I just finished reading this book:
(MWF Seeking BFF, by Rachel Bertsche)
and I have major logorrhea about it. You can't read this book and then just say "hmm, ok, moving on." No. You think about the author and whether you could be friends with her. You think about all the times you've moved to a new place and how you made friends there. You analyze the way she went about making friends and whether you have done/would do the same. And then you are compelled to talk about this stuff with whoever will listen. Guess what? That means you (and Jeremy, but he's already heard all this).
As you can tell from the title, this is one of those year-long "project" books where the author does something for a year and then gets a book deal for his/her troubles. In this case, the project is the author trying to make new friends in a new city (Chicago). This 28-year-old, newly married woman wants someone - a BFF - she can call or text (or someone who will call or text her) saying, "what are we doing today?" or "pedicures in 30 minutes." So she goes on 52 "girl-dates" (plus one gay man-date) over the period of a year, each one with someone new who could turn out to be that BFF she wants so badly.
On the face of it, this is a problem we can all identify with, which might explain why this book was so effortlessly easy to read. It's not as short as you might think and yet I found myself happily reading along through all 350 pages - after I got past the first 10 pages, that is. I almost put it down a few times at the very beginning. Because you see, this woman is very, very different from me. It can hardly be overstated how different she is from me. Before I sat down to write this post I promised myself I wouldn't bring up the e- or i-words but I CANNOT HELP MYSELF. Rachel Bertsche is an extrovert in the extreme (in my opinion). As an introvert, reading this book was like unto watching a train wreck, in slow motion. I was horrified, and yet I could not look away. Just reading about all the effort the author put into seeking out, meeting, socializing with, and then following up with complete strangers almost gave me hives. The cooking classes, the improv classes, the yoga classes, the twice-a-day meetups, the drinks, the dinners, the constantly driving across town, the neverending BRUNCHES. It exhausted me. It was like a glimpse into my own personal hell. I could not have handled her regime for long.
And yet. Even as I recoiled at all the social interaction (which to her was energizing, but which to me would be draining at that level), I understood her motivations. She seems like a really great person and I don't doubt her need for non-spousal interaction. She backs up most of her feelings with statistics about how we are x% happier when we have x close friends, or how interaction with x friends x times a year is necessary to maintain friendships, or how it's so dangerous to be best friends with your husband. Some of her opinions (and a few statistics) I had to just ignore because I disagree with them strongly, particularly when she talked about what a relationship with a husband should be like. Here are three passages from the book on this topic:
"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."
Disagree.
"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."
Disagree.
"Confiding in your spouse: good. Confiding in no one but your spouse: bad. What if something happens to your hubby? Or if he's the very person you want to vent about? Then who do you turn to?"
Disagree.
The book is filled with moments like this that underscore how different the author and I are, or at least how different we are regarding friends and husbands. And that's ok. It's her book, after all.
Which brings me to the element of life experience. Like I said, this book will make you think about every time you've moved to a new place and had to start from scratch. In the author's probable opinion, extrapolating from things she said in this book, what Jeremy and I did - got married and moved to Russia for a year, far away from all friends and family - was a horrible idea. Except, I actually think it was one of the most valuable, formative years of my life and certainly of our marriage. The author seems to mourn the fact that things are different between you and your BFFs after marriage. But I guess I've never seen that as something that is necessarily negative.
I think also of when we moved to Damascus, Syria. My circle of friends there - specifically of female, English-speaking friends, to be comparable to what this book is about - consisted of one (1) girl who was in Jeremy's program (hi, Hannah!). She was busy studying so it's not like we chatted all the time, but if I ever, ever did find myself chatting, it was pretty much with her. And who knows if we would have been friends in the wide-open free world? I think we probably would have - I was very lucky that the one girl in Jeremy's program was someone who was so easy to get along with and who had interesting things to say - but there was me and there was her and we made the best of it. I never felt like I was wilting for lack of female companionship. And I realize that maybe (ok, almost definitely) that makes ME the weird one, not the author.
