MWF Seeking BFF (27 page)

I’m still of the belief that moms know everything. Not just my own mother. Anyone who’s ever borne children. “You’re a mom, does this rash look funny? Who should I call to fix my washing machine? What’s the square root of 6,629?”

A quick referral to my Lonely Planet Croatia guide tells me that sea urchins are everywhere on the floor of the Adriatic and that swimmers should wear aqua socks to protect themselves. If you do get the spiny needles stuck in your foot, olive oil can help remove them. If you do not get them out, they could become infected, the book says.

It would have been a good idea to read this earlier.

“This is definitely a sea urchin,” I tell Matt. “What were you even talking about, rubber fiber? Is that even a thing? The Croatians are going to cut off my foot, I know it.”

I’m not usually much of a hypochondriac, but the fear of having an infected heel in a foreign land has visions of amputations dancing in my head.

“Rachel, you need to calm down,” Matt says. “It’s going to be fine. We’ll go to the pharmacy when we get back, don’t let it ruin our day.”

Too late for that. “Not ruin our day? There are tentacles. In my foot. What if they’re poisonous?”

“Then the book would probably have mentioned that. I think we would have heard about it if there were deadly animals all over the ocean floor.”

I want these things out pronto. I can’t think about much else. We eat our lunch in silence, except for when I request a bottle of olive oil to douse my foot with. (They don’t have any.) I’m frustrated that Matt clearly doesn’t appreciate the severity of the situation, he’s annoyed that I’m acting crazy.

When we get back to Korcula we head straight to the pharmacy, where, after a questionable exchange in broken English, they give me some antibacterial ointment and Band-Aids. At the hotel, I ask the concierge, a stronger English speaker, what she thinks.

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes, kind of.”

“Huh. Well, I think it’s fine. I’ve had one in my leg for three years.” There’s a distinct hint of pride in her voice.

I’m still not convinced, so I do what any rational self-diagnoser would. I consult the Internet.

Well, that’s it. These Croatians don’t know what they’re talking about. According to WebMD I should be shaving off the top layer of my skin and then digging out these needles.

“I need to go back to the pharmacy,” I tell Matt. “Got to buy some tweezers and operate.”

“Don’t you think
that
is what will infect your foot? Shouldn’t you trust the pharmacists instead of the Internet?”

It’s 4
P.M.
The rest of the day continues along this path of me overreacting and Matt not overreacting nearly enough. He’s furious at me for blowing this out of proportion, while I’m enraged that he’s not freaking out right alongside me.

What we need is a break from each other. Not a Ross-and-Rachel-style break, just an hour or so to each come back to neutral. Matt should watch a game with some guys and grunt about how I’m unreasonable, and I could use a friend to give me the face-to-face emotional support I need, which in this case means figuring out a better solution than “if it’s still really hurting in a few days we’ll go back to the pharmacy, even though it will already be too late.”

The sea-urchin-shaped cloud dissipates throughout the next day and disappears entirely after we arrive on the island of Hvar, where I find a pharmacist with a magic ointment that extracts the needles. “Put it on your foot every day and they should come out on their own in less than a week,” she tells me. It’s a pitch-black cream that smells like tar, but it has solved my current marital problems. I refrain from enveloping her in a bear hug.

It was a blemish on an otherwise perfect trip. Nothing a little breathing room couldn’t have quickly squashed. But our fight was emblematic of what is happening in plenty of marriages these days, when couples are so determined to keep
the honeymoon alive that they try to maintain their vacation-from-the-world attitude long after the suitcases are unpacked.

Recall the 2004 General Social Survey, the one that reported social isolation in America is increasing. It found that the average American reports feeling close to two people, down from three in 1985, and that a whopping 25 percent of the survey respondents reported feeling close to no one at all. The only good news to come out of the study was that the percentage of people who include a spouse in their circle of closest confidants increased by 8 percent—from thirty to thirty-eight. This speaks well for the future of marriage. Long and happy relationships are made of trust. But while it’s great that more people can confide in their spouses, the number of people who reported that they can confide in
only
their spouses increased by almost half.

Confiding in your spouse: good. Confiding in no one
but
your spouse: bad. What if something happens to your hubby? Or if he’s the very person you want to vent about? Then who do you turn to?

This is where things get tricky. Alongside the increase in communication among spouses has come a tendency for couples to isolate themselves from the rest of their social network. A 2010 study found that when the average person couples off, she drops two friends. A pair of researchers who studied U.S. national data from 1994 to 2004 found that married couples had fewer familial ties and were less likely than single folk to socialize with neighbors or friends. “Once people get married, they seem to feel relieved of social obligations toward family and friends,” write Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz in
The Lonely American.
“Cocooning is the couples version of
social isolation. It does increase closeness in marriages. It also increases the fragility of marriage, the burdens placed upon marriage and, over time, it increases the likelihood of both divorce and loneliness.”

Our European vacation can’t exactly be qualified as social isolation. It was a welcome and necessary getaway, complete with wine tours and yoga, banana boat rides and massages, people-watching and the best seafood I’ve ever eaten. We spent significantly more time laughing, talking, and being all, you know, romantic than we did squabbling. But it can’t be a coincidence that our first big fight since early in this friend-quest came just as we were a thousand miles away from the rest of our social network.

We land in Chicago on a Sunday night with gifts, some three thousand photographs, an empty tube of SPF 85 sun-block, and one bandaged heel. Good old Mom picks us up at the airport. I am not particularly thrilled to be home—would you be? After a week of island-hopping on the Adriatic Sea?—but I’m not sad to return to the new women in my life. Much worse, after all, would be returning to no one.

