When I entered the stark studio there were about ten women circled around Vanessa. She was giving the lowdown on the space and why she started the group—presumably to find fellow food-lovers, but also as a résumé builder—and I was overcome with jitters. Whenever I feel like I’ve started to conquer this quest, my inner wallflower comes out. Meeting someone with whom I’d already emailed was one thing, but I was starting at square one with these ladies. I couldn’t fall back on a witty essay or a mutual friend. Hovering outside the circle, I was momentarily paralyzed. Don’t let anyone tell you meeting new people is like riding a bike. It doesn’t come flooding back. Introductions are more of a use-it-or-lose-it skill. A muscle to be exercised, not a reflex to rely on. Should I finagle my way into the circle or hang back and take it all in? Ultimately I went the name-tag route, sneaking through the crowd to sign in and get my sticky identification. Hello, my name is Rachel.
As the circle broke off into smaller conversations, I stood aside, trying to purposefully gaze around the room. The pointed stare is my classic I’m-standing-by-myself-but-I’m-fine-with-it move. I like to think it says “I’m not alone because no one will talk to me, I’m just really fascinated with this crown molding.”
Eventually another seemingly solo girl settled in next to me, looking equally uncomfortable.
“Did you come alone, too?” I asked her.
“Yeah.” Thin, tall, blond, and wearing heels, Erica struck me as exactly the type of girl who’d have an inseparable clique of her own and wouldn’t need a meetup group to make friends. What was she doing here?
“Are you a big cook?”
“I used to have potlucks with some coworkers, but a few of them moved away and the dinners kind of petered out, so I thought I’d try this.”
Erica was pleasant enough. She’s from Wisconsin, works in PR, and lives in an apartment she can’t stand in Uptown. “I’ve moved every year since I came to Chicago five years ago,” she told me. “This is the worst apartment yet.”
As we talked, another two girls wandered in our direction.
“We came here together but swore we wouldn’t only talk to each other,” a girl in a long flowy black skirt and a gray cleavage-y T-shirt said. “We thought we’d introduce ourselves.”
Karen, in the skirt, and Abby, wearing jeans, sneakers, and one of those extra-thin cozy American Apparel T-shirts, recently moved to Chicago. They both graduated from the University of Indiana last year. Abby was looking for a job in real estate, while Karen was biding her time nannying for her niece before moving to Japan to teach English. When we were finally called over to the cooking demo the four of us took the last row, like high schoolers clamoring for the back of the bus. I sat next to Abby, and we chatted and laughed throughout the presentation—mainly about how it was becoming apparent we weren’t going to do any cooking ourselves. Or eating, for that matter.
“Maybe we could swipe that entire pot of gnocchi,” Abby suggested.
“It smells delicious, and I’m hungry enough I might eat my own arm,” I said. “How can a cooking event scheduled from six to eight not have food? I’m so confused.”
“Also confusing? The mime. And creepy.”
A fine point. The Kenmore Studio mascot is named Kenny Moore. He’s a mime, painted face and all, and between demos he juggled milk cartons and balanced a chair on his nose. He’s a strange choice for a cooking space. If it were up to me, no member of the clown species would be allowed in my kitchen—face paint away from the food, please. But Kenny was a great conversation topic, if simply for his sheer bizarreness.
At the end of the night, as the Chicks got ready to leave, I knew I had to ask Abby for her contact info. We had great banter, after all, and if laughter really is the best friendship detector, we had serious potential. But should I just casually say, “Hey, what’s your number?” Would that sound desperate? In the time it took me to gather these thoughts, Abby and Karen had already started heading for the door.
If I went home without even trying, I knew I’d kick myself. Not to mention the fact that cheerleader Matt wouldn’t let me hear the end of it. “You gotta do it, babe!” I could hear him in my ear.
My mom had been pushing the business card approach for some time. If I offer mine, the natural reaction would be for people to reciprocate. Or so goes her argument.
