MWF Seeking BFF

by Rachel Bertsche

  No matter how little my interest in religion, however, I can’t ignore it as it relates to my current quest. One of the most popular suggestions I hear from people when I mention my best friend search is to join a religious group. A friend of my mother-in-law told me she made all her closest friends when she first moved to Boston by joining a temple. My co-worker Ashley said her Chicago BFFs are the ones she met in Bible study after college graduation. Commenters on my online essay said women’s church groups were their go-to meeting spot.

  Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant once gave a speech in which he discussed the duration of different organizations. “Today, the average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company is forty years,” he said. “There are very few dynasties, and actually very few nations, that are more than three hundred years old. All of the world’s greatest religions share two things in common: They’ve all endured for at least fourteen hundred years and, unlike dynasties and corporations, they’re all based on love and compassion.” Of course, this is only one way to look at religion. Because while, yes, it has been the most enduring uniter in human history, some would argue it’s also been the greatest divider.

  While religion isn’t going anywhere, there are an increasing number of young people who, like me, aren’t so into it. A 2007 survey of Protestants aged 18–30 found that 25 percent of them had dropped out of the church entirely. Another survey found that respondents cite places like bars and Starbucks as better meeting places than church. I’m confident that I’d get to know people if I joined a women’s or young adult group at a nearby temple, but I feel like it would be under false pretenses. I’d be implying that I have certain values that I don’t, which feels a bit sneaky.

  I figure I can feel it out at lunch. Pam’s the managing editor of the JUF News, so she’s probably pretty knowledgeable about the local community.

  When I arrive, Pam is already seated. She has wavy, shoulder-length reddish-brown hair, silver dangly earrings, and is flipping through a self-help book.

  “I’m on a self-improvement kick,” she says immediately, as if to make excuses for the reading material.

  After talk about work and Northwestern (she graduated four years ahead of me), Pam mentions that if I’m really eager to meet new people, the JUF has lots of social events for young Jews in the city.

  “There’s a program called LEADS, where groups in different neighborhoods get together once a week to discuss Jewish issues. Then you all meet at a bar afterward for happy hour.”

  “I’m not really that religious, though. Do you think that would be weird? I wouldn’t have much to discuss in the way of Jewishness.”

  “Oh, that’s fine. Most people are there for the happy hour,” she says. I’m still a bit skeptical—there are plenty of happy hours they could attend without having to do the discussion group first, or pay the sixty dollars, but I’ll probably try it out. If one of the ultimate goals of religion is to bring people together, and my whole year is dedicated to connecting, I have to at least give it a whirl. LEADS doesn’t start until October, so I have some time to get used to the idea.

  Pam’s a real sweetheart. She’s a nurturer, I can tell, and is extremely interested in suggesting the perfect place for me to meet my new best friend, if not so interested in becoming the BFF herself. I think her essay was more an ode to Jessica than it was actually an attempt to find her replacement.

  As my dates continue to rack up, it’s getting increasingly difficult to plan follow-ups less than two weeks out. At the end of our dinner a few weeks ago, Lacey and I sat with our calendars trying to figure out a night for our two couples to try the new pasta place in my neighborhood. We came up empty. It wasn’t just my schedule that was difficult—her girlfriend works for the Cubs and has to attend all of the night games—but it was a good reminder that it’s going to be hard to turn these women into my best friends if they think I’m as hard to make plans with as I thought Hilary was. Part of the problem is that I’m doing all the follow-ups one-on-one. It’s time to make this more efficient. Why not invite a few new friends over for a dinner party? Or take some ladies out for girls’ night drinks? The women who responded to my essay are all looking to meet people, so they’d probably be interested. And I’ve definitely had moments on these dates where I’ve envisioned friend setups. I bet Kaitlin would really like Amanda. Lacey and Ellen would be a great fit. I could be the connector, rather than the connectee.

  The tables are turning.

  CHAPTER 7

  I’m up against the first test of my search’s success. It’s Friday night and Matt is in Boston for the weekend helping his mother move. When all this started, I said I was looking for a friend to call on a weekend when I’m alone and want a partner in crime. Well, it’s the weekend, I’m alone, and I surely need a Thelma to my Louise. I scroll through my mental rolodex of new friends. Hilary. Hannah. Alison. Margot. Kim. Jillian. I get out my phone and dial.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Can I come over tonight? I need someone to hang out with, Matt’s away.”

  My mother is thrilled. She loves nothing more than to eat dinner and watch TV with me. “I have Survivor and Private Practice on the DVR,” she assures me.

  “Awesome. Nothing like raging on a Friday night with mom.” I’m feeling sorry for myself—wallowing in the self-pity of someone who’s been on nearly twenty girl-dates with apparently nothing to show for it—but my mother doesn’t offend easily.

  “Why don’t you call one of your new friends? See what they’re doing?”

  “I just don’t think I’m there yet with any of them.”

  “Hilary?”

  “She’s out of town.”

  “Hannah?”

  “She has so many friends, I’m sure she has plans. We don’t do last-minute calls. And I have lunch plans with Jillian tomorrow, so it would be a bit aggressive to call her tonight, too. I’ve got a million supposed new friends, and still no one to call.” Then it hits me. “I don’t even have their numbers!”

