Dating for Friends

I’m craving endless nights curdled up in couches watching Youtube videos about oysters and showing a slideshow of a trip to Italy. I want to sacrifice sleep because that’s my biggest love language (which I suppose is just quality time but the former sounds more dramatic and monumental). I would rather fall asleep on the couch at 3am, lulled by the sounds of my friends also sleepily laughing, than be sensible and “call it a night” at 11pm.

I will drive for almost twelve hours round trip to spend two nights and one and a half days with you - or to be transparent I will convince my friend L, who is a much better driver than me and doesn’t mind driving at night to get to Montreal to see friends we both miss dearly.

It’s an ache. Missing friends is tricky because unlike a romantic partner, who I certainly expect to see every day, friends are meant to have their own lives (how dare they). Those lives will lead them to move to another city for law school, to go on big, long bike trips through Chile, to fall in love, to get married, to have children. Friends will make a life beyond me and yet I still crave doing it all with them. I crave sharing the mundane - tell me about that bill you forgot to pay, show me what cute little outfits you wore this week, let’s get distracted making breakfast so we’re now making muffins from scratch and scrambled eggs, convince me to get bangs, convince me not to get bangs.

But I can’t get married to my friends (I’m monogamous, sue me!), and I don’t like to bike for more than a couple of hours, I’ve never been camping (because the idea of pooping in a hole really unnerves me, which is why I should at least do it once), and in fact I’m now an ocean away from them. I won’t get to see with any kind of regularity those little humans they’ve created that are extensions of people I love so deeply, and so I will become a random woman in a photo and name that vaguely sounds familiar - and I can’t quite explain why that shatters me.

So I have to settle for hearing about it. Seeing photos. Calling them when time zones line up. But I ache for them. I long for the day schedules and finances line up and I can see them all IRL and spend the day walking around talking and laughing. Or playing dress up and taking pictures in beautiful dresses in the park while we eat pizza.

My dream is to grow old in a house with all of them. I told this to my husband and he said I basically long for a commune. And if that’s a commute, then so be it, THAT’S WHAT I WANT.

Because I have fantastic friends and my life is better with them. And now, far away from them, I’m thinking a lot about what makes a good friendship. Friendships require chemistry and intention just like any kind of romantic relationship. So what do you do when you land in a new place (physically or perhaps emotionally) and you want to make friends? “Dating” is for finding sexual or romantic partners - what is it called when you want to date to find friends???

A year ago I moved to London, UK (my Bridget Jones era - minus the love triangle and plus a husband) and one day on the subway (or tube - don’t roll your eyes, I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t) I looked around and my breath stopped as I looked at strangers’ faces: “You probably have friends”. I realized that, here in this city, I didn’t.

And yes we knew some people when we moved here and met some more kind, welcoming, and generous folks - but I craved intimacy. The kind of intimacy where I can confess my deepest, darkest insecurities that are not in any way based on facts (read this to get a sense of what lives in my head rent free), where I cry in front of them from either laughter or heartbreak, where they tease me in hilarious and loving ways, where we ramble on about a random subject like what are the best things to get at IKEA and why for a minimum of three hours.

And now you’re going: “Wow you have a really specific list for what makes you friends” and to that I say yes! I am really lucky to have amazing friends. The type of friends that feel like soulmates. Like in a past life we were witches in a coven together, or we were mushrooms growing on the same patch of grass, or we were a pair of bonded kittens. So yes, I have incredibly high standards for friends. And yes, this is unrealistic to expect from someone I just met because, as my therapist likes to remind me, the kind of intimacy I’m craving requires time to develop.

I think this need for intimacy is probably a symptom of having moved so much growing up. Since I was born till the age of 18, I did not live in the same country for more than 4 years. I had to make friends. The first day of school as the “new kid” is the tenth circle of hell. You know no one. You are simultaneously cool because you’re a shiny novel thing, and uncool because stranger-danger. But as much as I dreaded the first day of school, by the end of it I would leave with the beginning of at least one potential friendship.