The author's struggles with making friends with people in different life stages was another interesting point. She is married but childless, and at first she shied away from making friends with women who have children. I get that - it can be weird sometimes. In many ways, children are the great equalizer. When you have them, you can be friends with almost anyone else who does. When you don't, it can be more of a challenge. This is one area where I am glad to be Mormon. Because of the way our church works, I no longer bat an eye at being real, genuine friends with, say, a much-older mom of teenagers, or a retired woman old enough to be my grandma, or a young woman pregnant with her first child. Mormonism is a great equalizer, too.
Now, having said all this, I got to thinking about this post I wrote a few years ago about what it felt like to be a stranger in a strange town (Tucson, Arizona) as a new mother with a perpetually absent PhD husband. I quote myself:
"I don't make friends easily and at times it seemed like everyone but me [in Tucson] had a group they belonged to, or family across town. I was socially awkward and always pregnant or nursing and my husband was largely AWOL due to his doctoral studies and I knew that if we could just make it out of Tucson together, as a family, then things would be better...I have only recently been able to think about some of those dark days and realize that it wasn't all bad, not by a long shot...Despite my social awkwardness, after a year or two I ended up making very good friends (God bless Janae and her Friday morning games group) who I miss very much."
This is the closest I come to personally understanding what the author was going through when she moved to Chicago. And so those were the feelings I drew upon to try to sympathize with her year of rabid friend-pursuit. So I'm not trying to say I'm immune to the perils of having no friends, but I think it's safe to say that I am content with having much fewer friends than the author.
There's more I could say about this book, particularly how the Brafmans' research cited by the author goes a long way toward explaining why it's easier for expats to make friends with other expats, and Mormons to make friends with other Mormons (and when you're Mormon AND an expat, well...), but I think I've said enough.
In conclusion, while I found that I am very different from the author, I appreciated this glimpse into life as a normal (? - extroverted, anyway) person. It made me more understanding of people I meet here who seem to be reaching out for some connection to people in the community, and I am more likely to respond to those people now that I know more about what it feels like to feel lonely. Just don't expect me to go out for lunches and drinks and brunches six days a week, mmkay?
(MWF Seeking BFF, by Rachel Bertsche)
and I have major logorrhea about it. You can't read this book and then just say "hmm, ok, moving on." No. You think about the author and whether you could be friends with her. You think about all the times you've moved to a new place and how you made friends there. You analyze the way she went about making friends and whether you have done/would do the same. And then you are compelled to talk about this stuff with whoever will listen. Guess what? That means you (and Jeremy, but he's already heard all this).
As you can tell from the title, this is one of those year-long "project" books where the author does something for a year and then gets a book deal for his/her troubles. In this case, the project is the author trying to make new friends in a new city (Chicago). This 28-year-old, newly married woman wants someone - a BFF - she can call or text (or someone who will call or text her) saying, "what are we doing today?" or "pedicures in 30 minutes." So she goes on 52 "girl-dates" (plus one gay man-date) over the period of a year, each one with someone new who could turn out to be that BFF she wants so badly.
On the face of it, this is a problem we can all identify with, which might explain why this book was so effortlessly easy to read. It's not as short as you might think and yet I found myself happily reading along through all 350 pages - after I got past the first 10 pages, that is. I almost put it down a few times at the very beginning. Because you see, this woman is very, very different from me. It can hardly be overstated how different she is from me. Before I sat down to write this post I promised myself I wouldn't bring up the e- or i-words but I CANNOT HELP MYSELF. Rachel Bertsche is an extrovert in the extreme (in my opinion). As an introvert, reading this book was like unto watching a train wreck, in slow motion. I was horrified, and yet I could not look away. Just reading about all the effort the author put into seeking out, meeting, socializing with, and then following up with complete strangers almost gave me hives. The cooking classes, the improv classes, the yoga classes, the twice-a-day meetups, the drinks, the dinners, the constantly driving across town, the neverending BRUNCHES. It exhausted me. It was like a glimpse into my own personal hell. I could not have handled her regime for long.