  It’s almost entirely true. Hilary’s number is in my phone, and I could probably track down Hannah’s because she has texted me about book club a few times (I keep forgetting to store her number, so instead I just remember that it’s the only unidentified Boston area code that sends me texts), but that’s it. The communication with my other dates thus far has been by email—we write to set up a dinner, and then again to say “I had a great time” and “we should do it again” and “when are you free?” We haven’t even graduated to texting, so even if I wanted to call them tonight, I couldn’t.

  My mom is shocked. “You don’t have their numbers?”

  “Our relationships are email and Facebook only, so far.” This is largely my fault, of course. If I were bolder I’d track down someone’s number—Ellen maybe, or Jen—and text “Hey, what are you up to?” But I’m still cautious about asking for too much too soon.

  One of my earliest memories of friendship with Callie is when she approached me in our ninth-grade hallway, a month or two into freshman year, and said “I’m going to call you tonight.” And she did. We talked about who-knows-what for hours, and thus began a lifetime of phone calls. If only one of my new friends had made such a pronouncement.

  Even if we were still teenyboppers, that interaction would never happen today. Evenings spent spiraling the phone cord around your wrist while gossiping for hours are so twentieth century. Now communication is in snippets. One hundred forty characters of Tweetiness or abbreviated words via text. My old-school phone call with Callie would today be a text message: “Did u c what Caroline wuz wearing? OMG. Heinous.” According to one study, the majority of teens are more likely to use their cellphones to text than talk, and while 54 percent of teenagers say they text their friends at least once a day, only 33 percent talk to their friends in person that often.

  The research may be about teenagers—and I’m a good decade older than the 12–17 range that entails—but the ways of the future usually start with the kiddies and trickl
e up to the rest of us. The text-only lifestyle has certainly found its way into adult friendships. These days, I only talk on the phone with my out-of-town friends. When the Chicagoans whose numbers I do have pop up on my ringing phone, I immediately wonder what’s wrong.

  John Cacioppo told me face-to-face is better than phone, phone is better than email, email is better than Facebook, and so on. It’s unfortunate that phone calls are a thing of the past, but it’s reality. No matter how close I get with any of my new friends, I think the “what are you doing tonight?” will always start with a text message. Phone calls feel like impositions of the neighborly pop-in variety. I picture my potential friends making dinner or working or watching TV, and I don’t want to be the name on the caller ID that prompts a “why is she calling me?”

  This might be a fundamental flaw in my search. I’m looking for an old-school friendship in a modern technology world. How am I supposed to find a call-on-a-Friday-night pal when I’m hesitant to call anyone, period? Maybe I need to revise my wish list to text-at-the-last-minute friend. Those phone calls with Callie elevated us to BFF status pretty quickly, and texts probably won’t foster that same sense of closeness, but they’re still something. Sure, a phone call comes with give and take, voice and intonation, an opportunity for understanding and empathy, but a good “saw a cute dress in the window of Banana—it’s so you!” text will go a long way. If nothing else, it says, “I’m thinking of you.” Always a nice thing to hear. But first things first, need to get me some digits.

  The next morning I drive the twenty minutes to meet Jillian near her Andersonville apartment for brunch and a pedicure (a date set up by email, of course). First order of business: We exchange phone numbers. And then, over matching fontina quiches …

  “Okay, so I have two presents for you.”

  “Presents? For me?” I probably sound like one of her twins, but I’m in shock. I love presents! (At 28 years old I’d still search the apartment in the weeks leading up to my birthday if Matt didn’t know better and stash all gifts in his office.) I want to throw my arms around her and tell her I love her and that we should be bestest friends forever and ever. And I don’t even know what the gift is.

  “Well, I was in my favorite used-book store, and I saw this and remembered you said you loved Little Women, so I had to get it for you.” She pulls out what looks like a wall calendar, but is actually a book of antique-looking watercolor paper dolls of the March family. Upon inspection, I see that the collection is from 1981, part of a series that includes “Dolls of the ’30s” and “The Antique Dolls Go to a Paper Doll Wedding.” It’s perfect. The book is the type of gift that usually comes from the closest of friends—someone who knows that while you have no real use for paper dolls and no place to keep them, they’ll make you smile. And they buy it for you, just because. Needless to say, I’m girl-crushing something fierce.

  There are very few times in my life that I’ve not known what to say—or haven’t just said the wrong thing anyway—but I’m stumped. All the professions of gratitude that come to mind would probably seem creepy and overly adoring for a friend I’m meeting for only the second time.

  “Thank you,” I say. “This is amazing.”

  “I couldn’t not get it for you. When we saw it I told Paul, I’ve got to buy this for my new friend.”

  She called me her new friend! She told Paul about me! Matt’s mom tells the story of the day he met his best friend of twenty-four years. Five-year-old Matt arrived home from day camp and proudly declared, “I made a new friend. His name is Noah Benjamin.” And that was that.

  Jillian could be my Noah Benjamin.

