MWF Seeking BFF

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 there’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.”