MWF Seeking BFF (22 page)

The average American gains two pounds per year, and that seemingly small amount has sounded some serious alarms. Those annual additions are why the words “obesity epidemic” are as familiar as “Big Mac and fries.” If I keep going like this, I’m looking at twenty pounds. Ten times the national average. Such an overachiever. I’ll see your typical American, and raise her eighteen big ones.

I’m determined to stop the upward creep in its tracks but
eating out every night doesn’t make it easy. I used to think that people ate more when they were alone. It’s a lot less embarrassing to inhale a plateful of fries when you’re huddled late-night in a dark corner of your kitchen than in front of a potential lifer. But eating with others is actually one of the prime determinants of how much people consume. Food psychologist Brian Wansink, author of
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
, studies how external factors affect eating habits. Did you know that people drink more from a short wide glass than from a tall one? Counterintuitive, but true.

According to Wansink, when you eat with one other person, you take in about 35 percent more than you would alone. A table of four increases your intake by 75 percent, while a table for seven translates to 96 percent more. I guess the new bulge around my midsection is no big surprise. I’ve become a statistic.

So, basically, I’m tired and fat. Or, at least, fatter. Not the best way to go into another six months of meeting people.

There’s not much I can do about it now but down a Diet Coke, slip on my loosest dress (or so it was once), and head to work.

Five hours later I’m sitting in my cubicle, staring blankly at my computer, when Ashley and Kari appear in my doorway. (It’s more like a slight opening in the box where I spend my weekdays, but “doorway” sounds so much more dignified. Almost as if I have actual personal space.)

“We’re going with Lynn to see She & Him play at Millennium Park tonight, want to come?”

This is just the kind of thing I should be saying yes to. It’s a free concert, it will continue to build the out-of-office relationship with my coworkers, and might even be a prime spot for meeting new Chicagoans.

“Um, I do but …” I can’t bring myself to commit. After months of yessing, the lure of a quiet evening at home is too strong.

“We’re going to have a picnic,” Kari tells me. “Come! It’ll be fun.”

“I think I just need a low-key night with my couch,” I tell her. Just hearing the words come out of my mouth is embarrassing. Passing on a girls’ night out in favor of television goes against everything I’ve come to believe in.

“Say Yes” is my cardinal rule of friendship. Accepting random invitations is the best way of organically meeting new people. For the first time, I’m breaking my own commandment. I wish I could say it feels good to be bad just one time. To take a mini-break from all these friendly people. But it doesn’t. It’s the familiar shame of deciding to pass on the gym “just this once” for no real reason other than a USA airing of
You’ve Got Mail.
Again.

I know I’d feel better—energized, satisfied—if I went, but I don’t want to feel better. I want to nap.

Two hours later, watching three of my best work friends leave the office with a beach bag full of towels, red wine, and Stacey’s Chips, I attempt to ignore the mix of guilt and jealousy settling into my chest.

There might be another reason for my momentary listlessness. This week marks the four-year anniversary of my father’s death. In my family, we commemorate the day with a night out. I wouldn’t call it a celebration, but rather than sit around and grieve we go to dinner, eat good food, and tell stories. My mom is in New York with my brother, so this year it’s just Matt and me. On Wednesday, we go to a small Mexican BYOB that was recently named one of the best new restaurants
by
Chicago Magazine.
Not surprisingly, the memories that are top-of-mind during the meal all relate to my father and friendship. He didn’t consider himself especially popular, but his funeral was standing room only. A maintenance man at the temple said he’d only ever seen it that full in the days after September 11.

I grew up in Westchester County while all my high school friends lived in New York City. On Friday or Saturday nights, I’d make my sweetest, most irresistible Daddy’s-girl face and ask my father, often at the last minute, often around 9
P.M.
, to drive me the thirty to forty-five minutes into Manhattan. He always said yes.

I wish I could say those rides were filled with heart-to-hearts. Usually they weren’t. They mostly consisted of whatever song the top 40 station had in rotation and me jabbering on about my rude history teacher, and then saying “Dad? Dad, are you even listening?!?” But there were moments. Like when he’d bust a move to the latest pop sensation, or pretend to barrel though the EZPass barrier at full speed just to hear me scream, or recite absurd jokes he’d heard from his middle schoolers. (Why couldn’t the Dairy Queen get pregnant? She was married to Mister Softee!) And there was the time I called home after an ill-fated trip to visit my one-year-older boyfriend, then a college freshman, and asked my parents to get me the morning-after pill. The condom had broken, the student health center wouldn’t help a non-student, and I was terrified. Later that week, during one of our drives, Dad brought up the incident for the first time.

“I’m really glad you called us,” he said. “I can’t believe my little girl is doing such grown-up things—I wish you weren’t—but I hope you’ll always call if you need help. I’m proud of you.”

I responded like a typical 17-year-old. “Daaaaad, stop. Fine. Whatever.”

But still, I remember.