But this is the first time in my life where I chose to move. It’s the first time I’ve moved without my family. It’s the first time I’ve moved and haven’t immediately gone to school. Now I wish I had school! Or a real job! At least then there would be a pool of fish that had the potential to become friend fish because it’s impossible to not make friends with at least one fish when you spend the same amount of time in the same body of water for a prolonged period of time.

So how do you express the interest to be more than just strangers? If “flirting” is for dating, then what is the art of courting in order to make a new friend called? Especially as an adult! In the same way that if there is no romantic chemistry when someone approaches you and asks you out and it feels cringey, if there’s no friend-chemistry, someone coming up to you and randomly saying “wanna hang out but not in a romantic way I’m just looking for friends” sounds desperate. But if maybe I compliment your shoes and you tell me a story about how you got them and I volley back something interesting about what you just said cause I listen and so on, maybe we’d end up having a coffee after our yoga class? What is the word for that? How do I optimize my chances to do that?

Classes! I knew we were going to get here. I’m doing that, obviously. And annoyingly it works. But here’s my argument. Finding friends is just as hard as finding “the one”. You can widen your pool and go on dates but at the end of day you can’t force chemistry and that is true for both lovers and friends. Also, one of the closest friendships I have made here is with T, who I met because we share the same agent in Canada. We bonded over Fall Out Boy, and what I love about her is that she asks great, thoughtful questions and even though she’s only known me for a short time, she can already read me to shreds because she’s so curious and observant.

Elizabeth Day writes in Friendaholic:

“All this time I’d been busily making and maintaining connections and I’d actually undermined the thing that was important to me. I’d become a worse friend to the few who really counted in my desperation to be accepted by the many I barely knew.

It wasn’t, in fact, that I had too many friends, it was that I’d misunderstood the fundamental concept of friendship, which is that it should be stable, reciprocal, and attentive.”

I too, am a Friendaholic, I have come to realize. And I have also made this mistake.

With a year to reflect, I realize I was putting too much pressure on myself and these strangers. I joined Bumble BFF and ferociously swiped as if meeting as many new people as possible could cure my loneliness and soothe the constant missing. “Tu me manques”. In French, “I miss you” is literally translated into, “you are missing from me”. I’ve always felt that captures the feeling better.

I’ve had to be honest with myself about whether or not I see this other person in my life, and whether I fit into theirs. Like could I text them when I’m panicking because I’m randomly bleeding out of my ass (yes this happened and bless you friends who studied medicine - thank you for answering my texts C and K!) or when I’m totally overthinking a work situation and need someone to proof read my emails because I can’t tell if I’m being assertive or just a plain old bitch anymore (thank you A and A) or can I ask them to look over my math for a budget because I’m pretty sure I have dyslexia for numbers and they just simply will never make sense and this grant is due tomorrow (thank you C and M!)? And just as importantly, am I willing to do the same for them?

But with those friendships I didn't set out to ask those things of them or vice versa. Our relationships grew and flourished over time because all I knew when I first met them or spent significant time with them was: I like this person, I’d like to spend more time with them. And I was lucky that they felt the same way. And slowly, we proved this to one another over and over in small and big ways.

There are different expectations in a friendship versus a romantic relationship and I’m fascinated by those differences but I also marvel at how fundamentally they are the same. If a friend is struggling with a romantic partner, I often ask them, would you accept this behaviour if I did this to you? It always shifts the perspective because often the answer is no. Both require trust, understanding and respect. And knowing you can rely on one another. All these things take time to build (how rude).

So no, I can't just go up to people and tell them that I feel lonely and scared and unsure about what’s in store now that I’m here because they’d be like “No too much piss off” (you can tell I’m really immersed in the culture now). But also, it’s selfish. I’d be using them to make myself feel better and that’s not good for any relationship - romantic or platonic.

Time, like in any good love story, is key - and also for cheese. And in the meantime I’m lucky to have many finely aged cheeses in my life and I’m fermenting some really lovely new ones. Have I run the course of this metaphor, is it gross now? Whatever. Learn from my mistakes. Be patient and intentional when you’re dating for friends.