MWF Seeking BFF (4 page)

Try hard much? I am going to scare this girl off. I know it.

She writes back, two days later, that she’s sorry I couldn’t come but “to be honest there were already two Rachels involved
.” I’m pretty anti-emoticon, but I look past it. This is no time to be picky, and I’m on the losing side of that battle anyway. We make a plan to see each other at book club.

And now, only fifty-one more dates to go. I’ve got a city full of women to scour.

At yoga class, I make my first attempt at friend-flirting.

I’m two deep breaths into side angle pose when the instructor tells someone named Carrie to drop her shoulders away from her ears. In an attempt to remain Zen, I tune her out. She repeats herself. Twice. When I glance to the middle of the room, I see my teacher is staring at me. Clearly I haven’t made much of an impression on this yoga community. I correct her, release my shoulders, and continue to twist my chest toward the ceiling as instructed.

As I roll up my mat after class, the girl who had been chaturanga-ing next to me introduces herself. “I’m Zoe. What’s your name again?” Someone’s trying to pick me up! I get ready to woo her in return.

“Rachel.”

“Are you Jewish?” My name and my curls usually give this away.

“Um, yeah.”

“Cool. Me too. Shalom!” And with that, before I have a chance to pick my jaw up off the floor, Zoe wanders off.

Did she really delve into religion before we’d even exchanged last names? If that was her pickup line, Zoe might be worse at this than I am.

Before this girl-dating year started, another fellow yogi showed more promise. I’d been checking her out for a few weeks because she looked about one nose job away from someone I’d gone to summer camp with. Eventually, sleuth that I am, I reviewed the sign-in sheet. Sure enough, it was Sloane. I approached her before class and introduced myself. She stared at me blankly. “We went to Tripp Lake together? You were on my team when I was the captain of color war?” Nothing. I was shocked. Camp was where I thrived—my coolness peaked at age 16—and I’ve always been delusional enough to believe that anyone who was there in the nineties would remember me. After some prodding and mentioning the girls she was friends with (she was an age group below me, and I have a weirdly good memory) I got an “Oh, yeah …” that was clearly out of pity. But I’m not too good for pity. Later, we chatted about camp, her job as an inner-city kindergarten teacher, and our mutual experience as East Coast transplants. We talked for so long that the studio closed and we had to move outside to the parking lot. We even exchanged phone numbers.

At home I looked up Sloane on Facebook. Nothing. More than five hundred million users and she was nowhere to be found. Perfect. Still, I figured a few more post-class chats and we’d be in prime position to transition to actual friends.

Well, she wasn’t there the next few weeks. When Sloane finally showed up, she looked right through me. We passed on the stairway and as I started to say hi, she didn’t even make eye contact. Not a hint of recognition. What’s wrong with this girl? She’s like my grandma with Alzheimer’s (if without the slurred speech). Perhaps I should greet her the same way I do
Grandma Betty, shouting exactly how we’re connected every time we come in contact. Since this was all pre-friend-dating, I was too shy to push the issue. Now I’m taking a proactive approach. She’s been added to the little black book.

I can’t look at another female without assessing her BFF prospects. The girl at Bloomingdale’s Home who told the saleswoman that she plans to return everything on her registry for cash, but that she has to register for plenty of different price points for the Midwesterners who won’t write her a check? Definite possibility. Same goes for the clerk behind the register who I met while shopping with Matt. She was the perfect mix of friendly and sarcastic—we shared great banter about the tragedy of Chicago weather making it tough for girls to dress up as slutty nurses and schoolteachers on Halloween. I thought we could have something special. I returned to her store three times, ready to chat her up and perhaps schedule drinks, and she was never again behind the register.

She’s the one that got away.

I’m still not sure how it came to this. When I was a kid, I had friends within days of being somewhere new. Two years in Chicago and I’m still floundering in a sea of best friend prospects. My 57-year-old mother, on the other hand, has lived here for three months and already has a pal with whom she’s planning to go on cruises. (It’s unclear if said friend has been informed of these plans.) Born thirty years apart to the day, my mom and I have found ourselves on parallel journeys. Both in the beginnings of a new life stage—Rachel, marriage; Harriet, widowhood—in a new city, having left behind our closest friends to be with the people we love. The person I love is Matt. The person she loves is me.

I am, of course, thrilled that my mother is having an easy
time making new friends. She’s never been a burden to me, but at first I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt when I declined her offers to take Matt and me to dinner when we had other plans. Her very best friend in the world is her older sister who lives only blocks away (“I want to live walking distance from you and Gail,” she told me when she was looking for an apartment), but I think it’s healthy for Mom to have a social life independent of family. She does have some friends of her own—she grew up in Hyde Park and her two oldest pals live in Chicago—but if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that when it comes to friends, more is more.

My father died when he was only 58, so I’m intent on having my mother around for a long time. A large network of friends, it turns out, is a powerful deterrent against an early demise—even more so than close family ties. The evidence is overwhelming. Most notable is a 2010 study that found that social integration improves a person’s odds of survival by 50 percent. Researchers found that having low levels of connection is comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic, more harmful than not exercising and twice as harmful as obesity. Another study, this one of Australians aged 70 or older, found that participants with a large circle of friends were 22 percent more likely to survive the next ten years than those with fewer friends. Having a spouse, close relatives, or even lots of loving children, had no impact on survival. I figure the more friends my mom makes now, the more she’ll have when she’s 70. The more friends she has when she’s 70, the more likely she is to live to 80. On top of that, widowhood doesn’t even put her at a disadvantage (although, who knows, she could be remarried by then—I’ve heard rumblings of JDate). The correlation between friends
and survival was there even in people who’d lost spouses or family members.

