MWF Seeking BFF (12 page)

And yet despite—or perhaps because of—this resistance to talking about loneliness, the amount of socially isolated Americans is on the rise. Between 1985 and 2004, the number of confidants Americans reported feeling close to—someone with whom they discussed important matters within the last six months—dropped from three to two. Startlingly, the number of people who reported having no one to talk with about the important stuff tripled in that same time period. In 2004, people who claimed to have zero confidants made up nearly 25 percent of the fifteen hundred respondents to the national General Social Survey, which is conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. We are simultaneously feeling more socially isolated and less willing to talk about it. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

But don’t confuse loneliness with depression. I did, and I was wrong. People often think that if you’re lonely, you must be depressed, or at least socially inept. But loneliness and depression are two very different things. They may have a high frequency of co-occurance—people who are depressed report feeling lonely more often than the nondepressed—but Professor John Cacioppo says they are in many ways complete opposites. While loneliness is a trigger that tells someone she needs to reconnect socially, depression makes her apathetic. Loneliness, like hunger or thirst, evolved as a signal to tell someone when a biological need—in this case the need for social connection—is not being met and to cause her to change behavior. “Loneliness propels us forward,” he told me, “depression holds us back.” So, while someone dealing with a mild case of loneliness might, say, embark on a yearlong quest for a new best friend, if she were depressed she’d stop caring altogether.

I responded to the emails as fast as my little digits could get the words on the screen. Some women had asked me out, others just said, “I feel your pain and I’m in Chitown too,” so I made the first move. Suddenly, getting to date fifty-two didn’t seem all that difficult.

FRIEND-DATE 13.
Originally I had a soft spot for Jodie, the first woman to email me. Her note was enthusiastic but not crazy. She seemed smart, funny, normal. Here’s what I knew: She’s 40-something, has a 13- and a 10-year-old, and moved here from Los Angeles after a divorce. I was intrigued by her explanation of why she moved here: “That in itself offers enough material for your next article,” she wrote. I forwarded her note to my mom with a message of my own: “Don’t try to steal her from me!”

But as the date has grown closer, I’ve started to second-guess
this pairing. What kind of friendship is really possible with a mom of puberty-crazed children? I’m almost embarrassed—how are we going to look, me and the mom? Am I going to have to go to high school volleyball games and dance recitals if this works out? I know, rationally, that it doesn’t matter how we “look,” whatever that even means. It’s not like we want to have kids together. But we’re having lunch next door to my office. What if my coworkers see us? I’ll have to explain why I ditched them. For a stranger. Who’s, like, a grown-up.

This isn’t like the setups, or the reconnections with long-lost acquaintances like Margot or Kim. I have no idea what to expect. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to online dating and it doesn’t help that everyone I tell thinks it’s hilarious that I’m meeting a stranger who has more than a decade on me.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m so hung up on the age and kids thing. Maybe I’m trying to hold on to my youth. Like being best friends with a woman about thirteen years closer to middle age would make
me
seem closer to middle age. Maybe I’m scared it will be further evidence that I’m not a young fun post-grad anymore. While friends with babies seems doable, friends with teenagers just sounds, well, old. It’s a life phase I’m not ready for yet.

Lunch is only an hour, I tell myself. If it’s horrible, you’ll be done in sixty minutes. You are an adult. This is not that big of a deal.

I get to the restaurant first, grab a seat, chug water, and play with my iPhone—my Words with Friends app is a lifesaver—as I wait for Jodie.

I keep one eye on the door, waiting for her entrance. I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting my dates even without a physical description. There’s a universal look of eagerness and confusion when a woman arrives at a blind friend-date and scans
the room for her match. Once you’re both there, you make eye contact for a second, do a half smile and point as if to say “Is it you?” and then laugh at the strangeness of it all.

At 12:35, she walks in. Long brown hair, diamond stud earrings, a Coach purse. She definitely looks 40-something, but a good 40-something.

“Thanks so much for emailing me,” I say after official introductions. “I’m so glad we could do this.”

“I know, it’s so funny, but I had to reach out.”

I dive right in with questions: How did she end up in Chicago? Is she working? Where do her kids go to school? Does she like the city?

“Well my husband—sorry, my ex-husband—got a job offer in Indiana, and asked me to move out there so the kids could still be close. So I was planning to do that.”

“That was nice of you.”

“Yeah, I know that now. And when I realized he was moving in with his twenty-four-year-old girlfriend, I had second thoughts. I didn’t want to be the woman scorned. You know how people talk. Chicago was a nice compromise.”

She isn’t working, though she’s thinking about maybe doing an internship one day. I’m getting the impression that a day job isn’t really necessary for her. Lucky.

Her kids go to a private school I’ve never heard of. Her son, the 13-year-old, is big into soccer while her daughter is a musician.

I tell her my story—at least the part she hasn’t read online. How I got married last August, no kids yet, and have a great job but hope to write full-time one day.

The conversation at this date is, just, polite. There’s no deep connection. If friendships that work are about each coming away with more than we put in, I don’t think Jodie and I have
a real shot. Other than company—which is something—we don’t have much to offer each other.

How can I tell? The early indicator is usually the talk that comes after we share our histories. It’s about recognizing a dialogue versus two monologues. I’m starting to tune in to this simple difference in my dates. Do we have an interchange of ideas, or are we both just telling our own stories?

In her email Jodie mentioned that she belongs to the East Bank Club, a fancypants gym in Chicago that I’ve always wanted to visit. I tell her I’ve heard plenty of stories of members who belong and never work out but go for the food and the dry cleaner. (Both of which cost extra, of course.)

“I’ll take you one day,” she says. Girl-dates, all dates probably, are funny like that, the way we make plans for the future, even if we’re not sure there will be one. But what else was she supposed to say?

