MWF Seeking BFF (10 page)

That’s all great, and makes good sense. But I’m getting tired of mutual friend setups. They may help widen networks, but they come with baggage. Stories we’ve heard about each other, judgments that have been passed, endless chatter about people and places in common rather than any substantial conversation. My next two dates, Margot and Kim, are totally new. There are no preconceived notions of who the other one is. I met Margot over a year ago. She was the salesgirl on duty when I bought my wedding dress. We clicked and exchanged emails dancing around the topic of getting together, but it never happened. The same was true of Kim. We met in a cooking class, hit it off, exchanged contact information, and then never used it. I’ve sent each of them my “I’m finally following through” email and they seemed genuinely pleased to hear from me. Kim even wrote, “It will be refreshing to hang out with someone new.” Score.

Now I’ve got plans with both and am jumping out of my
seat at the idea of meeting people with a completely clean slate. I’m like a kindergartner at the bus stop on the first day of school. We have no mutual friends in Chicago that we’ll feel obligated to invite along when we want to hang out. Our opinions of each other won’t be tainted by any rumblings from others that Margot’s “nice but ditzy” or Kim’s “awesome but a selfish friend” or Rachel’s “funny but snappy sometimes.” Good or bad, we can find it all out on our own.

Basically I want a BFF to myself. Again, I’m like a kindergartner on the first day of school. I’m not interested in sharing.

I feel like these new potential buddies bring the possibility of a whole new Chicago. After only two months I’m eager, not nervous, to meet virtual strangers. I think they call this progress.

The date with Margot is first. We arrive at Market, the restaurant next to my office, at 6:30. We don’t leave until 10. At dinner, she chats up the waiter until we’ve been blessed with free drinks. I’m in awe. I’m the girl who’s overly polite to wait-staff, lest they hock a loogie in my soup, but I’m no good at, nor have I ever really tried, befriending them. I feel a little like the nerdy kid in school who’s been adopted by the cool girl, even if Margot is three years younger.

Other than the fact that we’re both white, Margot and I couldn’t be more different. She’s a pastor’s daughter from Ohio, the middle child of eight kids. She got engaged at 18, then broke it off before meeting the boyfriend with whom she moved to Chicago. She sells wedding dresses and knows pretty much every style number by heart (I learn this when I test her, as I’ve been trying to identify a dress I tried on that Callie wants for her upcoming wedding. When I show her the iPhone picture of me wearing it, she says, “Oh, Angel Sanchez, style #n3006.” Impressive).

“So, then, do you love
Say Yes to the Dress
?” I figure we
should get to the important stuff first and I’ve been known to waste hours in front of the TLC reality show.

“I can’t watch it. Too close to home,” she says. “But I can tell you it’s absolutely accurate.”

We discuss religion. “I am, I think, an agnostic Jew,” I tell her. (If I’m not even sure of that, does that make me an agnostic agnostic?) “You?”

“I’m … spiritual,” she says. “I definitely believe in God, but I don’t love organized religion.”

Then Margot throws me for a loop. “Oooh, I’ve got a great one,” she says, bouncing in her seat with excitement. “Do you believe in soul mates?”

You mean, like us?

I don’t actually say that. But I want to. Instead I spend a moment formulating my answer, as if the fate of our friendship rests on my response. I decide to quote one of my favorite movies,
Kissing Jessica Stein.
“I don’t believe there’s just one person. I think there are, like, seven.” She agrees. Phew.

Jessica Stein was referring to romantic partners, but her wisdom applies to my search, too. When I tell family and friends about the plan, they always ask: “What if you meet the one at, say, date ten? Will you stop?” The answer is no. There’s room for more than one best friend in my life. I could have, like, seven. Just as I don’t want to put everything on Matt—I need a BFF so I
don’t
dump everything on him—I’m nervous to invest everything into one friend. What if she moves away? I start a new search? A few supertight friendships would be ideal. If I come out of this year with five women I’m comfortable calling just to say hi, I’d consider it a great success.

