by Jessica Pan
Pete turns on the radio to cut the tension in the room. Just as Rod Stewart’s song “Maggie May” starts to play, my dad’s eyes open. He stares at us groggily. Then Pete slowly takes him off the ventilator, and my dad starts talking. Just like that, he is back.
So many things scare me in my daily life: talking to strangers, driving on the freeway, public speaking—but losing a parent will leave such a massive, gaping hole in my heart and life that I can’t even bear to think about it realistically for more than thirty seconds without losing it. There’s a clarity that comes with seeing everything in such sharp relief. In this moment, as my father has just come to after open-heart surgery, I am so elated I’m practically manic.
I will need to hold on to this feeling very tightly, because over the next few days we spend most daylight hours in the hospital, keeping my dad company while he recovers in the ICU. This means I am with my mother for about seventeen hours a day, an experience we haven’t endured since I was, say, seven, and I’m pretty sure that back then I was allowed to watch more TV alone.
My dad is resting. But my mom doesn’t know how to do this—instead, she is filling the silences.
What I had not anticipated about flying into L.A. to be there for my dad: I’d inadvertently enrolled in extroverting boot camp, with my mother as Team Leader.
It is a fast and furious baptism by fire. My mother talks to people in the hospital elevator, joining their ongoing conversations with a frightening lack of constraint. “The actress you are talking about is Alicia Vikander,” she says to one group. “And she is beautiful.” She chats with doormen, she stops a man putting cream in his coffee at Starbucks to ask how long the route is to Wilshire Boulevard, even though I know she knows the way. She chats with women in the bathroom about the pros and cons of Weight Watchers.
The woman waves to people while we walk around a nearby park.
Twice in one day she joins conversations as she’s passing by. Two nurses, a good thirty feet away, are talking about a movie that they can’t remember the name of. “WHIPLASH,” she shouts across the ICU, and then adds, “I HAVEN’T EVEN SEEN IT!”
And serving as the baseline for all this chatter, the type of small talk that sets my teeth on edge, my mom also talks to the nurse Pete a lot. But this is good small talk. This is “Take your mind off the fact that your loved one is still attached to many tubes” chat, and I am grateful to her for making it. We find out that Pete’s Chinese grandparents are from the same village as my dad’s parents, that they came over in 1948, that he grew up in San Francisco, that he knows where to get the best Korean food in LA (he makes a list of places for us). In turn, my mother tells him about where she and my dad have been in China, where they used to live in San Francisco, and their own favorite restaurants in LA.
Meanwhile, my dad slowly gets better and stronger in the ICU.
Five days in and Pete tells us that we probably won’t see him again, because he has a couple of days off and my dad will likely be released before he starts his next shift.
My heart jolts. Pete is leaving? Our Pete? I’ve become so attached to him. So has my mother.
“I really like Pete,” “Me too,” is a daily incantation that we make in the parking lot as we leave each night.
Pete had seen us all sob and cry and fight. He’s drawn my dad’s blood, given him medicine, made sure he was eating the right food. He’s also seen me wrestle my mother as I pried her iPhone out of her hands so I could turn off the sound on her typing and message notifications. Every. Single. Day.
Honestly, the man knows too much. But his warmth, his willingness to chat and to be disarmingly open with perfect strangers, has made this hellish experience bearable. He makes me want to make an effort to extrovert more: I wanted to be someone’s Pete one day.
✽ ✽ ✽
After a week in the ICU, my dad is finally released, and the LA apartment feels crowded with semi-invalids. I lie on the couch watching The Crown, between my grandma and my dad, who both happen to be on the same heart medication: her for being ninety, him for recovering from heart surgery.
Time stands still in this apartment. At lunch my mother says, “Does anyone want a sandwich?” and we all exclaim, “Yes, please!” without taking our eyes off the television.
This begins to feel like a new, strange normal. I’ve just accepted my new life: no past, no future, just limbo forever in this Los Angeles apartment full of pastries, good sandwiches, Netflix, and ninety-year-olds.
But I know I can’t stay forever. I need to get back to my real life in England, to my husband, to my job, to my vomit-inducing social experiments waiting patiently for me back home. There was a lot about the trip that I hadn’t anticipated—the whole goddamned thing, really—but now I’d seen firsthand how talking and being open through tense moments can transform them. How the right stranger can become your personal hero.
Verbose extroverts like my mom and Pete can sometimes be maddening. But they also can make uncomfortable moments in life more bearable. They convince nurses to sneak you in to see your father in the hospital. They make your father feel better.
In a surprise extroverting lesson from the universe, which I had somehow endured, miraculously, my mother and I had only one small fight, which ended when we bonded over how attractive a certain anesthesiologist was and how maybe he should be on Grey’s Anatomy because he would look great shirtless in a broom closet.
My parents order a cab for me, insist on making sure I physically get into it, and demand a text from the airport gate. I am sixteen again, possibly for the last time ever. I fasten my dad’s watch back onto his wrist. I wave goodbye to my parents and slip on my backpack and board my flight back to England.
