some names and identifying
details have been changed.
A Ballantine Books eBook Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Rachel Bertsche Levine
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52495-9
Cover design: Misa Erder
www.ballantinebooks.com
v3.1
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
—E. M. Forster, Howards End, 1910
Penny: What’s up with Ichabod?
Leonard: Oh, he’s trying to make a new friend.
Penny: Well, good for him.
Leonard: Unless he makes one out of wood like
Geppetto, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
—The Big Bang Theory, 2009
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
WINTER: “I’ll Be the One Holding a Red Rose”:
Setups and Long-Lost Acquaintances
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
SPRING: “BFFless Seeking Same”:
Taking Out a Want Ad
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
SUMMER: “If You Can’t Meet ’Em, Join ’Em”:
Clubs, Classes, and Online Friending
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
FALL: “Come Here Often?”:
The Art of the Pickup
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Friend-Dates: The Index
Recommended Reading
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
I’ve known my two best friends since I was 10 and 14. Sara was in the bunk next door to me at summer camp. She had chubby cheeks and came from Manhattan. Someone asked her once if she heard gunshots a lot. She had beauty products by FACE Stockholm and effortlessly cool stationery. She was allowed to walk alone around Greenwich Village. I guess we were friendly enough that summer—it was seventeen years ago, who can remember? What I do know is that sometime during the following school year Sara called out of the blue and invited me to her family’s country house for the weekend. That’s the defining moment for me.
Callie sat across from me during a math placement test for the high school where we’d be new kids that September. She wore saddle shoes, a term I didn’t even know, and a short skirt. She was “funky,” I thought. She wouldn’t stop jabbering with a kid she clearly knew about their school play and, I learned later, her starring role in Alice in Wonderland.
The bestfriendships grew naturally, as they do when you’re thrown together in relationship breeding grounds like high school and summer camp. They were my bridesmaids. On the night (or, I guess, morning) I found out my father was going to die from the cancer we’d thought was being treated, I called Callie. It was 3 A.M. but she picked up. “I don’t know why I answered the phone,” she mumbled. “It normally doesn’t wake me.”
A few nights later Sara borrowed her father’s car to drive uptown, bring me a clean T-shirt, and sit with me while I stole a few hours of sleep at my brother’s studio apartment. She just sat there, watching TV, while I slept. All those clichés about friends dropping everything when you need them? The ones about always picking up where you left off, even when you haven’t talked in a while? When it comes to Callie and Sara, they’re all true.
But summers, semesters, jobs, boys, and cities later, they’re still in New York while I’ve moved to Chicago. Unlike our freshman hallway or Tripp Lake Camp cabin, the Windy City isn’t rife with girls waiting to be my new best friend. In your late twenties, friend-making is not the natural process it used to be. In fact, as it turns out, I’ve completely forgotten how to do it. I’m too shy to approach a potential BFF at the local bookstore just because she too is caressing The Things They Carried. The ladies at yoga class already know one another and, for a discipline all about nonjudgment, seem oddly unapproachable. I’m not a mother, and won’t be for at least a few years, so I can count out the Mommy-and-Me classes that are so obviously more for the mommy than the me.
Life was easier when playdates were set up for us.
There’s no pity to be had here. I moved to Chicago with my boyfriend. We’d been doing the long-distance thing for three years since college and were very much over it. He had no interest in moving to New York, and I wasn’t relocating to his hometown of Boston. We met at Northwestern University, so Chicago was the obvious choice. When he got a job at a law firm here, I started packing my bags. Sure, I’d be leaving most of my friends (despite going to school in the midwest, our college pals flocked largely to the East Coast), but I would finally be in the same place as Matt. I figured we’d get engaged in about a year, married in two. We’d do grown-up-people-who-live-together things like picking out art and making couple friends when we weren’t doing really cool young-at-heart things like playing beer pong and Wii Tennis. It would be perfect.
Mostly, it was. We moved to Chicago in June 2007 and got married in August 2009. We bought a portable tabletop to play drinking games and framed a five-by-three-foot lithograph to hang over our fireplace. And it’s not like I didn’t know anyone in the city. I had a friend in town from college (who moved shortly after I arrived) and a cousin who I figured I’d get closer to. But there wasn’t a Callie or a Sara. Not even a potential one. I found myself with no one to call on Sunday morning to see where we were having brunch, nowhere to stop by after work to watch Project Runway.