The dinner with Kim is in some ways a repeat of Margot. We’re back at Market, though at the bar rather than a booth. (I think
the waiters and hostess are beginning to recognize me. They must either think I’m the most popular girl in Chicago or a lesbian seriously looking for The One. Either option is far less embarrassing than the truth: “I’m here auditioning best friends forever!”) Because we have no common social network, Kim and I discuss career goals and relationships. She’s as great as I remember. The day we first met, I called Matt on the way home to brag. “I got a number!” Back then, I’d just gotten engaged, so now I tell her about my wedding and she tells me about the guy who accompanied her to that Seafood 101 class. “Turns out he was a loser,” she says. Okay then.

One of the great differences between Kim and me is that she’s African American. Before my dinner with Margot, almost all the girls I’d met were Jewish, and all of them were white. Not by choice, but I guess when you’re set up by friends who fit that description, often
their
friends fit the same bill. I’m white and Jewish, most of my closest friends are, too, so it’s not a huge shocker that early in my search that’s who I ended up meeting. But ten dates in I need some change. And I’m not particularly proud of the fact that I have only a few black friends, so I’d be thrilled to add some diversity.

I’m not alone in having a limited number of friends outside my race. In 2004, only 15 percent of Americans reported having at least one confidante of another ethnicity (up from 9 percent in 1985). Among college students arriving on campus, race and living proximity are the two strongest indicators of who your friends will be. I’m not out of the ordinary in my same-race friendships, but in this case, I’d like to be the unusual one. That statistic isn’t very encouraging. I’m not going to befriend someone I wouldn’t otherwise, solely based on skin color. But would I be happy if one of my best friends ended up being black? Or, just not white? Yes.

Kim has a friend in town from college so when he arrives, I take my cue to leave. I don’t want them to have to catch up while simultaneously babysitting a new pal. And I’m heading out of town this weekend, so I’ve still got to pack.

As I head to my car, I think about the last two girl-dates and that old adage, “don’t talk about politics or religion around the dinner table.” It’s oft-given first-date advice, but science has proven it invalid. A recent study, which looked at how happiness correlated with conversation topic, found that the happiest people in the experiment engaged in one-third as much small talk and twice as many substantive conversations. I certainly found that to be true with my last two dates, though it’s important to acknowledge that they shared my politics, if not my religion. Had we fallen on opposites sides of the Sarah Palin fence, I could be telling a whole different story.

I guess it’s a risk-reward thing. When you go on a friend-date with someone completely disconnected from your life—where there’s no triadic closure—there’s a bigger risk that the date could be a bust. There’s no third party saying “You two will make a good fit.” No one’s vouching for her sanity. But what you stand to gain might be greater than what you can get from a setup: Instead of widening an existing social network, you could be creating an entirely new one. Instead of spending the first half hour playing the name game, you could have an entire evening of substantive conversation. Both types of friends have merit, of course. There’s no saying that a friend of a friend can’t be The One. But my dinners with Margot and Kim were decidedly different than with Hannah and Hilary and Jen-Alison. Still, they’re all on the follow-up sheet.

A few days later, I’m ditching cold Chicago and heading to Miami for a friend’s wedding. Emily was one of my best friends
in high school. Back then, we were the only two of our crowd who lived in Westchester, a suburb of New York City, rather than in the city itself. We drove to school together every morning, had “
Dawson’s Creek
Parties” on Tuesday nights, and showed up at a moment’s notice if anything went wrong. She was the one by my side the night my high school boyfriend broke up with me, which, at the time, I believed was the single biggest tragedy to ever befall my existence. She still lives in New York City, of course, and hangs out with plenty of friends from high school. Callie will be there with her fiancé, Nate, as will my close friend Jill.

Matt had to cancel on the trip because he got called to Cleveland at the last minute for work, so I’m anxious to use this weekend as old-friend catch-up time. One of the side effects of spending my life trying to make new friends is that I miss my old ones even more. It’s hard to insert someone new into your life history, so no matter how close Margot or Kim and I become, they’ll never have known me when I was 14.

I’ve already asked Callie if Nate is going to mind my constant presence.

“Nate? No, he’s used to it when we see each other,” Callie says. Love that guy.