I land back in London in the early morning. On the Underground on my way back home from Heathrow, I ponder the strangers around me on the train. I wonder whether that moment in the hospital with my father waking up from surgery will stay at the forefront of my mind. That reminder that my fears and problems are inconsequential when it comes to actual life and death. That everything is really small stuff compared to what I’d just been through.
And then I remember that I promised my dad a grandchild by 2020. I should probably talk to Sam about that.
five
In Search of The One
or
Friend-Dating
“Are you going on vacation?” the woman asks me as she spreads hot liquid wax on my bikini line.
“Um, not really,” I say.
“Is it a special date?”
I pause, wincing in anticipation of the imminent, searing pain.
She pauses, too, hovering over me, waiting for my answer.
“Sure,” I say. Accurate enough.
She rips out a chunk of pubic hair. I stifle my yelp into my hands.
I’m not having a bikini wax because I’m going away to Ibiza or because I have a romantic weekend planned. I’m getting a wax because I have an imminent “friend-date” with a relative stranger, and it involves swimming, and I cannot let this potential best friend see me in my wild, natural state. Not yet. It’s too soon. I can’t scare her off.
✽ ✽ ✽
Research says that we have the most friends we’ll ever have when we are twenty-nine, while other studies say we start to lose friends after the age of twenty-five. When we are in our thirties, our social circles decline and continue to do so for the rest of our lives. I had read this research before, but I didn’t realize that when I was in my thirties, I would be the poster girl for that statistic. (The poster reads: “Beware: this woman talks to strangers and is therefore a danger to herself and others.”)
For the Moth performance, Sam had been in the audience to see me, but at the end of the night, I saw big groups of friends and family mob the other storytellers as they walked offstage. Even though I was still on a high after the performance, I’d watched this wi
th a twinge of sadness. I didn’t have that. And after holding my mother’s hand in the waiting room, I briefly wonder what would happen if I had sudden major surgery, with my parents on the other side of the world. I didn’t want Sam to sit there alone in the waiting room. And so, for so many reasons, I want to find more close friends who live in the same city.
Since I turned thirty, all of my closest friends in London had moved away, had babies, or moved away and had babies. Introverts tend to value quality over quantity when it comes to relationships, and after this exodus, I was left with no friends. I had not thought to stockpile them in case of a drought.
Where do you go to make friends when you’re an adult?
No, honestly, I’m asking: where do you do this? There are no more late-night study sessions or college social events. And while meeting friends at work is the obvious answer, your options are very limited if you don’t click with your coworkers or if you’re self-employed. (Also, if you’re only friends with people at work, whom do you complain about your coworkers to?)
I don’t volunteer. I don’t participate in organized religion. I don’t play team sports.
Where do selfish, godless, lazy people go to make friends? That’s where I need to be.
Nearly all of my closest friends have been assigned to me: via seating charts at school, college roommates, or desk buddies at work. After taking stock, I realize that mostly all of my friends were forced to sit a few feet away from me for several hours at a time. I’ve never actively reached out to make a new friend who wasn’t within touching distance.
With no helpful administrators, just how do we go about making friends as adults? Is it possible to cultivate that intense closeness without the heady combination of naivety, endless hours of free time on hand, and lack of youthful inhibitions? Or is that lost forever after we hit thirty?
Loneliness, on the other hand, has no age bracket. I used to think that exciting countries could keep you happy and warm on novelty alone. Now I know: you can move to Paris, delight in the city, drink your café au lait, but no matter how pretty the buildings and balconies are, eventually you’re going to find yourself hugging lamp posts for company like you’re in Les Misérables.
And so I would have to go out and find new friends.
I feel embarrassed to want them. I don’t even want to say it aloud, because it sounds desperate and sad. So I seek out a friendship mentor. Rachel Bertsche went on fifty-two friend-dates in one year and detailed it in her best-selling book, MWF Seeking BFF. She understands my fear of looking pathetic.
“I would say to people, ‘I’m looking for new friends,’ and people would hear, ‘I have no friends,’” Rachel B. tells me over the phone from Chicago. “I had friends—just none in my current city. We feel desperate or weird reaching out for friendship, but we shouldn’t. It’s important.”
True. Friends listen to you, laugh with you, give you advice, encourage you, inspire you, fill your life with joy. A big source of my loneliness is not having a close friend I can call and meet for coffee at a moment’s notice and share everything that’s been happening in my life. Or a group of friends to go out with. Nothing big. Not too showy. A small coven I could count on to cast spells on my enemies. Brené Brown calls these friends “move a body” friends. You know. The people you call when you accidentally murder somebody.
And all of mine were abroad.
Surely, it wasn’t just me who was struggling to find friends in London? One day on Twitter, I see a tweet that resonates. A writer, A. N. Devers, who moved to London two years ago tweets:
Well, since making friends in this fucking country is so hard, I became a rare book dealer instead . . . FUCK THIS PLACE. All I wanted was a little tiny social life. LOOK AT THE LENGTHS I HAVE TO GO TO GET IT.
My first thought is: do rare-book dealers have lots of friends? This is a solution I hadn’t considered. But that tweet garnered a large response with many people jumping in saying age was to blame, and busyness, but also how London could be a particularly frosty place. A few people, including myself, reply to her tweet, saying we’d love to meet up.
