MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend - Softcover

Bertsche, Rachel

 
9780345524942: MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345524942 ISBN 13: 9780345524942
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

When Rachel Bertsche first moves to Chicago, she’s thrilled to finally share a zip code, let alone an apartment, with her boyfriend. But shortly after getting married, Bertsche realizes that her new life is missing one thing: friends. Sure, she has plenty of BFFs—in New York and San Francisco and Boston and Washington, D.C. Still, in her adopted hometown, there’s no one to call at the last minute for girl talk over brunch or a reality-TV marathon over a bottle of wine. Taking matters into her own hands, Bertsche develops a plan: She’ll go on fifty-two friend-dates, one per week for a year, in hopes of meeting her new Best Friend Forever.

In her thought-provoking, uproarious memoir, Bertsche blends the story of her girl-dates (whom she meets everywhere from improv class to friend rental websites) with the latest social research to examine how difficult—and hilariously awkward—it is to make new friends as an adult. In a time when women will happily announce they need a man but are embarrassed to admit they need a BFF, Bertsche uncovers the reality that no matter how great your love life is, you’ve gotta have friends.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rachel Bertsche is a journalist in Chicago, where she lives with her husband. Her work has appeared in Marie Claire, More, Teen Vogue, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Fitness, Women's Health, CNN.com, and more. Before leaving New York (and all her friends) for the Midwest, Bertsche was an editor at O: The Oprah Magazine.

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CHAPTER 1

FRIEND-DATE 1. As I approach the restaurant, there's a girl down the block walking in my direction. I squint to make her out through the January flurries. Average height, brown hair, peacoat. An everygirl. That's got to be her. When I enter Market, the new bar next door to my office, I do a quick once-over of the area near the hostess. Empty. The peacoat girl was definitely Hannah. She'll walk in the door in about 20 seconds. 19. 18_._._._My head starts spinning. When she gets here, do we hug? Or handshake? Hug is a little familiar for someone I've only met over email. But a handshake is pretty formal for potential buddies meeting for a drink. We did exchange "I feel like I know you already!" emails. And when you know someone, you hug them, right? 11. 10. 9_._._._I don't want to be overzealous in my hugging though. Definitely don't want to be that girl. What if I lean in for an embrace as she sticks out her hand for the shake? We'll end up in one of those one-arm-around-each-other half-hugs. That already happened to me once this week, with a colleague. Yikes.

She's here. We make eye contact. "Rachel?" "Hannah?" She goes right in for the hug. I reciprocate. Flawlessly, I might add. There's no sign I spent the last half-minute rehearsing this in my mind.

Let's back up. My inaugural girl-date and I exchanged our first email two months ago. She came to me via my best friend Sara. Actually, we should back up a bit further. Five years, to be exact.

After I graduated college, I moved home to New York and Matt moved to Philadelphia for law school. About a month into his Villanova stint, he broke up with me. I know now this is the natural course of events for post-grad long-distance relationships. Most of the women I know who married their college sweethearts went through the same thing. But at the time, I was devastated. I was quite sure Matt was out of my life forever and I was furious with myself for wasting years on him. I was lonely and frustrated and decided I needed a new social outlet to distract me. I started a book club.

I invited my other best friend, Callie, and Callie invited her cousin, Lauren. Then each of us invited two more people. The only requirement was that we bring in ladies the others didn't know. The idea was that if we were strangers, we wouldn't let gossip distract us from the book discussions. For three years, nine of us met every month. Over time, girls moved away and others were invited to replace them. Soon after I moved to Chicago, Hannah was called in as a relief book-clubber. After two years, and one bad breakup, she decided to leave Manhattan for Chicago, her hometown.

I was elated when Sara, who also belonged to the book club, emailed to tell me Hannah was moving here. "You guys will be great friends," she wrote. "She has a book club she can invite you into or she can start a new one with you." Amazing. I'd wanted to be in a book club since I arrived in Chicago but when I mentioned it to my friend from college, she said "How 'bout a dinner club?" I once even tried to finagle an invite to a coworker's book group when I overheard her mention the titles they'd read. "If you ever need another person, I'd love to join!" She looked at me as if I'd asked to join an orgy.