I caught up with the college buddies. “I’m just going to give you guys my card, because …” There was no natural way to finish the sentence. Because I think you’re supercool? Because I think you could be my BFF? Because I really really want you to call me?
“Um, okay …” Karen looked confused, as if this was her first business card offering. Considering her only job since college was working as a nanny, it might well have been. But then—
“We’re going to grab a bite, do you want to come?”
How easy was that? “I’d love to,” I said.
And we all held hands and skipped off into the sunset.
Or, Karen invited Erica, who declined, and the three of us found a nearby Thai restaurant and inhaled plates of Pad See Ew over talk of college days and foreign travels and out-of-context silent performers. There was a lot of laughter.
“Call us!” Karen yelled as I got into the cab. This time I’d been sure to get their numbers. “We go out all the time—we’re so much fun!”
FRIEND-DATE 26. It took a couple of months for me to contact them but tonight I’m finally meeting Abby for our long-overdue date. Karen has family in town, but considering she’s moving in September, I’m more interested in her friend. Coldhearted, but true. I have to be practical.
Our sushi dinner is delicious, but the stellar chemistry from our cooking escapade has simmered. I can’t tell if it’s due to the lack of a mime to mock or because Karen isn’t here or what. Certainly too much time has passed. The momentum from the meetup has fizzled, so it feels as if we’re starting all over again. Further proof that I need to follow up on promising dates right away. Our age—or life-stage—difference is another culprit. It’s the same story of my date with Rebecca the intern some months ago. (Maybe I should introduce them?) Abby has just graduated college. She still uses “party” as a verb. When she hears I’m 28, six years her senior, she says “But you don’t seem old,” which makes me want to pop in a hearing aid and show her my dentures.
“They should make a Match.com, but for friends.”
About 50 percent of the people I’ve told about my search have pitched me this idea. The good news for me, less so for their entrepreneurial spirit, is that something similar already exists. GirlFriendCircles.com is a website for women looking to expand their friendship base. Before signing up—this would be my first pay-for-play in the friendship world and buying BFFs still seems iffy—I get on the phone with Shasta Nelson, the company’s founder and CEO.
Nelson came up with the concept for GirlFriendCircles while she was working as a life coach in San Francisco. “I had three clients who hired me for very different reasons, but when it came down to it, what they were all lacking was people nearby to support them,” she says. “They could go online to find jobs and romance and homes, but when I tried to find something to help them fill the friendship void there was no resource.” So Nelson created one herself: an online community that brings women together offline. The presentation is a bit touchy-feely for me—the website has a lot of pink, I generally hate the word “girlfriend” when it doesn’t refer to a romantic relationship, and the “Introducing women. Inspiring friendship” slogan reminds me of Jack Handy—but the concept makes sense. Once you sign up, you get access to calendars of local events, classifieds, profiles of all members and invitations to ConnectingCircles. This last option is the most popular. ConnectingCircles are gatherings of about six women at a restaurant or coffee shop within twenty miles of your home. It’s the easiest way to meet new people since the event is set up for you.
“All you have to do is show up,” Nelson says. “The average member attends three ConnectingCirc
les. That’s about how long it takes to find the right match.”
Nelson, who has an infectious passion for self-help and uses life-coach jargon like “we need to give each other permission to talk about this,” is a big proponent of group friendships. “It’s easier to find friends in groups because you don’t have to have the ‘we didn’t click’ conversation,” she says. “And the others don’t have to be just like you for it to be incredibly meaningful. If they weren’t part of the same group do you think Miranda and Charlotte would have been friends?”
But what about the payment aspect? Am I really such a social leper that I need to purchase my relationships? “People often say ‘I can’t believe you expect me to pay for friends, this is so low. Friendship should be free,’ ” Nelson tells me. “My response to that is, ‘If you don’t want to pay, then don’t. If you can do it without my service, go for it.’ But my question, if I were life-coaching them, would be, ‘Then why don’t you have what you’re looking for already? Obviously you were on my site, so you have a need.’ You can exercise for free and if you can go jogging, do it. But some of us need to belong to a gym.”