She replies saying that now she’s too busy, but maybe later.
I delete my tweet in a panic of shame.
Studies show that we’re spending more time online than ever before, scrolling through our social media accounts, liking photos of strangers’ cats and dinner plates, reading twenty-four-hour news, watching the latest Twitter meltdown of our world leaders unfold, but all of this connectivity is leaving us isolated.
While the internet creates a space for introverts to find like-minded people and online communities, it has its limits. It seems like everyone is relying so much on technology and social media for our interactions, and while we can write witty tweets or heartfelt Instagram comments, we don’t know how to say hello to the cashier at the grocery store without breaking into a sweat. We’re at risk of losing our ability to interact with other humans in person.
Social media is a huge part of the loneliness problem (we’ve stopped meeting up with our existing friends in person, we struggle to meaningfully talk with each other), but maybe technology can also be the solution. At least, that’s what Instagram keeps trying to tell me. Bumble, the dating app, now has a “BFF” feature, which matches you with new friends (or, new best friends forever). These days, it’s the norm to meet new romantic partners via apps on phones. If people were finding love via matchmaking apps, could I use them to find my new best friend?
And why stop at a new best friend? What about an entire squad? I wanted to be able to write things on Instagram like, “The gang’s all here!” and not just have it be a photo of me with a dozen blueberry muffins and a Sally Rooney novel.
Sam’s friend Shaun shudders when I mention signing up for apps to make new friends. “What, so you’re going to meet up with a bunch of weirdos?” he asks me when I casually mention it in conversation. A promising start.
“No,” I say, slowly. “I don’t think they’re weirdos. I think they’re . . . just like me . . .”
Despite having met his fiancée on Tinder, he can’t bear the idea of doing the same for friends.
Why the stigma? Well, for one, it’s hard to admit you want friends, and research says men are less likely than women to publicly do so, but given that studies also say that it’s harder for men to make new friends, maybe they need these apps more than we do: 2.5 million British men have no close friends (and loneliness is on the rise in the US as well—it’s a bigger health threat to middle-aged men than obesity or smoking).
I download Bumble BFF and Hey! VINA, two friendship apps, onto my phone. What if Shaun is right? What if there are a bunch of weirdos out there? People who like country music or are into ventriloquists. People who line up to go to Madame Tussauds wax museum. People who like dancing in public. People who say “lit.”
And what am I supposed to put on my bio?
I seek advice from one of Sam’s close friends, John, who has been using the dating apps for a few years.
He has plenty of thoughts: “It’s good to be specific. People usually try to be as broadly appealing as possible, but I think it’s important to discourage people you won’t like and encourage people with similar interests. Having said that, I would avoid overtly naming things you don’t like, as it looks negative.”
First and foremost, I want to discourage people who live far away. I already have my fill of long-distance friends. At a Christmas party I once attended, I spent the majority of the party petting a friendly brown dog with a woman who seemed similarly eager to ignore the other guests for the duration of the evening. We laughed together easily. I was pretty sure I had found her. The one. But near the end of the party, we discovered that she lived and worked an hour-and-a-half Tube journey away from me. We didn’t bother to exchange numbers, because we both knew—it was over before it had even begun.
A kindred spirit,
lost to the depths of southeast London. As she put on her coat and left the party, I watched the door close behind her and whispered, “Goodbye, forever.”
I wanted to avoid that kind of heartache in the future. London was a big city; surely, I had a few soul mates somewhere in north London. I was not traveling to Greenwich for anybody.
So, I write that I like seeing live comedy and plays, eating spicy food, going to good cafés, and reading good books. This is all true. I don’t add that I had no friends in London. Announcing that fact feels like saying, “No one else wants me—maybe you will?” Best to spring it on them later.
I choose my profile photos carefully. Something that says “fun” and “cute” but not too serious. Me, smiling, alone, in front of a food truck. Me, hiking with no makeup in very flattering sunset-y light on top of a mountain. Something that says, “Look how normal and fun I am.” None of me weeping on the sofa.
And just like that, I’m in. My profile is active, and I’m swiping on potential new best friends.
I study faces and bios of other women. “Are you the one? Are you the one? Could you be the one?” I contemplate smiling profile shots. What about this nice woman in a peacoat petting a dog? Or this lady with purple hair petting a dog? Or this blonde woman in shorts . . . petting a dog?
After a few minutes on the app, I realize that nearly every photo is a variation of three things: women posing with dogs, women holding glasses of prosecco, and women standing on top of mountains (guilty). A disproportionate number of women are petting elephants (Sri Lanka is very in this year). This is the female-friend “come-hither” equivalent of single men posing near tigers on Tinder.
I come across a photo of a woman holding a surfboard on a beach. “Could I curl up in bed with you and watch TV? Could we travel together? Will you make me laugh on my darkest days? Will you be forgiving of my cellulite?” I ask her photo.
Her bio says, “I went to Paris for lunch once, and I regret nothing.” I love her instantly. Though I am also intimidated by her. Perhaps she will be my new extrovert guide.
