MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search For A New Best Friend

I was pretty invested in my desire to read this book - I told my husband, look she's just like me: married, recently moved to a new place, unable to make any close friends there, relying on long distance friendships and then she makes friends! I want to be like her! And her self-description was so promising: we're both young professional bibliophiles, who like yoga and are Jewish with an affinity for people who share our curly hair. I wanted [a:Rachel Bertsche 4789751 Rachel Bertsche http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1314039364p2/4789751.jpg] to be my BFF and if not her, then I wanted her to share her secrets about how to make friends like her.Unfortunately for me, the similarities between myself and Bertsche pretty much end in the one-liner. She's the sort of woman who only has female friends and uses terms like “Gay BFF” unironically and gets mani-pedis; I'm the sort of woman who uses terms like “heterosexism” and consider happy hours a sophisticated form of torture. Also, she gets a huge boost in her friend count from people she already knows in Chicago - friends of friends, coworkers, her husband's friends - and from people who read her newspaper article; not exactly strategies I can utilize. So on that hand, a disappointment. On the other hand, her research on friendship is fascinating. I particularly was interested in the search for a definition of “best friend,” the discussion of social role support and face-to-face versus side-to-side friendships.

This book was surprisingly interesting! I really expected to be annoyed by the gimmick - a healthy, happy woman goes on 52 friend dates in a year to try to make new BFFs. And that's basically what the book was. Rachel is smart, funny, financially comfortable, likable and not really challenged by life in any obvious way. Still, her acceptance of the fact that she does not have the friends she wants and her aplomb at asking women she is interested in to try out friendship with her was refreshing. While reading about her dates with her mostly charming potential friends, I thought a lot about ways I could be more receptive to 1) closer relationships with my existing friends and 2)enhancing friendships with existing acquaintances. I might work on this. According to the research Rachel summarizes, it would do me good.

Blogger's story of going on 50+ “friend dates” within a year of moving to Chicago as a 27-year-old. A funny and interesting account of an impressive/exhausting feat, sprinkled with sound-bytes from related social psychology research. I thought it was cute, but I skimmed it - one can only take so much of a 27-year-old woman's musings.