And yet. Even as I recoiled at all the social interaction (which to her was energizing, but which to me would be draining at that level), I understood her motivations. She seems like a really great person and I don't doubt her need for non-spousal interaction. She backs up most of her feelings with statistics about how we are x% happier when we have x close friends, or how interaction with x friends x times a year is necessary to maintain friendships, or how it's so dangerous to be best friends with your husband. Some of her opinions (and a few statistics) I had to just ignore because I disagree with them strongly, particularly when she talked about what a relationship with a husband should be like. Here are three passages from the book on this topic:
"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."
Disagree.
"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."
Disagree.
"Confiding in your spouse: good. Confiding in no one but your spouse: bad. What if something happens to your hubby? Or if he's the very person you want to vent about? Then who do you turn to?"
Disagree.
The book is filled with moments like this that underscore how different the author and I are, or at least how different we are regarding friends and husbands. And that's ok. It's her book, after all.
Which brings me to the element of life experience. Like I said, this book will make you think about every time you've moved to a new place and had to start from scratch. In the author's probable opinion, extrapolating from things she said in this book, what Jeremy and I did - got married and moved to Russia for a year, far away from all friends and family - was a horrible idea. Except, I actually think it was one of the most valuable, formative years of my life and certainly of our marriage. The author seems to mourn the fact that things are different between you and your BFFs after marriage. But I guess I've never seen that as something that is necessarily negative.
I think also of when we moved to Damascus, Syria. My circle of friends there - specifically of female, English-speaking friends, to be comparable to what this book is about - consisted of one (1) girl who was in Jeremy's program (hi, Hannah!). She was busy studying so it's not like we chatted all the time, but if I ever, ever did find myself chatting, it was pretty much with her. And who knows if we would have been friends in the wide-open free world? I think we probably would have - I was very lucky that the one girl in Jeremy's program was someone who was so easy to get along with and who had interesting things to say - but there was me and there was her and we made the best of it. I never felt like I was wilting for lack of female companionship. And I realize that maybe (ok, almost definitely) that makes ME the weird one, not the author.
The author's struggles with making friends with people in different life stages was another interesting point. She is married but childless, and at first she shied away from making friends with women who have children. I get that - it can be weird sometimes. In many ways, children are the great equalizer. When you have them, you can be friends with almost anyone else who does. When you don't, it can be more of a challenge. This is one area where I am glad to be Mormon. Because of the way our church works, I no longer bat an eye at being real, genuine friends with, say, a much-older mom of teenagers, or a retired woman old enough to be my grandma, or a young woman pregnant with her first child. Mormonism is a great equalizer, too.
Now, having said all this, I got to thinking about this post I wrote a few years ago about what it felt like to be a stranger in a strange town (Tucson, Arizona) as a new mother with a perpetually absent PhD husband. I quote myself:
"I don't make friends easily and at times it seemed like everyone but me [in Tucson] had a group they belonged to, or family across town. I was socially awkward and always pregnant or nursing and my husband was largely AWOL due to his doctoral studies and I knew that if we could just make it out of Tucson together, as a family, then things would be better...I have only recently been able to think about some of those dark days and realize that it wasn't all bad, not by a long shot...Despite my social awkwardness, after a year or two I ended up making very good friends (God bless Janae and her Friday morning games group) who I miss very much."
This is the closest I come to personally understanding what the author was going through when she moved to Chicago. And so those were the feelings I drew upon to try to sympathize with her year of rabid friend-pursuit. So I'm not trying to say I'm immune to the perils of having no friends, but I think it's safe to say that I am content with having much fewer friends than the author.
There's more I could say about this book, particularly how the Brafmans' research cited by the author goes a long way toward explaining why it's easier for expats to make friends with other expats, and Mormons to make friends with other Mormons (and when you're Mormon AND an expat, well...), but I think I've said enough.
In conclusion, while I found that I am very different from the author, I appreciated this glimpse into life as a normal (? - extroverted, anyway) person. It made me more understanding of people I meet here who seem to be reaching out for some connection to people in the community, and I am more likely to respond to those people now that I know more about what it feels like to feel lonely. Just don't expect me to go out for lunches and drinks and brunches six days a week, mmkay?