The more research I find, the more it feels as if it was done specifically for my mother’s benefit. Breast cancer runs in my family—my maternal grandmother and aunt are both survivors. So when I come across a study of women with breast cancer that found that those who had ten or more close friends pre-diagnosis were four times more likely to survive than women with “low levels of social integration,” I take note. (Not coincidentally, my aunt and grandmother have always had tons of friends.) Again, being married had no impact on survival. My mom, so far, has been cancer-free. Still, this study makes me want to round up the neighbors and drag them to her apartment until she’s weaving friendship bracelets with ten other middle-aged women. You can’t be too careful.

My mother’s mother, long after beating the breast cancer, developed dementia and eventually full-blown Alzheimer’s. Again using the “let’s show why Harriet Bertsche needs tons of friends” model, Harvard researchers studied the effect of large social networks on brain health as we age. Surprise! “Social integration delays memory loss in elderly Americans.” This, too, holds up against my anecdotal evidence. My grandmother didn’t start to really lose it until she was about 85, while the average age of diagnosis is around 80.

Maybe my BFF search is selfish. Perhaps I should be going on mother-daughter double-dates. I can just picture it. As if writing almost-strangers and asking them out isn’t bizarre enough, imagine being on the receiving end of an email that says “I’d love to get together sometime. Oh, and can you bring your mom? Mine needs someone to play with.”

But like I said, I’m the one struggling, not my mother. When I first realized how much I missed having a best friend nearby, I was concerned for my emotional welfare. Now I know my physical health could benefit from some face-to-face friend-lovin’, too. It’s not just about living until I’m ancient. Studies show that having more friends will help me sleep, stave off colds, improve my immune system, and lower my blood pressure and cholesterol. Researchers haven’t yet uncovered exactly why friendships influence physical health so strongly, but I can surmise some logical explanations. My friends are the people I vent to when my stress reaches insomnia-inducing levels, and I’d rather do it over drinks than over the phone. Talking through my issues helps reduce that stress. Less stress means better sleep, better immune system, lower blood pressure and cholesterol.

More friends also means more people to convince you to quit smoking, get that weird mole checked out, put down the ice cream, and drag yourself out of bed before the bummer of a breakup turns into full-fledged depression.

The Australian researchers make another convincing point: “Friends can have effects on depression, self-efficacy, self-esteem, coping and morale, or a sense of personal control, possibly through social engagement by reinforcing social roles or because interactions with friends stem from choice or selectivity.” Blood might be thicker than water, but friends are people we’ve chosen. That doesn’t explain the spouse thing, as these days most of us are picking our own husbands, but it speaks to why having children and relatives didn’t really help the old Australians make it through the decade. Maybe they didn’t want them there in the first place.

FRIEND-DATE 2.
Sally moved here from Manhattan a few months ago to be with her boyfriend. She’s a college friend
of my high school classmate and only knows one other girl in Chicago. Considering our how-we-got-here stories are exactly alike, I’m confident the date will be a slam dunk. We met a few times back in New York and for our girl-date we try out a restaurant in Chicago’s Greek Town. She’s a sweetheart, if perhaps a little flighty, though I don’t feel the you-could-be-the-one spark that I did with Hannah. Our conversation never takes off after the obligatory “Where are you from? What does your boyfriend do?” chatter. Still, when Sally invites me out to dinner the following Saturday, I gladly accept. Matt is in Vegas on a boys’ trip with his high school buddies and I figure this search means giving every potential BFF a fighting chance.

“It’s going to be you, me, Chris, and his sister,” Sally says.

“Sounds good.” Agreeable is always a good trait in a friend.

Sally and Chris pick me up at home and we drive to his sister’s apartment. It’s a small place with a carpet made of toys. I watch her 2-year-old son play with a plastic baseball bat while Chris and his brother-in-law recount the joys of going shooting.

I wait until we’re alone to corner Sally.

“When they say shooting …”

“Yeah?”

“They’re talking about actual guns?” I ask.

“Oh, sure. The range is fun!”

Suffice it to say, I feel a little out of my element.

FRIEND-DATES 3 AND 4.
The next two weeks bring drinks with Lauren, who did my makeup at my wedding, and Heidi, another former camper. Lauren couldn’t be nicer, which in this case seems to be the kiss of death. The conversation is forced, the silences awkward, and neither of us makes any false promises to call the other when we part. As for Heidi, we ran into
each other last year on a flight to LaGuardia and I had been meaning to write her an email ever since.

Two days before our scheduled girl-date, she emails to tell me she invited Michelle, her own BFF (who also went to our camp) along.

Sitting across from me, Heidi and Michelle look like they could be sisters. Both are in jeans and fitted cashmere sweaters with their shiny hair blow-dried stick straight. It’s that same flat-ironed look that made me insecure about my curls for the first nineteen years of my life.

I’m a bit off my game during dinner—it was a rough day at work—but that can’t be entirely to blame for our lack of connection.

“Who do you guys still keep in touch with from camp?” I ask over a bowl of edamame.

“Just Michelle,” Heidi says.

“The girls and I text all day long,” Michelle says. By “the girls” I know she means the same group of five friends she bunked with summer after summer.

“Oh, that’s great.”

“Yeah.”

And then … nothing. Silence. I fiddle with my chopsticks just to have somewhere to direct my attention.

I can tell Heidi and Michelle interpret my interest in making this friendship happen as pure desperation. And it feels like it from my end, too. To fill one long pause, I find myself asking Michelle, “Soooo, what TV do you watch?”