MWF Seeking BFF (32 page)

My excessive desire to take on bridesmaid’s duties and be of some help to my best friend comes from a place of kindness, for sure, but also largely from my own insecurity. Due to the distance between us, I missed many of Callie’s pre-wedding festivities. I did fly to New York for her engagement party, but her shower was on a Thursday evening so I couldn’t make it. Her bachelorette party, which took place while I was in Croatia, was scheduled after I’d already booked my ticket. (I did send a giant penis cake in my stead, which should count for something.) I know the other attendants have played a more active role in the pre-wedding celebrations and I feel like now is my chance to make up for my absences. This weekend I can establish myself as A Good Bridesmaid.

Aside from wanting to live up to my end of the bridal party bargain, I’m anxious to reaffirm my best friendship with Callie. Not that we’ve been growing apart, but I’ve been so unusually focused on making new friends and she’s been so busy with work and wedding planning that lately we haven’t talked as much as we used to. This is largely a product of living seven
hundred miles away from each other—research shows that emotional closeness between friends declines by about 15 percent a year in the absence of face-to-face contact. My search is about complementing Callie and Sara locally, not replacing them. So while I stomp around pronouncing that Callie is my best friend forever, I need to do my part to ensure the “forever” part sticks.

I don’t want to be forgotten.

“Callie wants a curry chicken sandwich and a Diet Pepsi,” I announce to Matt and my mother after hanging up with the bride-to-be at lunchtime. “I told her we’d pick it up and bring it to her; she’s getting her hair and nails done.”

“Look how excited you are,” Matt tells me. I’m literally bouncing out of my seat.

“She’s my best friend!” I say. “She held my wedding dress when I peed. I just want to do the same.”

When I was planning my wedding, plenty of people warned me that the weekend would be over as soon as it began. “Make sure you stay present and soak up every moment,” they’d say. “You don’t want to miss a second.”

Maybe because I’d been put on such high alert, I was acutely aware of each memory as it was made. My wedding didn’t fly by as I’d feared. I danced and laughed and lived it up, and I didn’t let myself get bogged down by overlooked details (a missing tablecloth here, a misspelled name card there), or wardrobe malfunctions. (My mom stepped on my tulle gown before the ceremony even started. Awesome.)

Callie’s wedding, though, feels like it doesn’t even happen. By the time the ceremony starts—after the rehearsal dinner and speeches, the full day of primping and picture-taking—I’m
so excited to catch up with my old friends in attendance that it’s over before I can even share a dance with Matt.

The crowd of high school friends at Callie’s wedding is largely the same as the group at Emily’s Miami nuptials earlier this year. And while the bouts of frenvy—that specific brand of jealousy that hits when I’m with old friends and am reminded of the lives they share back in New York without me—do bubble up, they occur less frequently and with far less force. When Jill and Callie reference their crazy adventures in Brooklyn—“This is just like the time we went to that bar, remember? The one that had the thing? With the psycho girl?”—I feel on the outside of an inside joke, but it doesn’t make me wish I lived in New York. Instead it makes me miss Chicago and the comfort I’ve found in my new groups of friends—my book and cooking clubs, my coworkers, Rachel and Eddie and the improv gang.

Visiting old friends used to make me feel like I was back on the mother ship. I felt like a stranger in a strange land in the Midwest. But there’s been a welcome, if unexpected, reversal this year. Curling up with lifelong besties will always be the ultimate creature comfort, but my life—the one spiraling forward, picking up steam and determining my future—is in Chicago. With my no-longer-new husband, and my very new friends.

FRIEND-DATE 37.
There’s new compelling evidence that this quest is working. My girl-dates from earlier in the year are starting to introduce me to their friends. My social net is getting cast wider, extending as far as three degrees. I’m 50 percent Kevin Bacon.

Take tonight’s date, Alexis. I was introduced to Alexis through Hannah, who I met through Sara. In January, Alexis and I were separated by three degrees. Now we’re at only one.

This is triadic closure at work. Remember that theory? The one that says one’s friends will find it easy to become friends with each other. Earlier this year I got sick of only meeting friends of friends. I wanted to establish my own relationships and create my own networks. I’ve finally achieved that. I’ve woven friendship webs, even more of them than I can sometimes keep track of.

I see the merits in both approaches to friending—expanding social networks or forging numerous independent relationships. The former allows you to be at the center of a cluster, having several tight relationships within a given group, while the latter puts you in the role of connector between different social webs.

According to
Connected
authors Christakis and Fowler’s research, Americans are more likely to take the network expansion route. The probability that any two of our friends know each other, they found, is 52 percent.

Hannah, Alexis, and I now fall into that category. Alexis is planning an extended trip to Italy and wants to keep a blog while she’s there. Hannah sent her my way for general blogging advice and because “you two will have a lot to chat about.”

“My dream is to be a food personality—to teach and do cooking demos—rather than run a restaurant,” she tells me. “So I’ll be spending three months in Italy to cook and eat and drink. And eat. It’s my specialty.”

Alexis has Snow White coloring—pale skin and dark hair—and is long and lean, with perfectly sculpted arms that I covet. “How do you stay so thin doing all that eating?” I ask, gazing at the biceps I would like for myself.

“Are you checking out my arms?”

Caught. She totally just called me out. “I am. This is totally embarrassing. But I want mine to look like that.”

“That was hilarious. You were just, like, literally talking to my arms.”

I should be mortified. I’m not. I love calling people on their ridiculousness, so I can take it. If anything, the exchange makes us feel like old friends. We already have an inside joke.