It turns out poor Emily chose the coldest, rainiest weekend Miami has ever seen. There was no need to pack my bathing suit. Instead of the pool, I spend all day Saturday at The Cheesecake Factory.

Over Thai chicken and a Diet Coke, I tell Callie and Jill about the search. “It’s good. I’ve met a lot of girls with potential,” I say. “I don’t have a new best friend, or even a new good friend, but I could eventually. It’s hard because I’m not the most patient person in the world, and apparently making friends takes time. And work.”

“This is why I’m never leaving New York,” Callie says. “I’ll deal with new friends once everyone moves away and leaves me.” She says this because Jill might relocate to be with her boyfriend, who lives in Pennsylvania, but there’s really no need to worry. Callie grew up in Manhattan and left only for college. She has more friends in New York than I can count. She’s also a best-friend magnet. I’ve always said she’ll have trouble picking a wedding party because she’s one of those people who has a million friends, each of whom considers her their BFF. She’s really good at talking on the phone, too, which makes it easy for her to stay close with many people at a time. (Mental note: Work on phone skills.) So, no, she’ll never find herself on a friend search in New York.

Throughout the weekend, there are casual references to Callie’s birthday party, or Jill’s new apartment, or that night at that bar where that crazy thing happened.

“What crazy thing?” I ask.

“Oh, it wasn’t even that funny,” Callie says. “It was just that … It’s a stupid long story, never mind.”

Instead of taking comfort in my friends, I feel left out. I’m frustrated with myself for not appreciating the time we have together. I know I’m being childish, but it’s hard not to notice every little thing I’m missing.

“I swear, you’re really not missing anything,” Callie says while we’re watching MTV in the hotel Sunday morning. “I don’t see everyone as much as you think. I’m in Brooklyn, they’re in Manhattan. Jill’s in Pennsylvania most weekends. Emily’s busy with school. I promise.” Well, now I just feel sillier, because I’m an adult and my best friend is sitting here promising me she doesn’t see her other friends that often. As if it would be cheating. There’s something very wrong with this.

“No, obviously you should see people,” I say. “It’s not that,
I just wish I was there sometimes.” Not having Matt here is making it harder for me to not get jealous. He usually keeps me in check when the crazy-wheels start spinning.

This is the same thing that happened when Chloe was in town. It seems my moments of friendship insecurity are strongest, strangely enough, when I’m actually with my best friends. Sitting with everyone in Miami, talking about the wild nights I’ve not been around for, that’s when it hits me. Friend envy. Or, as I like to call it, frenvy.

In their book
The Lonely American
, psychologists Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz discuss this very feeling. “Seeing the love between others can make someone feel left out, even if he knows that the others love him as well,” they write. “No one has to
be
left out to
feel
left out; a person simply has to believe that the bonds between others are more alive or intense or intimate than their connection with him.”

Jealousy in friendships is usually studied in terms of one friend being envious of the other’s success. She met a great guy, lost five pounds, or landed a great promotion and you smile on the outside but secretly wish it was you. Psychologists say this kind of behavior is what turns a friendship toxic.

But that’s not the jealousy I’m dealing with when it comes to my specific breed of frenvy. I want my friends to have success, I just want to be there to share in the celebration.

I’m not living in New York, by my own choosing, so I. Must. Stop. Acting. Insane. I tell Callie not to worry about me and we turn our attention to the matter at hand.
MTV Teen Cribs.

Heading back to Chicago, my plane is delayed three hours. I sit at the gate, and, like a PI in a detective movie, hold my
Marie Claire
just below eye level while secretly scoping out my fellow passengers. Is my new BFF here? Could I spot her even if she was? How would I approach her? Bitching about
the airline is always a good start, and the opportunity arises when the gate agent announces our flight has been moved to an entirely different terminal. There’s a collective groan as a mass of people gather their bags and start streaming down the corridor. We look like the Bitter Parade.

“What gate did he say?” A girl who looks about my age is talking to me.

“I think E Six? I figure if we follow the crowd we’ll end up in the right place.” This is where I would usually stop talking, look down, and pick up the pace so we aren’t awkwardly walking next to each other.