Seattle is the first place I’ve lived with the intention to stick around. I always knew I’d leave my hometown, and when I moved for college and grad school, I thought of them as temporary stops. But lately, my role has shifted to the stayer, while people around me leave. One of my best friends moved away during the pandemic, and other friends have decamped for towns with cheaper rent, for new jobs, for a shorter distance to their families. I stopped seeing all but my inner circle; no running into people at the climbing gym, or catching up at a happy hour.
When my birthday rolled around this year, I felt like I should actually do something, since the last two fell in the pre-vaccination COVID era. In the before-times, I’d invite a couple dozen friends to meet me at a brewery, which would inevitably turn into karaoke. I wasn’t sure that was what I actually wanted to do, but I began mentally preparing my guest list. Bad move — that spurred a full-on existential crisis. I thought back to my 2018 and 2019 birthdays, and realized half my friends no longer lived here, or we’d lost touch over the pandemic. Who would I invite now? Would they even come? Who’s really my friend? I do have friends, right?
In a fit of panic, I downloaded an app called Bumble BFF. You may have heard of Bumble, the dating app; BFF is a version of the app that allows you to swipe through people’s profiles to make friends. I met my partner before the heyday of internet dating, so this was my first experience making snap judgments of strangers; it was just as awful as I imagined from hearing my friends’ dating stories. I felt mean rejecting people who were probably perfectly nice, but realistically, if you want to have toddler play dates or spend a lot of profile real estate talking about your “hubby,” we might not have a lot in common.
Most of all, though, I felt embarrassed! While dating via Bumble is now the norm, making friends via Bumble is not. What kind of person needs an app to make friends? This is the part where I feel tempted to assure you that I am actually very likeable and normal and I have friends, real friends, so many friends, all the friends, friendly friends. (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fans: I realized I’m basically rehashing this song.) Admitting you’d maybe like to have more friends feels like admitting failure in some way. I sensed that on the app, too; people post group photos with their friends, or write things on their profiles like “I already have a great circle of friends but I want to grow my girl gang,” or “moved here during the pandemic so I’m looking to branch out!” The sheepishness is palpable: I’m on this app for non-weird reasons — I promise I’m lovable!
In my more gracious moments, I recognize it’s natural to experience the ebbs and flows of friendship, and not any personal failing. I’ve got friends in grad programs, in the last weeks of pregnancy, in a stressful stretch of work, in self-imposed COVID isolation, in the blissful state of vacation; sometimes a lot of my friends are around, and sometimes it feels like they’re all doing something else. Sometimes I’m around, and sometimes I’m not. That’s just life. But life as a person who works from home alone most days can get pretty lonely pretty quickly.
Within an hour of setting up my Bumble BFF profile and swiping, I had a few matches. New friends, maybe! But I underestimated how hard it is to strike up a conversation with a stranger via text, devoid of any context. In person, I’m totally comfortable introducing myself to a stranger, where there’s body language and usually some shared experience to talk about, be it writing or climbing or a mutual friend or just the physical space we’re both inhabiting. But online, I found myself asking milquetoast things like, “You’re into bikes? Where do you like to ride?” or “What kind of climbing are you into?” Plus, I have no clue what the etiquette is for how much chatting is appropriate before suggesting an in-person meet-up. I wish I could say I’ve figured it out, but I am admittedly awful at Bumble BFF banter and have let many a conversation die. After about a month on the app, I’ve only met up with one person, and she initiated it. (She’s great and we’re going to hang out again soon!)
Perhaps what I needed more than the app was an admission to myself that my social world had shrunk, and that I wanted to build it back up again. Making new friends is one thing, but I realized I could also be better about seeing the people I already know and like. I said yes a lot more: yes to impromptu plans, yes to taking a new class, yes to happy hours, yes to leaving my house (but also yes to having people over). I tried to instigate more plans, too; instead of sulking that I had no weekend plans, I checked in with people I hadn’t seen in awhile, people I’d like to know better. I am writing this from a co-working space I just joined with another writer friend; we’re here to work, not necessarily to make friends, but just seeing other people in a shared space makes me feel a bit more connected to the outside world, a bit more like a human being. And though it might feel awkward to admit, isn’t that feeling of connection what we all really want?
Jane, I have to say that for a long time a lot of my friends were in their near eighties–while I am in my early forties. We do strange things to make friends. “But you must have some young friends, too,” someone in their forties said to me recently, tired of hearing me talk of Esther and Fran and a woman named Stevie. But of my lady friends–their kids have moved away, they’re always happy to see me, they can be incredibly affectionate, and they validate my choices by telling me strange stories of times long ago. Just imagine gossip from forty years ago–kids long grown fathered by men that were not married to their mother, spouses who left and then came back. My ladies in their eighties know the way life can curve up and down, do a bit of loop-de-loop, before settling into a comfortable soft rise and fall.
This is so beautiful and humble in a way that only someone who surrenders to curiosity and unexpected awe in the fringes can be. Here in Baltimore I find that Mother Nature is oozing, blossoming, and howling in all the forgotten ‘worthless’ pockets of land sandwiched between the railways and the roads along stormwater streams. This incredibly resilient life force is just daily living for the sparrow and the squirrel but so inspiring in a world humans seem to be actively destroying. Thank you. Just found this site and LOVE it!
Jordan, you would also like Emma Marris’s writing, if you don’t already know it. She’s done a bunch of posts on this site, plus written a couple of books, one of which, The Rambunctious Garden, is exactly what your comment is about.
Oh the inner dialogues us Salish Sea hermit crabs have as we dare to scurry from the eelgrass beds to practice/resume meeting others. Jane, I’ll shyly smile or wave to you should we – unknowling – cross paths amid the blackberry thickets, owl groves, and gravely shores of Discovery Park.