After we down two glasses of wine and one volcano roll, Alexis tells me a story of skinny-dipping at a friend’s and realizing that one of the girls there, a lesbian, was into her. “Later in the night she grabs me by the hand and drags me to the car to go get more beers with her, and I finally just said, ‘I can tell that you like me, but I’m straight.’ And then she kissed me. It was quite a night.”

It’s not the usual first girl-date conversation, but I think that’s why the dinner is going so well. There’s a difference between the potential friends who are “nice,” and those I sense could become lifers. Alexis falls into the really-could-be-a-BFF category and I have a feeling that one day, when we have twenty years of friendship under our belts, we’ll look back and pinpoint this story of the misplaced affections—and my blatant arm gazing—as the beginning of it all.

Rom and Ori Brafman, the authors of
Click
, are experts on those small euphoric moments that tell us a relationship is going to stick. As this year has progressed I’ve tried to incorporate their “click accelerators” into my everyday life—standing closer to someone I want to befriend (proximity), being fully present in each conversation (resonance), and joining defined communities that are conducive to forging bonds (safe place). But what if I already have a girl-date planned, and I really want it to go well? What if I think, “This girl is The One, I just need her to feel the same”? Is there a way to manufacture a click?

According to Rom Brafman, people tend to overlook one
particular weapon in the friendship arsenal. The power of storytelling.

“My guess is that if I recorded a conversation between you and your friends in New York, I’d hear each of you relating stories of things that happened to you. Whether it is funny or gossipy or newsy. ‘You’ll never guess what happened’ type of stuff,” he told me over the phone recently.

When we meet new people, he explained, we switch into interview mode. We think the person sitting across from us needs to know how long ago we graduated from college or what we majored in.

“It’s factual, but it’s not very interesting,” he said.

He’s right on point. A distinguishing feature of the few girl-dates that had me giddy, aside from laughter, was that we went beyond the boring exchange of information into more personal, story-driven territory. There are ways of obtaining the factual tidbits—the where-are-you-froms and what-do-you-dos—without grilling your girl-date, Brafman said. The details emerge through narratives.

A story of skinny-dipping and unexpected makeouts? Click click click.

The next day I send Alexis an email with a link to some popular food blogs we discussed at dinner. I include in the note a variation of my usual “we should get together again” spiel, as I like to get the plans for the second date moving quickly. In the spirit of network building, and also because I adore her, I suggest we invite Hannah next time, too.

Five days later (apparently she wasn’t quite as smitten as I) Alexis writes me back. “You are totally raw and hilarious,” she says. “My kind of personality.”

When you spend the majority of your time setting up girl-dates, there comes a point where you have to think outside the wine-and-sushi box. Before this year started I was so comfortable in my personal bubble—one that consisted of the office, restaurants, movie theaters, and yoga studios—that I felt no need to stray. Now that I’m constantly entertaining the ladies, I’ve expanded my repertoire. I’ve brought dates to free workouts in the park, readings at independent bookstores, musical improv performances, and community running groups. I’m basically the Casanova, or The Situation, of girl-dating.

My new friends have expanded my Chicago in return. They’ve introduced me to fortune-tellers and community gardens and new neighborhoods—Margarita to Chinatown and Jillian to Little Vietnam where I had some pho that was to die for. (To Die Pho! What a brilliant name for a restaurant. A project for my next life.) It’s the free-gift-with-purchase of this quest: Invest in new friends and rediscover your hometown at no extra charge.

Today I’m joining Mia—who I met through my online essay, is in my cooking club, and lives around the corner—and some of her friends for a day at a suburban winery. Until a week ago I had no idea that Illinois had wineries, but this thirty-year-old bed-and-breakfast, just a forty-five-minute drive outside the city, ships in grapes from California and makes vino on-site.

Mia won this wine tasting for ten people in an auction last year, so I was flattered when she told me to expect an invitation. In Matt’s ongoing horserace, Mia has been inching her way toward the front of the pack. She’s the up-for-anything type who actually follows through when we discuss fun outings.
She’s easygoing but interested, and loves a good session of girl talk, whether it’s about her latest suitors or my most recent deadline horror story.

Since she lives so close—a three-minute walk from my apartment—we have become mani-pedi buddies. Mia is really good at pedicure maintenance, while I’m more of the “oh, my pinky toe looks like a stump, maybe I should paint it so you can tell there’s a nail” type. I must say, since she came into my life my toes have never looked better.

Plenty of research has found that geography is one of the most influential factors in whether two people will become friends. Having similar addresses has been shown to matter more than having similar values or interests. Luckily, Mia and I share all three.

“How do you two know each other?” asks one of Mia’s friends.

We look at each other with a grin. It always sounds odd when I tell people that a new friend responded to an article I wrote about wanting more friends.

“Mia read an essay I wrote online and she reached out to me,” I say. “Turned out we live in the same neighborhood and we’ve been friends ever since.”

“That’s so great!” Mia’s friend says. Once again, what I fear will appear desperate actually sounds pretty impressive.

“Yeah, isn’t it?”

My nose is buried in my third glass of red wine when my phone rings. The caller ID shows it’s my brother, Alex, but I hit the
IGNORE
button. I’ll call him back later. New friends and new wines demand my undivided attention.

Sixteen hours later I’m hunched over the computer when
my brother calls a second time. I have assignments to finish up so I hit
IGNORE.
Again.

Modern technology makes it virtually impossible to disappear entirely—especially when my communication with co-workers is almost entirely over instant message—so within minutes an IM pops up on my screen.

“You avoid my calls now?” Alex asks.

I explain that I was wine tasting with one of my potential BFFs yesterday, and that today I’m swamped at work.