Authors: Rachel Bertsche
The psychological definition of loneliness is “perceived social isolation.” As John Cacioppo told me, “Loneliness isn’t being alone, it’s feeling alone.” If we’re going strictly by the book then I guess I am, in fact, lonely. I’m certainly not alone—aside from Matt, I’m surrounded by coworkers and family, and the two of us do have plenty of friends. When we throw a party, we pack the house. But obviously I don’t feel enough of a meaningful connection with any of them, or I wouldn’t have launched this yearlong search.
There’s also what social scientists call “social comparison” working against me. The gist of the theory is that we evaluate our own circumstances by comparing them with others. It’s why researchers say loneliness peaks during the holidays—inundated with images of Christmas parties and loved ones gathered around the tree, our own small dinner party feels not good enough. Because I watch so much TV, and my favorite shows are the likes of
Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Sex and the City
, and
Entourage
, I’m socially comparing myself all year long. If those are the models I live by, I should have three or four BFFs who I meet for coffee or beers or cosmos every single day, sometimes twice.
But now that Chloe’s here, I’m feeling super-socially connected. We spend Sunday laughing, eating, and trying on clothes. She’s my favorite shopping buddy because she buys with abandon and encourages me to do the same. Probably Matt’s worst nightmare, but whatever. She’s only here for the day.
“You need to get it,” Chloe tells me about a gray cotton vest with a shimmery trim.
“Really? It doesn’t make me look like Charlie Chaplin?”
“No! If it doesn’t feel girly enough, pair it with skinny jeans and heels.” I never wear skinny jeans and heels.
“Okay. But if you come back in a year and I’ve never worn it, I’m giving it to you,” I say.
“Deal.”
We go through a few more rounds like this. When we get home, I’ve got a new cable-knit sweater, a plaid button-up shirt, a little black dress, and the vest in question.
“I had so much fun,” Chloe says as she packs her suitcase full of purchases. “I’ll keep you posted about the job.”
“Please do,” I say. We hug goodbye. “Our second bedroom is always ready for you.”
Matt’s in the office, so after Chloe leaves I plop on the couch to check in with my DVR. I think about her visit, about how purely happy I was, and how I don’t have that relationship with any girl in Chicago. The potential for how happy I
could
be, versus how happy I
am
, is clear for the first time. Which is weird because I’ve had friends visit before without these kinds of epiphanies. Only five weeks in and this project has me all hyped up on friendship. It’s worse (er, better?) than crack.
I’m not
un
happy in Chicago, it’s just this idea that I could be so much happier. For the first time in two and a half years, I wonder if Matt and I could have made it work in New York, if he really would have been as miserable as he thought, and what life would have been like to have him and my best friends all in one place. I picture us living in Brooklyn, inviting Callie and Sara over to watch the Golden Globes or eat Thai food. I don’t want to even think it, but I wonder, could we have made a mistake?
It’s a moot point. We’re here, and we love this city. It’s not like I didn’t want to move to Chicago. I was the one who pushed for it because it was the one place we both wanted to be. But still, I wonder.
When I wake up beside Matt the next morning, the questions are lingering. Will I ever find the pure giddiness I felt with Chloe with someone nearby? Will there ever be a time when I feel like nothing is missing? In New York, Matt’s absence left a deep void. Here, the hole that should be filled with friendships is a bit shallower, but it’s there, like a manhole you don’t notice until you’ve fallen and are knee-deep in sewage.
“What are you thinking about?” Matt asks.
“Just Chloe’s visit.”
“What about it?”
“Just that I was so happy, it was so fun, and I never have that here. I was just, you know, wondering, if—even though I know we didn’t—if we maybe made a mistake when we moved here.” The minute the words are out of my mouth I regret them. This will turn into a fight.
“You think we made a mistake?” he asks. “I’m sorry, I thought we were happy. We love Chicago, we love each other, we have an amazing life. Then your friend comes for one day and you think we made a
mistake
?” Oh, no. Now
this
, this was a mistake. “I don’t have that many best friends here either, Rachel. But I don’t let that make me question my entire life here. I have
you.