Summer may be tough for girl-dating, but it’s prime time for catching up with old friends. I guess that’s what my new pals are doing, too. Everyone is taking advantage of the nice weather, using it as an incentive to persuade lifelong friends to visit—Chicago winters scare off potential guests ten months of the year—or to take those unused vacation days for trips of their own. I’ve already done the high-school-ten-years-later thing, and next week my summer camp is hosting five hundred alumni for a one-hundred-year anniversary weekend in Maine. And despite having gotten home from Croatia just yesterday, this week Matt and I are playing host to friends who are in town for Lollapalooza, Chicago’s annual summer music festival.

Our first guest, Sam, is a buddy from the college days. He’s part of Matt’s close-knit group of guys—men who maintain their ties six years after graduation by way of fantasy football—but he and I actually connected long before either of us knew my husband. We became friends in the first few weeks of freshman year because we lived in the same dorm (the only prerequisite for friendship in the early college days) and he went to high
school with Sara. She’d been singing his praises since we both got accepted, so I had my eye on him from day one. (Platonically, that is. He came to NU with his high school girlfriend, who is another close friend of mine.) Now Sam is staying with us for a week, exploring the city while Matt and I work.

One of Sam’s most endearing qualities is how awkward he purports to be, when in fact he’s one of my most accomplished friends. He graduated from Northwestern undergrad and Georgetown Law School. He taught English in Japan, worked on immigration law in Geneva, and monitored human rights in the Congo. He’s hardly an underachiever. Yet to hear him tell it he’s a bumbling fool, so he’s genuinely in awe of the concept of friend-dating.

“I went out to dinner with this guy in Geneva once. We were introduced through a coworker,” he tells Matt and me over dinner. “It was a total man-date. Very intense. And uncomfortable.”

“A bromance in the making?” I ask.

“Hardly. It was painful. I had no idea how to behave.” I’m willing to bet Sam’s behavior was perfectly appropriate, but his discomfort wasn’t unusual. An intimate dinner for two is not the male bonding method of choice. It goes back to the face-to-face versus side-to-side friendship theory. Men prefer the latter—watching sports or movies, playing golf or poker or video games, going fishing or drinking or camping. Author Jeffrey Zaslow, whose book
The Girls from Ames
recounts the forty-year friendship between eleven girls in Iowa, tells a story about how he’s played poker with the same guys for eighteen years but none of them knows his children’s names. I’ve always found it hard to believe—by the time I leave a girl-date I can usually recite my new friend’s entire family tree, not to
mention her offsprings’ names and ages. I was so skeptical of Zaslow’s story that I recently grilled my uncle George about his own poker game.

“You play with them every week, do you know the names of their kids?”

George thought for a moment. “I’m not even sure which of them has kids,” he said.

That’s not to say that male friendships are less vital to their health or happiness. One study of Swedish men found lack of social support to be one of the two leading risk factors for heart attacks and death from coronary heart disease. The other factor was smoking.

The trouble for men comes as they grow older and disengage from the activities they once enjoyed. According to the research, when men get married and have families, the pressure to balance wives and kids and jobs doesn’t leave time for the office softball team or weekly card game. They reluctantly cut back on time with friends, seeing the existing ones less and abstaining from activities that help them make new ones. By the time they realize what they’ve lost, they feel like it’s too late. And unless he’s Paul Rudd in
I Love You, Man
, no guy is going to set out on a friend-dating quest.

Sam is not married and doesn’t have kids, so he isn’t at this family-or-friends crossroads just yet. One botched Genevan man-date is no big deal. He has recently returned to New York City for good, his first permanent residency stateside since he graduated law school. Considering he was born and raised in Manhattan and all his BFFs are still there, I think he’ll be just fine.

The girl on the yoga mat next to mine looks incredibly familiar, but I can’t figure out how I know her. I do a mental scan of my personal rolodex. Was she a girl-date? No. Phew. I have a perpetual fear of running into one of my lady-dates and drawing a blank. It wouldn’t happen with one of my new friends, but what about someone I’ve only met once? Five or six months ago? Definite possibility.

Then, mid–triangle pose, I place her. She taught an exercise class I took at a different studio last year. The old me would silently register this coincidence and go on my way. But a consequence of this year has been that I talk to everyone now. As it turns out, shopping is more interesting when you know the saleslady’s life story, meals are more delicious when you dissect each dish with the waiter before ordering. I’ll chat with the woman in line behind me at the movie theater, the guys next to me at the sports bar, anyone. It makes life more fun.

Well, more fun for me. Not everyone in my life loves my newfound everyone’s-a-potential-BFF attitude. My mother recently treated our whole family to dinner at celebrity chef Graham Elliot’s restaurant, and I didn’t want to botch the ordering. After some discussion with the waiter—who was quite friendly and seemed to appreciate having his culinary knowledge put to use, I might add—I went with the suckling pig.

“You get everything you needed?” my brother, Alex, asks. He looks mortified.

“Yup. Why?”

“You talked to him for fifteen minutes.”

“I didn’t know what to get! Now you’re all going to be jealous of my meal.” And it was three minutes, tops.

“It was a little ridiculous,” Alex says. My brother’s not unfriendly, but he is perpetually concerned with how others perceive
him and he embarrasses easily when people don’t behave “appropriately” in public. To him, appropriately means using proper etiquette and being polite, but also not inconveniencing people. And talking to a waiter—making too many special requests or asking too many questions—is, by his standards, an inconvenience. He’s of the “don’t bother the waiter or he’ll spit in your food” mind-set, just as I was earlier this year.