  “The second gift is really just a loan,” she says. “I ordered this on Amazon.uk.” She hands me the third in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, which isn’t due out in the United States for a few weeks. I hug it tight.

  “I promise to take good care of it,” I tell her. “Is it great?”

  “Yeah, I couldn’t put it down.” There’s something about how well we can relate to each other’s nerdy love affair with books that just makes us work.

  When we first met, I thought the similarities between Jillian and me were a sign we were meant to be. But I’ve been reading up on social connections, and apparently it’s more science than fate at work here. There’s more to my immediate connection with Jillian than just our shared passion for reading. Brothers and coauthors Ori and Rom Brafman, who examine the science behind these magic moments in their book Click: The Magic of Instant Connections, name similarity as one of the five “click accelerators” (the others are proximity, vulnerability, resonance, and a safe place). No matter how trivial and out of our control the likenesses may be—like the simple fact that Jillian and I both have brothers named Alex and fathers named William—they lead to greater likability. That’s why I always remember the girl in grade school who shared my birthday, or why Matt might easily warm up to a fellow Red Sox fan. I put stock into random coincidences, but it turns out I’m just favoring what’s called the “in-group.” Jillian and I are both from the East Coast, lived in New York City after college, have family members with the same names, and adore reading and TV-watching above all other activities. Plus she has twins and I want twins. Take these similarities, and couple them with gifts? This is serious.

  (Of course, my new friend Margot—the home-schooled bridal consultant with seven siblings—is pretty much my opposite when it comes to our backgrounds and I adore her, too, so there is also some validity to “opposites attract.” But when it comes to those I’m immediately drawn to? Let’s just say if I met a curly-haired Diet Coke–toting Friends-quoting bibliophile who had an inappropriate and inexplicable crush on Jeff Probst, I’d whisk her away on a girl-date before she knew what hit her.)

  As if lavishing me with presents isn’t enough, Jillian seems to put the same emphasis on friendship that I do, which is endearing her to me even more. She’s got two kids, a full-time job in Indiana, and yet she still makes time to have brunch or dinner with me.

  “I need adult conversation and some time to myself. Otherwise I’d go crazy,” Jillian says. “But next time you need to meet the boys.” Yes, please.

  One quiche, three sodas, and ten purple-painted toenails later, I head to my car with book and paper dolls in hand, a new number in my phone, and the pitter-patter of friend-love in my heart.

  FRIEND-DATE 20. When I arrive at Gibsons, a classic Chicago steakhouse, I elbow my way to the bar. Though Wendy and I didn’t specify if this would be dinner or just drinks—so many of the setup emails begin with “I’d love to grab a bite or glass of wine sometime” and end with only “Great! Let’s do Wednesday at 7”—this restaurant is expensive enough that I assume we can’t be eating. I drop my gym bag on a barstool and head to the restroom before settling in to wait for my latest potential BFF. On the way back I notice a girl sitting alone, napkin in her lap, with what looks like a chocolate martini. Her back is to me so I can’t see her face. Not that a visual would be that helpful. Wendy and I have only spoken online, and her description of herself as “a brunette on the short side” covers about 90 percent of the girls I know, myself included. Dinner here would be a pretty fancy date, but I figure I better ask. “Are you Wendy?”

  “Hello.”

  It’s a normal greeting, but something about the way she says it—sort of like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada—gives me the creeps.

  I guess we’re eating dinner after all. I grab my stuff from the bar and take the seat across from my new date. Facing Wendy, I can immediately see we’re plenty different. I’m as casual and sporty as she is prim and proper.

  “So, were you nervous about tonight?” she asks matter-of-factly, and I can’t tell from her tone if this means she was anxious herself.

  “No, not at all.” It’s true. I’ve become totally at ease with these friend-dates. In the early days, my response would have been different. There was a nervous excitement when I first met Hannah—Should we hug? What’ll we t
alk about? Will she want to be my best friend forever?—but almost six months in, dates are just part of the routine. I know, look at me all blasé. Me? Nervous? Never! I could friend-date you under the table. I take a note for my mental growth chart: Nerves have left the building.

  Wendy, who found me via LinkedIn.com after reading my online plea, tells me she reads my blog.

  “I really like it. You are funny.”

  “Oh, thanks so much. I try,” I say. “So you moved here from New York, too?”

  “Yes, but let us talk more about you. I want to know: How did you become a writer?”

  “How? Oh, well I went to school for it, and then got a job at a magazine out of college. I don’t know, really. I’ve just always loved writing so when I moved out here I pitched stories and started freelancing. I had to stop for a while when I got my full-time job, so I’m happy to be blogging. It helps me maintain some creativity. What do you do?”

  “I work in accounting. But back to you, tell me about your time in New York.”

  The conversation is teetering on the edge of uncomfortable. At least for me. Wendy is not particularly interested in telling me about herself. You never realize just how important the give and take of a conversation is until it’s missing. This feels more like an interview than a friend-date. And there’s something really distracting about her speech pattern.

  “I loved New York. I obviously miss all my friends there, but my husband was in Philly and we wanted to be together after dating long distance for three years. You moved here to be with your fiancé, right? Tell me about you …”