I sent Sara an email shortly before Hannah was due to arrive. "What's her email address? I want to grab her as my BFF ASAP." When I next checked my Gmail, I had two responses from Sara. The first had Hannah's email address. The second said "Oops. Didn't mean to cc her. I guess the ice is broken."

Sara is the smartest girl I know, but her fleeting moments of idiocy are made worse by the fact that she has no idea she's just been a huge idiot. After she typed Hannah's name in the TO: field to get her email address, she left it there. She thought nothing of this slight oversight, cc'ing her again on the "oops!"

She'd just forwarded my first potential girl-date an email in which I laid claim to her as my best friend forever! We'd never even met! Sara is as low-key as I am overexcited, so it all seemed peachy keen to her. I was mortified.

Despite our memorable introduction-we'll laugh about it one day?- Hannah wasn't scared off by the declaration of my intentions. We decided to meet for drinks.

So here we are. Hannah and I settle into our seats, order two glasses of wine and start chatting. When she starts to ask if I'm hungry, I shout "Yes!" before she finishes the question. I eat when I'm nervous.

The conversation is off to a comfortable start. We each explain how we're connected to the other book club girls, which leads to a wider- cast name game. Oh, you went to Tripp Lake, you must know Jill! You're from Glencoe? Do you know the Bernsteins? We come from similar upper-middle-class suburban worlds. We know plenty of people in common.

Hannah grew up forty minutes outside of the city. It becomes clear, as she tells me about her recent move, that she already has plenty of friends in town. "So, you know a ton of people in Chicago?" I'm not happy with where this is going.

"Yeah, about a million."

A pause and then I hear myself saying, "I wish you didn't have so many friends."

Um, that was weird. Did I just say that? That's not what I meant. Well, it is what I meant, but I didn't mean to say it out loud. At least I caught myself before saying, "How many, exactly?" That's what I really want to know.

It may sound like the question of a crazy jealous stalker, but it's actually a logical inquiry. A person can only maintain so many social contacts. Facebook may trick us into thinking we have five hundred friends, but research shows there's a saturation point for actual interpersonal relationships.

It all goes back to the chimps. When British anthropologist Robin Dunbar was studying the behaviors of primates in 1993, he noticed their social groups were generally limited in size. Chimps, for example, could not maintain tribes of more than 50. For any species of nonhuman primates, Dunbar found the "mean group size is directly related to relative neocortical volume." In English, he's saying the size of your brain determines how many relationships you can maintain. Chimps can have about 50 friends. Since human brains are bigger, we can keep up a wider social network. The exact number Dunbar proposed was 148.4, but the Dunbar Number, as it has come to be known, is 150.

Social network means something different today than it did back in the nineties. Dunbar didn't care about the number of people who follow you on Twitter. He was talking about relationships "that depend on extensive personal knowledge based on face-to-face interaction for their stability." Reading someone's status update doesn't count.

When I came upon Dunbar's Number, I realized it was time to do some math. People don't have to be close friends to qualify as part of the 150. They just have to fit into your social group, even if you haven't spoken in a while. If you saw them, you might "have to do a lot of catching up, but they know you fit into their social world and you know they fit into yours," Dunbar told the Wall Street Journal. "You have a history." I whipped out my wedding invite list. Once I removed the guests who are exclusively Matt's friends, and the significant others who have since broken up with my friends or vice versa, I determined that I had sixty-four invitees who fit into my Dunbar web. Then I checked out the Facebook

friends who didn't make the guest list. There were thirty-six people with whom I have communicated in the last year, or who I would actually stop and talk to if I saw them on the street. I'm generally a social person, but I've been known to run in the other direction to avoid small talk. Family falls under the Dunbar umbrella, too, if you maintain independent relationships with them, so I added another thirty-I've got a lot of...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345524942
ISBN 13 
9780345524942
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
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