Image courtesy TheDebutanteBall.com
A friend recommended MWF Seeking BFF to me a while ago, and I pre-ordered the British paperback off Amazon immediately. Its a book about a woman who follows her boyfriend (subsequently, her husband) to Chicago, a city where her social network is a little thin. After a couple years, she realizes that she hasn’t found her go-to girl in Chicago: she has a social life, but no one she can call on a moment’s notice.
The friend recommended the book to me because, obviously, I am also in the process of finding a social life in Cambridge. The author of MWF Seeking BFF goes on a friend-date once a week for a year – meeting friends of friends, going friend-speed-dating, at one point even hiring a friend for an afternoon – and reports back. The good news is, after a year of working really hard to make friends, she calls it a success: she’s met lots of people she really likes, and some have become close friends.
Its not exactly literature, but MWF Seeking BFF is a solid read. I didn’t love the whining she did at the beginning – “I don’t have anyone to get a pedicure with!” – but I empathized just the same. And I took heart from the conclusion: almost everyone the author, Rachel Bertsche, met was open to new friendships and was pleased to be invited on a friend-date, even though not all of them became friends in the end.
The thing that I did wonder the whole time was, what had she been doing the previous two years of her life? I have spent six months in Cambridge frantically trolling for friends, and while I’m not popular, exactly, I’ve met some people on whom I can call in a crisis and who have lifetime-friend potential. When I mentioned the book to My Friend Lauren, I said I didn’t think the experiment – 52 friend-dates in a year – would translate to Cambridge, because its too small and because so much of the social life centres on the university. She said “and its so un-English” – which was an important factor that I hadn’t even considered.
For the most part, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how friendly English people are, in defiance of cultural stereotypes. Its been better than I was expecting – although when i said that to a Swiss friend, she said “What were you expecting?!” We’ve made a commitment to being in the country for a long enough time that people are willing to commit to getting to know us. And of course the advantage to living in a university town is that new people are always arriving, most of whom don’t have a pre-existing social network in the area.
That said, if anyone has suggestions for ways of making new friends, I do welcome suggestions…
snacks & adventure 
just for the record, your mother thinks it is un-American too-
That sounds like an interesting read. I think the 52 “friend dates” in a year is a little bit of a strange way to go about it, but it would definitely push you out of your comfort zone and force you to meet a ton of new people.
Guy and I have similar issues, believe it or not. We have friends, but half the time it feels like we do stuff together almost more out of habit than anything else. It’s really hard for people to make new besties, even if they’ve been living in one place for a long time. We’ve been making baby steps at reaching out, though. There’s a board game organization that we’ve dropped in on a couple times and there’s dozens of people that attend. I used to think we liked board games but the people there are on an entirely different plane than those folks… Anyway, there were some cool people there, so maybe there’s a club/group/whatever near you that shares your interests. We have another possible pals lead that we found through Google+, of all places. I was reading posts made nearby on the phone app and commented on someone’s post, which eventually lead to Guy and I deciding to meet up with him and his partner at some point.