”
What Matt’s saying is actually quite kind. That I make him happy, that all he needs in life is me. Or something like that.
“Of course I’m happy with you. I was just thinking, I don’t know. That I miss having them …” There’s no easy way for me to articulate my feelings, mostly because I know Matt can’t understand them. A man’s well-being isn’t as dependent on friendships as is a woman’s, and his needs really are different. Psychologists say that women have face-to-face friendships, while the male kind are characterized as side-to-side. Women
like to engage in conversation, men like to bond over an activity. It’s not that novel a discovery. Anyone who’s seen men sit and watch the game while the women gab in the kitchen knows this to be true.
The fight escalates. There are tears (mine) and heavy sighs (his). Matt says I’ve become obsessed with this friendship thing and have let my search spiral into the notion that my life here is empty when we actually have a lot going for us. I yell something about how I know I have friends but not the friends I need, and that it’s not a reflection of my feelings for him.
I’m worried this last point might be hard for my husband to believe. Research has found that both men and women get more emotional satisfaction from their relationships with women. Studies show that men think their wives are their best friends, and women think their best friends are their best friends. When marriages break up, social scientists say it’s the men who have the harder time. They’re suddenly left with no one. Women, usually, have friendships to fall back on that are nearly as intimate as the romantic relationships that failed them.
While I can help Matt stave off loneliness, my own protection must come in the form of some local BFFs.
There are, of course, plenty of people—male
and
female—who tout the idea that “my spouse is my best friend and the only one I need.” It’s one of those romantic notions that has been perpetuated by our mothers and grandmothers and every movie in the Meg Ryan canon. It’s a myth that has probably been responsible for thousands of unhappy marriages. Imagine the sense of failure a woman must feel when she enters into this covenant, expecting to be rewarded with a whole new level of bestfriendship, only to realize that her husband will never be
her Callie or Sara. It’s enough to make her feel far lonelier than when she was alone.
A husband can fill many vital roles—protector, provider, lover—but he can’t be a BFF. Matt is my most intimate companion and the love of my life. But I can’t complain about my husband to my husband. That’s what friends are for.
It’s like what journalist Ellen Tien wrote in
O, The Oprah Magazine
about her self-proclaimed “mid-wife crisis.” “Your husband is not your best friend. Your best friend is your best friend. If your husband were your best friend, what would that make your best friend—the dog?”
Or as an old colleague once told me of her significant other: “He can’t be my girlfriend, he’s my boyfriend.”
I’m not sure where the husband-as-best-friend myth came from, anyway, but I imagine it began as a story women told themselves to ease the pain of giving up friendships for marriage. Loneliness in matrimony isn’t a new phenomenon. Back before women were liberating themselves and taking back the night, they were doting on their husbands and children 24/7. That didn’t leave much time for BFFs. “Wives are lonelier now than they ever used to be,” wrote Nora Johnson in “The Captivity of Marriage,” her 1961
Atlantic Monthly
article. “Great numbers of friends are a luxury she can no longer afford; old friends often diminish in importance, which she is sorry about. But there is a limit to her capacity for giving affection, and maintaining old friendships at their original intensity requires an effort she hardly has the energy for. Besides, she is often forced into unwanted and demanding friendships with the next-door neighbor, the boss’s wife, or the ladies’ club chairman, and she must learn to cover up her real feelings … It can be painful to find oneself isolated, in marriage, with problems
that have always been shared with mother or girlfriends, and to realize that there are some things that even one’s husband cannot be told.”
I can’t necessarily relate to being forced into friendship with anyone at a ladies’ club, but the isolation Johnson writes of is still very real almost fifty years later. The problems that I’ve always shared with girlfriends cannot be foisted on Matt. Not because he doesn’t want them, but because I need to sort through them in the female, face-to-face manner.
And, anyway, these days friends are a luxury women
can
afford, so I want to embrace the “have it all” mentality. Marriage and bestfriendship. They’re not one and the same, nor are they mutually exclusive. And, as it is with work and life, I need to find a balance.