I have access to free treadmills both at work and in my apartment building, and I still pay a health club for the classes and nicer machines. I get it.
“People who invest in something value it more, and I really want to keep a high quality of women on the site. I don’t want to open it to anyone who’s in the mood one night to start a profile and then not have active members. Who cares if there are ten thousand profiles if only seven are really on board?”
Fair enough. I assure Nelson I’ll sign up.
Afterward, something she said sticks with me as I think back on my year thus far: “I’ve found that most of us need to meet with somebody twice a month for three months before we will consider them a friend.”
I love this. If there’s anything I wanted when launching my search, it was a friending formula. In retrospect, I think I’ve adhered to this schedule pretty well with the top prospects. I see Hannah and Jillian once a month at book club and we usually have a separate one-on-one (or one-on-one-on-twins) date during that thirty-day period. Margot and I have lunch fairly often, usually twice a month. Hilary is one of those either-three-times-a-week-or-once-in-two-months friends. A second batch of ladies—Mia, Amanda, Lacey, Brynn, Jackie, Ellen—haven’t necessarily met Nelson’s quota, but they’re gaining ground. A meet-and-greet dinner party is already in the works.
Then there’s Kim. After our myeloma connection and the invitation to meet her dad, I thought we were getting serious. And then, nothing. Three of my emails went unreturned, including one about her father’s visit.
“Maybe something happened with her dad and she doesn’t have time for new friends,” my mom says. “Or maybe your association with myeloma was too much for her.”
Maybe, but it seems far-fetched considering her last email. Everything was going so well.
“Sometimes guys just disappear into thin air,” Sara tells me on the phone one night. “Maybe with friends it’s the same.”
I want there to be a reason: Is it her dad? Did she read my blog and get turned off? Did she get overexcited at the Lincoln Park Zoo sea otters and hit her head on the glass, get a concussion, and suffer a horrible case of amnesia? As much as I want to create excuses for her, to give our budding friendship the benefit of the doubt, there’s only one explanation that makes any sense: She’s just not that into me.
I’ve been dumped. For a second time.
Matt and I are spending the Fourth of July weekend at his mother’s house in Cape Cod. En route to an annual barbecue, I notice I’m wearing a red jacket, white shorts, and a blue tank top. What can I say? I’m proud to be an American.
“Is that what you wear on your friend dates?” Zach, a childhood friend of Matt’s, gets a real kick out of himself.
“Every time.”
Zach’s sister-in-law Colby and her sister Carly sit beside us at the kids’ table (“kids” being a generous term for the 20- and 30-somethings at this multigenerational affair). “Do the girls you go out with know about your search?” Colby asks.
“Do they think it’s so weird?” echoes Carly.
These are the questions people ask most when I tell them about my quest. I know Matt’s family friends are just curious—and excited—about this project, but this weekend the inquiries feel more like an onslaught. I answer the first as I always do: “They definitely know I’m looking for new friends. I don’t think they know I’m going on fifty-two dates …”
But as I respond to Carly’s question, I realize my answer has changed. At the beginning, when people asked if my potential BFFs think I’m strange, I’d say, “I don’t know. I hope not.” But with twenty-six under my belt, I’m quite confident in my new response.
“No, they really don’t,” I tell her. “I thought they would. I was nervous everyone would think I was either really pathetic or really annoying, but so far they’re mostly flattered. People want friends, they’re just embarrassed to ask for them.”
Carly gives me the crazy eyes. She’s not convinced.
My coworker Kari once told me that after she graduated college, whenever she and her now-husband Tony would go to dinner, he’d spot potential friend prospects and encourage her to introduce herself.