The truth is, I’ve always felt comfortable in groups. I know, so Mean Girls of me, but I’d argue it’s true of most women. It’s un-PC to use the word “clique,” but most of us can name our “group of friends” pretty easily. And it’s not necessarily exclusive. Just the opposite. Defined groups eliminate the hard decisions. There’s no question of who to invite to a dinner party, where to sit during lunch. Yes, if th
ere’s a woman anxious to join your ranks and you ignore her, you’re being a bitch, but I like to think that scenario ends after high school. Come adulthood, women don’t sit around wishing they would be accepted by the popular girls. They have their own friends who are their own popular girls.
In fifth grade there were seven of us. We called each other LYLAS. Love Ya Like a Sister. We hung out on the playground singing in obnoxiously loud voices to En Vogue’s “Giving Him Something He Can Feel.” In high school, five of us shot our senior yearbook photos together. We took a “Senior Page!” picture at my wedding. By the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I could have told you who I’d live with when we were seniors. When that time came and we all moved into a house together, people started referring to us by our address. “Is 1113 coming?”
My office held a fitness challenge last year. I joined a team with four coworkers. We called ourselves The Transformers and took Booty Beat classes to, well, beat off our booties. Eventually, the dance classes phased out. The name stuck. We eat lunch together every day. There’s another group of women in our department who also eat as a pack. We like them, they like us, but there’s no room in the cafeteria to all sit together so we smile and wave as we pass en route to the salad bar.
Come the weekend, though, I don’t have that goes-without-saying lunch date. Other than Matt, of course. But men, even husbands, aren’t the same. They don’t need to gab over drinks, analyzing every conversation, potential purchase, and awkward run-in they had that week. They’re happy to silently watch sports over a beer. Guys hardly even look at each other when they hang out. Their buddy requirements are minimal.
Aside from my coworkers, I’ve made exactly one new friend since I moved to Chicago. Matt and I met Lindsey and her boyfriend at a wedding. I see her every month or so, when we gather for dinner with the bride and a few ex-Northwesterners we both know. They’re fun, but even after two years we haven’t reached that call-on-a-Sunday-morning level.
That’s the bestfriendship test, I think. The “What are we doing today?” phone call. If you have that, you have someone with whom it is implied you will spend the day or at least an hour. That’s the level of BFF I’m in the market for. At this point, I have girls in Chicago who I could email to set up a dinner date. But when Matt decides at the last minute to take a Friday-night trip to the casino, I use the time to catch up on Grey’s Anatomy. When he has to work on a weekend, there’s no one, save for my mom (who followed me, er, moved, here a few months ago), whom I feel comfortable enough to call and say, “What are you up to?”
Getting to that level is tricky. It’s essentially dating. At what point after meeting a new friend is it acceptable to call “just to say hi”? When is it not overly aggressive to text “Pedicure in a half hour?” The first time I saw a coworker outside the office, we’d been texting on a Saturday about a work-related issue. When Lynn wrote, “If you’re not doing anything, come over for Guinness and oysterfest!” I went into a tizzy. I wasn’t doing anything! I’d love to come over for Guinness and oysterfest! But could I just say that? No one wants to be the pathetic girl sitting by the phone, waiting for an invitation. I wrote back a few minutes later. “Have to get lunch and run some errands … How long will you be there?” It wasn’t entirely untrue—I did have lunch plans. With my 60-year-old aunt, my cousin, and my brother’s girlfriend, Jaime. Easily cancelable, but made me look less eager. There were no errands.
This was big-time. It could be the transition from “work-friend”—Lynn sits in the cubicle next to me at the office where we are both web producers—to “friend.” I wanted to play it exactly right. At lunch, Jaime laughed as I dealt with my nerves by asking a zillion questions. Did the outfit I’d thrown together for lunch look weekend-casual-but-cool enough? Was Lynn just being nice, or did she really want me to come over? “It’s not like you’re trying to hook up with her,” Jaime said. “You’ll be fine.”
And I was fine. My T-shirt and yoga pants were perhaps a little more weekend-pajama than weekend-cool, but I walked the street fair with Lynn and her college friends, passing on oysters and Guinness in favor of a Bucket O’ Fries. (Cool girls eat fries, right?) These could be my friends, I thought. I could infiltrate the clique! At one point, Lynn’s friend Karen put her arm around me. I was awkward but tried to go with it. It was a great day.
Other than Lynn, I haven’t seen any of them since.
Around that same time, Lynn was the friend-to-be I invited to join me for my first wedding dress fitting. Callie and my mom had flown in from New York for the shopping, but I was on my own for this appointment. My aunt was supposed to come, but a last-minute doctor’s appointment forced her to cancel. Even though I knew it was a big step for our fledgling friendship, I was desperate.
