Why Can’t We Just Be Friends?

As soon as my teen-age daughter left for camp, I peeked at the autographs in her yearbook. “I (heart) you so much. . . . It was great chilling with you in French . . . . We’ve got to kickit in Biology next year. . . . Call me. Let’s chill this summer.”

Almost all said the same thing (loosely translated): “I like you and I want to be your friend.”

Why can’t we say it? Imagine logging in on the computer at work and finding: “You’re really cool; let’s be friends.”

Simplest thing in the world, and yet the older you get, the harder it becomes. Why can’t we be friends?

My almost-friend Rose got fed up with feeling lonely, but she didn’t know where to begin. When you’re 33, you can’t hang around the playground hoping to get into a pickup game of house. So, she put an ad in the personals.

There, near the feverish quests for love, was her simple appeal: Woman seeking women for friendship.

She explained in the ad that she was in good health, had a nice boyfriend and a good job in a largely male profession. But she didn’t seem to have time to make friends and wanted to find someone to talk to, exercise with--someone to, you know, chill with.

She immediately got 50 letters. Like the autographs in my daughter’s yearbook, almost all said the same thing.

“I could have placed that ad myself,” most of the writers began. “I had been thinking of doing exactly what you did.”

I wrote one of those letters to Rose under the guise of wanting to write about her, although I admitted I too could have placed the ad.

When we finally met, I immediately went through that process of elimination that probably explains why adults are so lonely. Despite the fact that she seemed pleasant and sincere, I found myself noticing our differences. She’s a little too young. She has no kids; I do. She’s in a different type of work. Her head’s in a different place. All this, despite the fact that one of my best friends is a single, womanizing, male research scientist.

I asked Rose to let me know what happened in her search for friendship. The results were not really surprising. First of all, to contact the people who had written the eager letters, she had to make a monumental effort to get past their answering machines--the first adult line of defense. Then, when she finally got through or was called back, they couldn’t seem to find a time to meet her. It seems that fear of even a friendship-commitment is rampant these days.

Finally, she and three of the women met for lunch, and it was a disaster. Two were of the same ethnic background and despised each other, making disparaging remarks to Rose about the other’s skin shade. The third only wanted to talk about her alcoholic boyfriend.

Rose found herself so depressed by the experience that she ended up seeing a shrink.

So, I started thinking back to high school and why it was so easy to make friends then, when we didn’t have strong identities that differentiated us. As a teen-ager, I made friends my highest priority--well, just under a boyfriend but way above grades.

“Make new friends but keep the old / These are the silver, those are the gold . . .” we used to write in yearbooks. But as adults, we find it hard to make new friends because we’ve got so much history in common with old ones--even though we have no time for them.

The difference between a one-year friend and a 10-year friend is so great that I like anyone I’ve simply known for 10 years or more. There are people I couldn’t stand when we first met, but whom I adore now just by virtue of familiarity.

Most of the friends I’ve made as an adult are people I got to know from work. Since I’ve been working at home, I find myself doing a lot of talking to the squirrels.

There’s one woman I met this year who I really like, and we’re getting to be friends on the computer, sending each other bizarre messages impugning the other’s sexual morality. It may not be like folding laundry together or a sisterhood-is-powerful kind of situation, but it’s a definite step up from the squirrels.

After I sat down to write this column, I checked my answering machine, hoping that someone had called and wanted to get together--silver, gold, any kind of friend. I actually found this message:

“Alice, I feel terrible. My job is going nowhere, I have no friends and nobody likes me. Will you do something with me?”

The problem was, she didn’t leave her name. And it could have been every woman I know.