MWF seeking BFF

I am not the "MWF" in question of the title of this post.  The title refers to a kind of annoying and kind of insightful book I just read by Rachel Bertsche.  This is a "faux-oir", ie a fake memoir where someone decides to change a habit for a year and then gets a book deal out of it.  (I didn't come up with this term; a review I read of MWF seeking BFF did - I wish I were clever enough to have thought of it!).  Bertsche moves to Chicago with her husband, and after two years realizes that she has nothing approximating the BFF ("best friend forever") relationships that she has with friends from youth summer camp or high school (Bertsche is 28 and I don't think she uses the term "BFF" with irony) and embarks on a year long search for a new BFF in which she will go on 52 "dates" with women.

This was a pretty annoying read.  Bertsche actually has a number of friends.  Though her BFFs live in other cities she is in constant communication with them and sees them a few times throughout the year.  Her BFFs introduce Bertsche to numerous friends, some of whom she hits it off with.  Bertsche also has a group of work friends and semi-regular couples dates with friends of her husband.  And she's constantly running into people she knows from her alma mater (Northwestern) or her sorority.  So it's not like she's alone, living in Chicago without knowing a soul.  Bertsche defines a BFF as someone who she can call and just say "What's the plan for today?" without making formalized plans.  It's the intimacy that she has with her her two BFFs from summer camp and high school that she wants to replicate within the year of the experiment.  Bertsche's desperation to achieve this level of BFF intimacy is palpable and she's too immature to recognize that you simply cannot go from a first meeting to a 16 year history in the course of a three hour date.

Despite how annoyingly Bertsche is, she actually does make some interesting points about friendships and I've been thinking about my own approach to friendship since I finished the book.  Her points:

• It is really hard to feel like you don't have friends.  Bertsche's perception is that she doesn't have friends.  I don't think this is true, but I'll go with it for the sake of my argument.  If you feel like you are alone or if you feel lonely, it's the same as being alone or being lonely. 
• While a mate can provide many things, a mate cannot and should not be everything.  As Bertsche says "You can't complain about your husband to your husband."  I love D and my life is vastly improved for having him in it, but we had a gigantic fight last week that I would have given the world to have run the fight by another woman.  
• Making friends is like dating.  The first date is all about sizing up the other woman.  Do you have anything in common?  Do you have compatible personality types?  Is there enough there to want to see them again?  Bertsche shares research that you need to see a friend twice a week for two months before you can consider someone a friend.  After this amount of time in the dating world, you either cut them loose or you're in it for the long hall.  
• You have to be willing to take chances.  Bertsche literally tries everything to make friends - introductions, meetup groups, online friend matchmaking (like match.com for friends), religious organizations, approaching waitresses and sales clerks with offers of lunch, etc.  You have to be persistent.  You also have to be able to put yourself out there to make the first move.  It was surprising to see how many women would respond to Bertsche's overtures with a "Yeah, I don't know that many people either."  And you have to be prepared to do a lot of follow up and take the onus of doing the followup.  People are busy and overbooked and overscheduled and the easier you make it to be friends (at first), the easier it will be to reach the friend level.
• Distance is really important when making friends.  Sure, social media allows us all to stay "connected" but it's hard to achieve a level of intimacy when your relationship is relegated to reading one another's posts on facebook.  I made some good friends when I first moved back to MA but once I moved away our fledgling friendships all but disappeared.  If it's hard to stay friends with someone who's not in your immediate geographic area then it's doubly hard to start a friendship long distance.
• Food and drink are natural friendship enhancements.  It's so easy to bond over a favorite restaurant or bad service.  Most of Bertsche's dates take place at bars or restaurants.  After a while I started to wonder how she could afford to go on 6 or 7 such dates a week!  And I considered my own challenges in that I don't drink and have some food allergies that make casual food outings a little difficult.  I have an acquaintance who once turned to me (once it became obvious that I was the only one in a group of people who had just seen a movie together that had not been invited to the post-movie dinner) and said "I would have invited you but I didn't think you would be able to eat anything."  I am sure this was a cover-up for not inviting me in the first place (and an obnoxious one at that - did I mention that this person is an "acquaintance" and not a "friend"?), but the remark stung just the same.  How many other people look at me and think "Doesn't drink.  Allergic to everything.  Not worth the time."?  If they got to know me, they'd know that I love a good cup of tea, am always up for Asian food and that it's often not the food I'm interested in but the company. 
• Yoga is not a great place to meet people.  Bertsche observes "for a discipline all about nonjudgement, [the women in her yoga class] seem oddly unapproachable."  If I had a dollar for every conversation I tried to strike up with a women in one of my yoga classes only to be ignored or shot down, I could afford to buy the ridiculously expensive yoga outfits that everyone seems obsessed with!

Though I found Bertsche to be annoying I couldn't help rooting for her and I am glad that she wove the friend-making lessons into her story of trying to make friends in a new city.  I've been out of the game for the past two years, after I moved an hour away from where I worked and then started grad school and I have felt very very lonely.  Grad school doesn't exactly have the best schedule to make friends; most of my classes are at night (when everyone else is free) and weekends are spent working, writing papers and meeting with your groups.  Now that I'm done with school, I would love to make some friends.  A BFF isn't a requirement, but it would be nice to have someone to take a class with, knit or sew with or go to lunch with (I am more like a man than Bertsche - I need an activity to focus around rather than jumping head first into revealing my soul).  I also see more clearly which "friends" I'd like to cultivate more and those friends who I need to let go of (if someone tells you they're "always up for doing things" but never makes the first move and takes weeks to get back to you if they do at all, then it's safe to say that you're not going to BFFs).  I don't think I'm going to embark on a year long search for a BFF but it would be nice if, a year from now, that I had some social engagement outside of D or my family.