At the hour mark I’m getting restless, though it seems like Jodie could chat all day. That’s one nice thing about the people responding to my essay. They also put a high premium on friendship. They’re in the market, too, so this time I don’t feel like the desperate one. We’re both the desperate ones.

I start to bundle up my napkin as if to say “It’s about time I head out” and Jodie gets the message. We pay the check—actually, she treats (this
is
like a date!)—and walk back to my office. I direct her to a street a few blocks down where there are cute stores and we part ways, but not before she says “Let me know if you want me to take you to East Bank!” I thank her, for the offer and for lunch, but make a conscious decision that I won’t reach out again. I feel like a jerk, but if I’m going to do fifty-two of these, I need to focus on the dates with real BFF potential. Jodie was nice, but aside from not feeling the synergy, our schedules are totally conflicting. She’s
a single stay-at-home mom so her weekdays are free while her afternoons and weekends revolve around soccer tournaments and parent-teacher conferences. Evenings and weekends are exactly when I do my socializing. I worry I’m being picky, like suddenly I’m the mean girl casting potential friends aside, but there are only so many hours in the day. It would be impossible to pursue a deep friendship with fifty-two different women. Plus, I’m confident that if I didn’t feel a strong bond, she didn’t either. If she reached out to me again, I’d say yes (how would I even say no? “Sorry, I didn’t think we hit it off”?) but, for now, I think this ship might have sailed.

That Friday, Matt and I meet Margot and her boyfriend, Daniel, for dinner. Earlier in the week I’d broken the news to my husband that he was being called on for his second stop on the BFF tour.

“Friday we’re going to dinner with Margot and her boyfriend, okay?”

“Which one’s Margot again?” I’ve been on thirteen of these dates, with nineteen girls, and the only ones Matt has ever met are Jen and Alison, who he knows from college and their friendship with his ex, and my coworkers. As the list keeps growing, and follow-up dates are now taking up the rest of the week, he’s having increasingly more trouble keeping them straight. (If you are, too, check out the who’s who of friend-dates on
this page
.)

“She’s the wedding dress girl.” I expect Matt to agree to the dinner, but begrudgingly.

“Oh, right. Okay.”

“Maybe you can make a BFF, too.” Though he hasn’t put
up even a hint of a fight, I feel the need to make it sound worthwhile for my husband. Like there’s something in this for him. It’s not like Matt signed up for a friend-quest, but being married to me he’s become an unwitting participant.

“Awesome.” There is his signature sarcasm here.

“Don’t you want to get to know my potential friends?”

“I already said okay. You don’t need to keep selling me.” True. I stop talking.

I’m excited that Matt’s meeting one of my most promising prospects. For the last three months it’s felt like I was leading a double life. Friend-dater by day, wife by night. Or, really, office worker by day, friend-dater by night. Wife when there’s time. But some of the potential friends—Kim, Margot, Hannah, Hilary—have become like characters in our house. Matt’s bad with names—bad as in: He asks me if my cousin’s fiancé is named Jason or Teddy when his actual name is Peter—so they’re often referred to as Cooking Class Girl or Wedding Dress Girl.

On the drive to dinner there’s a lot of “Okay, Margot and who again?”

“Margot and Daniel. Margot and Daniel. Just keep repeating it in your head.”

When we get to the local Vietnamese restaurant Margot chose, they’re already seated.

“You guys picked a great spot,” I tell them. “We love it here.”

“Aren’t you in Vietnam in your Facebook picture?” Margot asks me.

“Me on the elephant? Yeah, we took that trip a few years ago.” My Facebook profile photo, of me riding a baby elephant, is in Laos actually, a three-day stop during the Vietnamese vacation we took after Matt finished the bar exam. This
leads to a riveting discussion of how to pronounce the traditional noodle soup, pho. It’s actually “fuh” not “foe,” which we learned when we stayed in Hanoi and ate pho every morning for breakfast. On the street. In ninety-degree heat. Sitting on plastic baby chairs with our knees at our chins. Here the seating is much nicer but the soup doesn’t hold a candle.

After the waiter takes our order, I tell Matt and Daniel how Margot scored us free drinks on our girl-date. “She totally buddied up with the waiter. I was one hundred percent the dorky friend.”

“I was so worried I got too drunk! I got home and told Daniel that you probably thought I was crazy and would never call again,” she says.

I laugh this off, but kind of love hearing that Margot was as “will she call or won’t she?” as I’d been. I secretly pat myself on the back for following up. Just as I suspected, we’d both been waiting for the other to reach out. My pursue-the-good-dates rule is paying off.

Daniel is a chemistry student at the University of Chicago. He does cancer research, and tells us about some pharmaceuticals he’s investigating that will assuage some of the side effects of chemotherapy.

Just like at my first date with Margot, talk turns to politics and the struggling economy.

“It’s our parents’ fault,” Margot says. “They got us into this mess.”

“Well, that’s not true,” Matt counters. This is when I get nervous. I don’t need any heated battles at my first couple-date. “It’s way more complicated than that.”

“You think? I’m not so sure.”

The discussion continues, and I listen, mostly quietly, nervous that this could escalate. There’s no real disagreement
happening—we all live on the same end of the political spectrum—and even if there were, I know it will be fine. It’s just that tension makes me uncomfortable. I guess this is what they mean when they say not to talk about politics on the first date. Still, Matt’s a lawyer, he likes a good debate, and Margot seems to as well. We’re all adults, I remind myself. (This has become my friend-date mantra. I go into my yogic place and repeat it in my head whenever I get nervous.
We’re all adults. We’re all adults.
It’s funny how much trouble I have remembering.)