It’s hard to know if my parents influenced my strong interest in friendship. Maybe if my father had thought it absurd to chauffeur his daughter into Manhattan every week, instead of unfailingly agreeing to it, I’d care less about seeing friends on a consistent basis. Perhaps I’d be okay with fewer social connections. For their book
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler studied more than eleven hundred sets of twins, the ideal subjects for the perpetual nature-versus-nurture debate, and found that genetics were a key factor in popularity. “On average, a person with, say, five friends has a different genetic makeup than a person with one friend,” they write. Biology might also be responsible for whether you are the queen bee or a quiet follower in your group of friends, the authors say. Your mother and father, their mothers and fathers and the generations of mothers and fathers before them could be directly responsible for your level of trust and trustworthiness, cooperation and loneliness. Christakis and Fowler claim that the “diversity of feelings about being connected and sharing with others”—i.e., the fact that some of us want so much to be connected that we focus an entire year around that need—is inherited, so while my desire for sociability is probably due to my parents, so is the significant void I felt when my local connections didn’t meet my intimacy standards.

Matt and I sit in the crowded basement restaurant inhaling our dessert of peanut butter empanadas with fruit compote
and chocolate dipping sauce. I’ll lose the weight soon, I swear.

“It’s almost July,” I remind him. “I’m halfway done.”

“And?”

“And it’s working. I definitely have new friends,” I say. “Do you?” I want the fruits of this quest to rub off on Matt. He has good buddies in Chicago, but only a few. He doesn’t seem to especially want any more, but I’ve become a friend pusher. Plus, I’ve started to feel bad leaving him alone so often, ditching my husband for another night of girl talk. Not bad enough to stop doing it, but I’d feel better if he was spending a night with the guys. Sara recently asked what dear husband does while I’m out every evening, and I had no idea. Watch ESPN maybe? Read the paper?

“No new friends for me,” he says. “But you’re happier, which means I’m happier.”

“Aw, look at you. You’re like a real live husband.”

“You used to complain all the time about how you had no friends. It got pretty old. Especially because we
had
friends. They just weren’t the kind of friends you wanted.”

It’s true that before this search we had a decent number of invitees for birthday outings, but I never thought of them as
my
friends. They were Matt’s friends, or our friends, or my cousin’s friends. They were friends of friends I’d seen once or twice, but to whom I didn’t feel a personal connection. It’s a deeper satisfaction to have friends that are completely my own.

“It wasn’t all the time,” I say.

“Yeah, okay,” he responds, deciding not to argue the semantics. “Either way, you have more friends. I don’t have to hear you complain. It’s better for everybody.”

On a Sunday night—or, actually, Monday morning—a few months back, I went on my first sign-up binge. I’d recently learned about
MeetUp.com
, a website that bills itself as the world’s largest network of social groups. Their mission is to “revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize.” Basically, you register (for free), sign up for groups that interest you, and attend meetings as you see fit. With about eighty thousand local meetups, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find something appealing no matter how offbeat your passion. A quick search of my neighborhood turned up a gathering of tantra lovers; a group dedicated to raising awareness of hula hoopers, fire performers, and poi (consider them a success: I am now aware that poi is a performance art out of New Zealand, which consists of swinging a cord with balls on either end of it, sort of like nunchucks); a golf club; and a collection of Chicago webmasters. In a matter of minutes I signed up for five groups: 20 and 30 Somethings Chicago, The Chicago Children’s Literature Meetup Group, Chicago Cooking Chicks, The Chicago Cooking Lite Supper Club, and Read the Classics—The 1001 Books Challenge.

This enrollment rampage took place at 1
A.M.
, high time for my most ambitious—or ill-advised—decisions. (Many an overemotional email—or worse still, crazy-girl phone call—has been sent in the middle of the night. There’s something about lack of sleep that once made me think it was okay to show up late-night at Matt’s dorm and wake him up so we could “have a talk about where we are.” My sanity has returned in the time since that sophomore year debacle, but I’d still do well to be cut off from the world after midnight.) The next morning, with the clear head of a decent night’s sleep, it was obvious that the reading groups weren’t my most brilliant idea. As much as I’d love to devour all 1001 books to read before I die, doing
so on top of the two book clubs I’m already committed to might just kill me sooner. The 20 and 30 Somethings, which apparently had almost fifteen hundred members and entailed mostly happy hours, seemed a little broad and unfocused. If I wanted to gather with a mass of perfect strangers at a bar, I’d just go to a bar. Better to focus my energy on the cooking groups. Food—making it, not eating it—is a personal interest not currently serviced by this quest. From a strictly self-serving standpoint, it makes the best sense.

The Cooking Chicks’ upcoming meeting worked with my schedule and I loved that it was a brand-new group. The meeting to which I RSVP’d was the inaugural gathering, so I wouldn’t be walking into a bunch of already-established friendships and inside jokes about feeling fried or salad tossing. From the online profile photos, the Chicks looked like a younger crowd, while the Supper Club women seemed primarily in their forties. Chicks it would be.

A few weeks later, Matt dropped me off at Kenmore Live Studio, a kitchen-meets-social-media space that hosts and broadcasts cooking demos. According to messages from Vanessa, the supremo Chick, our first gathering was going to be filmed and streamed live on the Kenmore Facebook Page. A real twenty-first-century cooking extravaganza.

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.”