“I’m not just going to walk up to them and say ‘Hi, I’m Kari,’ ” she’d say. “That’s so weird.”
“But if someone had introduced herself to me? I would have been so excited,” she told me, eight years later.
Most women I’ve met are similar. We all think we’re living in a world of grouches, so we’re too self-conscious to be the overtly friendly one. A 2009 survey found that 75 percent of adults say Americans are becoming ruder and less civilized. I was part of that three-quarters of the population when I moved to Chicago. I thought overtures of friendship would be received with suspicion rather than appreciation, so I hung back for fear of being the weirdo. Now I think I was wrong. It’s not that people are less civilized, it’s just that we think they are, and so we act accordingly. We don’t reach out unsolicited for fear of being rejected. We don’t talk to new people because we assume they don’t want to be bothered. But as I continue to pursue friendships, I’m constantly surprised at how receptive people are.
Toward the end of the evening, as if just to prove my point, I hear the ping of a text message. It’s from Jillian.
“Hi! I went book-hunting at the thrift store and they had two copies of the British edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Clearly, I got them both, and one is for you. Hope you are enjoying Cape Cod!”
I smile, adrenaline coursing strong at this evidence of real friendship. It’s not the gift, really. It’s that Jillian thought of me. I could hardly be the only person she knows who reads Harry Potter.
Shasta Nelson told me the biggest problem with making friends is that there’s no easy way to talk about it. “We can’t hammer the importance of these relationships when there’s not even a vocabulary in place,” she said. “There are no platonic words for courting or flirting or hitting on a potential friend.”
Right now that would be helpful. I’d have a language to explain the honeymoon phase of this friendship, full of thoughtful gestures and innocent excitement at a simple text message. I’m all giddy, as if the captain of the football team just asked me to the homecoming dance.
FRIEND-DATE 27. When I first started my blog back in March, I figured it would be a solitary endeavor. A means of chronicling my search for a BFF, but certainly not a way of finding her.
I’d learned from coworkers that the way to make your mark in the cybercommunity is to comment on other people’s blogs with links back to your own. As blogger etiquette goes, people whose sites you comment on will do the same for you. It’s the unwritten rule of reciprocation. So I started leaving notes at the end of interesting blogs, and, sure enough, the authors started commenting on my posts in return. Which often lead to email
exchanges, and even the occasional “If only we lived closer!”
I’d read about blogger Meetups and Tweetups, blog carnivals (when a group of bloggers write on the same topic), and becoming IRL (webspeak for “in real life”) friends. Hiding behind a computer screen seemed an illogical friend-making method, but the more blogs I read the clearer it became that the online community was fiercely loyal. When I posted about this surprise discovery one day, other bloggers virtually nodded in agreement in my comment section. One wrote, “Sometimes I feel like my bloggy friends understand me better than my real ones.”
Maybe blogging is the modern-day version of pen pals. We can read each other’s daily posts—entries that range from a mundane to-do list to a biting “here’s who I hate today” rant to a Dear Diary entry of innermost secrets—and suddenly understand a perfect stranger’s thought process. You know each other in isolation, separate from any context that might lend itself to prejudgment. But it’s a slippery slope. Enlisting the blogosphere as a way of connecting is great, but, as I’ve been warned, using it as a replacement for face time can be dangerous. So when a fellow blogger—one whose work I admire—commented that she was local, I asked her out. In real life.
As I wait outside Piece, a pizza place in Wicker Park, I search the street for someone with kinky curls that dominate her face. That’s Maggie’s defining feature according to the tiny profile picture on her blog. All I know about her is what she’s written online. She has three kids. She looks like she’s in her early thirties. She likes to draw and make sarcastic notes in the margins. I especially enjoyed a recent sketch of some El commuters who were playing their music too loud. A personal pet peeve.
When she arrives, Maggie’s hair is in braids. My vision of a curly comrade is shattered.
After half an hour, so too are my dreams of our IRL relationship.
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