For four years, I spent my time not making friends while attending college. The one potential friend that I had my freshman year was too bossy and dominant for me. She had to be the authoritative, outspoken person in the group. She was loud, cussed every other word, and talked too much about how she wanted to have all the university athlete’s babies. In the words of Sweet Brown, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” In any case, that phrase actually became true as I changed majors and our schedules drew us to opposite sides of campus. As I made my way through the throngs of Arts & Sciences majors, I had copious amounts of opportunities to make new friends. There was Rebecca, Meredith, Paige, Miranda. If I were in college now, I might would’ve struck up a conversation about what Rebecca thought of Columbus’s letters to Ferdinand and Isabella or if Paige liked Shakespeare’s comedies better than tragedies or trade struggling writer stories with Meredith in the colloquium over lunch.
Instead, I did what Rachel Bertsche did before setting off in this quest to find a new best friend in Chicago. I sat at my desk in class, looked up at the professor and down at my book, and little else for fear that a potential friend would turn around and expose their fangs in Van Helsing-like fashion. Before reading this book, when a girl stood behind me in the colloquium line on campus and asked what time they started serving lunch, instead of answering and asking what class she just came from, I answered and stared at all the potential sandwiches I could eat while mentally shouting at myself to talk this potential friend up. If there’s anything I took away from Rachel’s research on making new friends, it’s this:
Most women are flattered to be befriended and want to befriend other women themselves, but simply don’t know how to construct the approach and/or would feel invasive for doing so.
In the beginning of Rachel’s search, she sets out to find a “best friend forever,” or lifer. Her expectations are naive early on, as she navigates what it means to have a best friend in this new adult stage of her life. As she relays the anecdotes of 52 friend dates in the year of her experiment, she researches articles and books on friendship, conducts interviews with social media entrepreneurs, and tries everything from publishing an article on her search to attending cooking classes to speed friending to renting friends. While the narrative of her different dates felt redundant at times, the facts and statistics she weaves through her successes in finding lasting friendships outweighs any small nuances I found in the reading experience.
What I admired most about her research, wasn’t the research itself, but the honesty through which she wrote. In an age where people are either completely okay with you writing about them or totally against it, I commended her mother, and, especially, her husband for supporting, and even encouraging, her project in making friends and writing this book. Her research wasn’t merely factual, but required a certain intimate evaluation of the existing relationships in her life and why they weren’t enough to fulfill all the needs she has as a human being. In the beginning chapters, Rachel understood that she had a certain relationship with her mother, a certain relationship with her husband, and a certain relationship with her high school friends that couldn’t satisfy what she was looking for in a long-term, local friend. At one point, she tried to make her husband fulfill every facet of her needs in a relationship, learning that while he met certain stipulations, he couldn’t meet her need to discuss certain topics more appropriate between intimate, female friends.
Her biggest takeaway, I believe, wasn’t in finding that one best friend she could call at the last minute for a mani-pedi or figure out where they were having Sunday brunch, but was in learning how to open herself up more to the possibility that every encounter had a potential for making a new friend. She learned how to be friendly in an on-the-move atmosphere that’s more nose-in-the-phone than open to opportunities of befriending a complete stranger. What I found inspiring was how trusting she was in the idea that other people are just that, people — not stalkers or murderers or other such sketchy folk. In a society of popular crime dramas, it was refreshing to read about someone setting aside their fears in the potential danger of others and seeing them as human beings. She learned not to expect the same kind of friendship she had with girls she’d met in grade school, but to allow herself to adapt to a new level of friendship that would require a different kind of development.
In the spirit of Rachel’s search, I even decided to ask someone out for coffee Tuesday night in hopes of making a new friend. Her name is Kristin, and I’d seen her talking with other people whose blogs I read, and when I looked at her Twitter profile and saw that we lived in the same city, I knew I had to reach out. I mean, how many times do I come across a blogger in the city I also inhabit? Never. So, we went for coffee and had a really good time chatting about college and boys and books. I even got so absorbed in the conversation, that I let the last bit of my coffee get cold. But it was worth it. By the end of the night, we had both relaxed and admitted to our shared awkwardness, and I walked away feeling very happy that I decided not to chicken out on making a new friend. If Rachel taught me one thing, it was that I need to care less of how others perceive me and just go for it.
(Disclaimer: My made-up acronym stands for “single white female seeking new friends now.”)