“Are you doing anything Saturday?” I asked Lynn at work one day. “I have to go try on my wedding dress and would love your opinion. Do you want to come?” Bridal-related activities are usually reserved for VIPs, so I knew it was a monumental request.
“Just me?” she asked. The look on her face reminded me of the male lead in a romantic comedy when the girl says “I love you” too soon. It was a startling combination of fear and confusion and whoa-slow-down-there-lady. “Um, I’m not sure. I might have plans.”
I tried to backpedal. “What? Oh no, never mind actually. I was just thinking, but actually I, well, I’ll let you know. I probably won’t need you.” It was a poor exit strategy but Lynn took it.
It’s possible that I read more into my coworker’s reaction than was actually there, but I’d already psyched myself out. I didn’t mention it again and a few days later I went to my fitting. Alone. But not before having a minor breakdown on the phone with my mom, devastated that I had no companion to tell me how blushing bride-like I looked.
All of this makes me realize one thing: I do not miss dating. Matt and I met freshman year of college. He went from friend-with-benefits to boyfriend to husband. My experience with all this courting and should-I-call-the-next-day is limited, and the thought of diving back in—even if only platonically—is seriously daunting.
My friend Blythe moved from New York to Portland six months ago with her boyfriend. She’s funny and outgoing and I figured she’d probably found her Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha already, so I shot her an email seeking advice. “Here in Portland, I have two friends, Eve and Julia,” she told me. “Eve is dating my boyfriend’s business partner. She’s great, although I find myself thinking that she’s not very much like me and if we didn’t have the common experience of following boys we love to a place we have little interest in being, we might not have become friends. She’s a finance geek. She’s quiet and thoughtful. I adore her—but in other circumstances, I don’t think we’d have connected. My other friend, Julia, is married to another of Max’s friends. She’s fun, lively, adventurous, and a Republican. When I was talking about Rosh Hashanah, she said, ‘Who?’ Right now, with work and all, these two seem to be enough for me. I would love to find some other girls to become friends with but I don’t even know where to look. My yoga studio is filled with women, but how do you strike up a conversation? In the locker room when you’re naked? I’m sarcastic and facetious. It’s hard to find those people on first encounter. I can be nice, but I don’t want nice friends. I want funny, gregarious, sarcastic, and smart friends.”
It’s so nice to hear you’re not alone.
Journalist Valerie Frankel wrote in Self magazine about the types of friends a woman needs to be happy. “Psychologists have long described four major types of friendships,” she wrote. “1) The acquaintance, someone you’d chat with on the street or at a local café, who gives you a sense of belonging; 2) the casual friend, a ‘grab lunch’ pal who often serves a specific purpose, such as a tennis or running partner; 3) the close buddy, an intimate, trustworthy comrade you can say anything to; and 4) the lifer, who’s as deep and forever as family.” Frankel’s research found that women should have 3 to 5 lifers, 5 to 12 close friends
, 10 to 50 casuals, and 10 to 100 acquaintances. I’m searching for someone who would fall in the close-friend category. If she became a lifer I wouldn’t object, but I imagine the differentiating factor from one to the other is time. No one I meet next week is going to measure up to someone I’ve known since fifth grade. But I’m pretty chatty. I could get to the “say anything to” level pretty quickly. I do have close friends, it’s just that they live in New York City, D.C., San Francisco, and Boston. I need someone who lives across the street rather than across the country.
I’ve been in Chicago for more than two years. Obviously, sitting around waiting for friends to emerge naturally isn’t working. It’s time to turn this mission up a notch. I’m looking for a Kate to my Allie. Six to my Blossom. Blair to my Serena. No one’s knocking down my door. If I want a new best friend, I’m going to have to go get one.
I could go the old-school route and take out a want ad. Craigslist perhaps:
“Married white female seeks best friend forever for last-minute brunches, TV-watching playdates, and general girl talk. An East Coast transplant newly settled in the Midwest, I work as a web producer by day though my first love is writing. I run and do yoga. I’m addicted to television, be it critically acclaimed (Friday Night Lights) or juvenile (everything on ABC Family, anyone?). I’m an avid reader with a soft spot for book clubs. I vote Democrat and drink too much Diet Coke. I grew up in a New York City suburb though I went to a private high school in the Bronx. At 27, I’m too old to stay out drinking until 3 A.M., but too young to start a family and move to the suburbs. Truth be told, I hope never to leave the city. In high school and college I had tons of close friends, but now it’s not so easy. Research says female friendships are most at risk between ages 25 and 40, the career-building, child-rearing years. I’m looking for someone, locally, to stick it out with me until the big 4–0, so we don’t find ourselves in fifteen years with no friends to rely on.”
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