When I started this project I told Matt that I’d found the perfect man, now it was time to find the perfect girl. He encouraged my quest so that I could find a way to be happier here, not so I could decide we should move back East. Hence, the fight.
It’s become one of those arguments where halfway through neither of us knows what we’re arguing about. Matt does make one point that sticks with me. “It was just a visit,” he says. “You were with Chloe for less than twenty-four hours. If she lived here it wouldn’t be like that all the time.” He’s right. Maybe I’m letting the idea of having a best friend here cloud the reality of it. I’d still have to go to work. I’d still want to spend time alone with my husband and veg out on the couch solo once in a while. I’d still have family obligations. And if, say, Chloe were here, she’d have her own life, too. We wouldn’t have sleepovers and stay up late every night. People are busy, people travel. It’s likely that if she lived in Chicago, we’d only actually see each other once or twice a month.
Matt and I leave for work. While I’m at the office, I get a call from Chloe. She didn’t get the job. Well, that was quick.
Back to the drawing board.
The workday separation gives Matt and me time to breathe. When I come home, things are okay. We apologize. Matt knows I don’t regret moving here with him, I know he just wants me to be happy where we are. That’s what I want too. After all, I can find a new BFF in Chicago. I can’t find a new Matt in New York.
FRIEND-DATE 6.
Fight or no fight, there’s no time to dawdle at home. I have a date to get to. My coworkers and I have planned a group date of sorts. We’re all fans of musicals, both the High School and Broadway varieties, and Kari found a coupon for thirty-five-dollar tickets to
In the Heights.
We decided to make it an event. Kari, Ashley, Joan, Lynn, and I gather at Ashley’s for dinner and drinks before the show. These four are currently my closest friends in Chicago, hands down. After two years of lunches together, they know I hate strawberries and mint, send me any and all links related to
How I Met Your Mother
, and agree that Rachel Bilson should play me in the movie of my life even if my hair is closer to Keri Russell circa
Felicity.
There are a few problems though. First of all, they’ve lived in Chicago longer than I have—Joan, Ashley, and Lynn are all from here originally—so they already have their own best friends. I figure that’s not too big an issue. I’ve already entered their Dunbar circle, I’m just fighting for higher status. If I earn a spot, they can add me to their BFF list just as I’m looking to add to mine. The larger problem is that we spend most of our time together gossiping about work. As we grow closer that’s fading, but it’s still
our common thread and dominates the conversations. I want time with my best friend to be an escape from office politics. Then, of course, there’s the fact that since we spend so much time together on weekdays, we hardly call or see each other on weekends. When we do, it’s for a group activity like dance class. I can’t imagine any of us will share a one-on-one “want to get brunch?” call until we’ve moved on to new jobs.
But this year is about building relationships. I’m not going to make a best friend overnight, so this is a date with long-term potential. Every time the five of us have a real-life playdate we move another step closer to being friends independently of the office.
There’s a pretty large collection of research about workplace friendships, both pro and con. Some experts say you should keep office relationships separate from the real-life kind. In her book
Friendshifts: The Power of Friendship and How It Shapes Our Lives
, sociologist Jan Yager says coworkers should adhere to a “three-year rule,” taking that long to turn coworkers into friends. Even then, she says, you should keep the relationships casual.
Three years? That’s absurd. That’s about how long I stay in any one job. We live in a world of high employee turnover, so why make office friends at all if you’re going to leave by the time the relationship is established? And how do you time that, anyway? If I say five words to my cube neighbor every day, it will be just enough to make us buddy-buddy in three years? That’s crazy talk.
Personally, I side with author Tom Rath. He’s the Global Practice Leader for Gallup (you know, the company that conducts all those polls). His book,
Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without
celebrates the office BFF. The
numbers he presents are staggering. Rath’s research found that while only 30 percent of employees report having a best friend at work, most people would opt for an office bestie over a 10 percent raise. And the lucky employees who do have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs.