As I sat eating my carefully designed salad at Whole Foods today I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on the conversations around me.  They were free for the hearing.

I was surprised and saddened by the similarities of these conversations (three of them), while none of these articulating duos probably knew each other their conversations were almost identical in theme: they were all speaking pejoratively about some absent third party.

As far as I know all three of these anonymous parties were horrid people or just dopey folks incapable living their own lives with any savoir faire.  I don’t think that’s the case though, I think that for some reason our first instinct when sitting down for a chat is to talk about other people.

I’m no saint, I’ve certainly talked my fair share of shit in my day, but I guess hearing it so overwhelmingly present in the air around me made think there’s something really sad about that.  I think I found another New Year’s Resolution, think before I speak about other people.

I’m going to go ahead and say that Plato was really on to something when he said:

“Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle”

Judging others is as ingrained in us as judging ourselves, but as a culture methinks we’re all judging everyone a little too much…including ourselves.  It’s important to remember that we’re all just human, fallible, funny, humans.  We ain’t perfect and neither are our friends and frenemies.

This month, however, I was pleasantly surprised with the relationship section of Women’s Health magazine, was not about romantic interludes, but instead about friendships.  The author, Leslie Goldman, talks about mourning the friendship of her college besty.

It really is amazing how life changes after dorm life. Especially when it comes to friending.  No longer are your friends a mere whiteboard message away.  Once grown-up life begins, it can be truly difficult to sustain those relationships you thought would last forever.  In Goldman’s case, she courted her friend post graduation, but her friend, always on the flakey side, seemed to grow even flakier when the real world came crashing in.

I’ve been feeling the same way about my college friends lately.  Although, I don’t see any of us as the party to blame, I think our lives took different turns.  For starters, I went to school in Boston, while many of my close college friends stayed in New England, I moved home to New York City.  While, they’re not exactly continents away, the distance is enough to make for an out-of-sight-out-of-mind style friendship.

I was really inspired by this article (especially the timing of it), when my college friend and roommate’s mother found me on facebook and asked that I come to Maine for her daughters baby shower in October.  This friend of mine has quite possibly the exact opposite of my life, she eloped our senior year,  moved to rural Maine upon graduating, and within a year was pregnant with her first son.  We’ve emailed back and forth, less than we should probably, but it often feels like we’ve got nothing but the past to keep us intertwined.  She’s pregnant with her second son now, and well, I miss her.  I know we’ll never stay up talking about our dreams and boy troubles again (after all, her married life boy troubles are very different than my single girl boy troubles), but I loved her as a person then, and while our circumstances have changed, that person is worth flying to Maine for a baby shower for.

The ending of Goldman’s story is a good one, she and her college BFF did finally get back together.  It seems that when her college friend became a mother, she also became more respectful of commitments and other peoples time.

If she can have a happy reunion, hopefully, so can I.  I’ll keep you posted on my re-friending adventure when I go to Maine next month.

Welcome to the first instillation of the BFF book club. There has been an increase in books published about friendship, which as far as I’m concerned is fan-friggin-tastic!  I believe that being  a good friend is one of the most important roles that we have, so as a responsible friendship blogger my goal is to read whatever friendtastic reading material that comes my way!

On the docket for today is the book Life is Friends, by socializing expert Jeanne Martinet.  I do a lot of reviews in my professional life, albeit those are usually in regard to perky women in spandex telling me to squat 1, 2, 3, 4, lucky for all of us, there was no squatting involved in this book…unless of course that is what you like to do with your friends.  Seriously, no one here is judging you.

As far as this review, what has me torn is the subtitle.  That sub-title being: A Complete Guide to the Lost Art of Connecting in Person.   At first to me that looks like heaven in 252 neatly bound pages, unfortunately, I think it’s the wrong subtitle.  I think a more appropriate subtitle is “Having your friends over, being a good hostess, and being a good guest.”  This book primarily is about the art of hosting.

Ms. Martinet is a firm believer that the glue that binds a friendship happens over Chinese-takeout, movie nights, dinner parties and all other having-people-over type activities.  I happen to agree that having people to your digs can be a big part of being a friend, but I don’t know that I think it’s the be-all-end-all of friending activities.

If you’re host-phobic, well this book has all sorts of hosting scenarios to help you trouble-shoot, including how to get over your hosting phobia.  Martinet’s advice can best be summed up as:  don’t stress out, no one expects your home to be perfect, no one expects your food to be gourmet, and no one expects you to dress like Jackie-O, your friends love you and they’re there share your company, so send out that Evite!

Actually, on second thought, don’t send an evite, the thing that shocked me so much about this book is that absolute adversity Martinet has to online socialization.  This of course may be due to my generation.  I agree with her that many people abuse social networking forums.  I do however see them as great tools to keeping up with friends all over the country…and the world for that matter!  Where Martinet makes of a friend in the beginning of her book for being friends with people they met online, I’ve had very strong, and long lasting friendships with people I’ve met on the internet, as have many others I know.  I guess what some may see as crazy others see as an opportunity to meet people one would never have the opportunity to otherwise.

While I may be being a bit hard on Life is Friends, it is most likely because it’s just not what I’d expected.  There is some solid advice in here pertaining to social organizing, like how to hedge your social bets, how to handle a friend-break up, how to behave on your first friend-date.  Speaking of your preliminary get-together with your soon to be BFF, she doles out some solid advice on how to conduct the conversation around keeping conversation light, like not sharing truly intimate detail, keep the gossiping to nill, and always splitting the check.  It’s pretty good advice for romantic dating too-but that’s another blog entirely

All in all, it’s a book about hosting really, not a great book about building and nurturing friendship, but if you’re host-phobic, well it’s probably a pretty useful read.

If you have suggestions for any great reads for the BFF book club shoot me an email, I’d love to hear your suggestions!

I’ve never been the kind of girl who could borrow clothes from friends.  I have always had friends of totally different sizes.  I couldn’t even borrow clothes from my mother, as she’s an adorable 4’11, and I happen to take after my tall strapping father.  To all those blokes that think they can judge what a girl will look like when she gets older by looking at her mother, you my friends are shit out of luck with me, I’m the spitting image of daddy dearest.

I’ve never seen or read The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants­, but I like the idea.  A single pair of pants that magically fits Ugly Betty and Chanel’s new IT girl.  Love it.  Alack, tis fiction, there’s not a pair of pants with that sort of spandex awesomeness to be had in the real world.  Instead, I accessorize.

The Sisterhood of the Travelling Bag, started when a friend was sad, and three of us went shopping, she loved a bag, so we bought it for her (because sometimes you just want to do anything to make your friends happy), she refused it, and we hatched the idea that we would share the bag, and share the bag we have.  I must say it’s held up quite well.  Much better than if it had always been in my possession.

I’ve heard of groups of women doing this with expensive jewelry before, but never with a cheap bag from Target.  I guess we work within our means.

The best part of the travelling bag, is the stories that come with it.  As soon as it changes hands, stories of where the bag has been, what happened while it was in our possession, what dress we coupled it with, etc.  It’s all sorts of girltastic fun.

In reality, it’s not about the bag, it’s about sharing with people we love, about having stories and something in common.  A bond in the form of blue and white fabric.  I love that bag, because I love the friends I share it with, I love hearing the stories of their lives and the excitement in their voices when they pass it off.

While my travelling whatnot might be on the budget end, why not take this idea and use it to indulge in something beautiful that you and your friends love.   Consider it budget indulging

A good friend of mine recently lost a sibling.  There’s such a sadness behind that statement that I know I can never full comprehend.  For one, I’m an only child.  While, I have friends in my life I consider as close as any sibling could ever be, I’ll never really understand that bond.  Secondly, in my life, the people who have passed away, have been the older generation, while I miss them, I know that they lived their lives.  To lose someone so young and so much a part of who you are, has to be one of the hardest things imaginable.

While all her friends rallied together, to try and figure out some way to shoulder some burden for her I realized I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what to do.  What do you say to someone  in this situation?  An “I’m so sorry” seems too trite in this situation.  My friend, happens to be quite stoic, she’s not the kind of person to talk about how she feels all the time, and I certainly am not going to force her to deal with her grief in any way that feels unnatural to her.

Instead, I cook.  In my family (and I’m pretty sure this is the same in many families), food means love.  My grandfather who was a great cook, wasn’t big on exclamations of love, instead he’d make your favorite meal.  That’s how my dad (his son-in-law) realized after many years, that he was finally accepted into the family-it only took many, many years of walking on eggshells and one grandchild. His means of conveying love, have been passed on to every generation since, and while saying things like “it will all be okay” doesn’t come naturally from me, cooking for people does.

I can’t say anything to make her sadness go away, instead I can help her in the ways that I know how.  I can give her the funny details of life and friends awaiting, while she’s away with her family. And, I can make her trips back easier, by making sure she has a stocked fridge.  The rest of her friends and I can coordinate to make sure there’s someone always around if she needs someone.  I learned something from that friend of mine, the foul weather one, oh so many years ago, you shouldn’t force your way into other peoples hardships.  What  we can do, is make ourselves available if we’re needed, and be there, without expectation,  when that call comes.

Keeping in touch is one of the hardest parts of friendship.  Sometimes  I find it bafflingly hard to keep in contact with friends of mine who live in my neighborhood, not to mention those long distance relationships (platonic of course) that need love and attention.

I’m a big fan of care packages.  In fact, when two of my friends went away to law school I made regularly scheduled care packages a part of their semester.  Timing them for times when I thought they’d need a little lovin’ from home the most.  Moving days, mid-terms, finals, and birthdays:  no time was safe from a surprise batch of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, or the entirety of the Target $1 section.

Sarah, over at the fantastical blog Pink of Perfection has touched on the art of care packages many times.  I highly suggest snooping around her site.  As for me, my suggestion is to keep them simple, keep them silly, and if they’ve got perishable items:  overnight them.  I learned this the hard way when my mother sent me a care package my freshman year of college only to be lost in the bottomless pit of a mail room and to be delivered months late.  The pastries inside had spider webs as a ganache.  Actually, they were probably preferable to the cafeteria food.  But I digress…

Speaking of college, one of my favorite methods of keeping in touch with long distance friends was hatched when my two best friends and I went to three very different and very far schools.  Nothing made us happier than passing notes in class, and since we considered ourselves an inseparable threesome anything we wrote had to be immediately accessible to the other two.    This made college communication a bit tricky.  Of course we bombarded one another with cards a la snail mail, but it all felt so two sided.  Someone was always being left out.

I’m not sure who came up with the idea of THE BOOK, but THE BOOK came into fruition and has become a tradition in our friendship to this day.  Of course we’ve gone through multiple THE BOOKs by now, but the tradition remains the same.

Our tradition requires one girly, sturdy composition book, a boat load of stickers, pictures, magazine clippings, sappy cards, and stories about our lives.  A simple notebook that is the timeline of our friendship to be shipped back and forth to remind us all that we are always on one anothers minds.

I have to say THE BOOKs from times past are among my most treasured belongings.  Inside are so many of our hopes and dreams, virginities (well not inside, but the stories of), first loves, engagements, embarrassing pictures, declarations of our love for one another-they are truly special mementoes of a long and history rich friendship.  To this day I still get stupidly excited when the book comes in the mail.  Now that college is over my two best friends live in our hometown, I still live away, but not quite as far away, we see each other regularly, but THE BOOK remains our very special way of keeping in touch.

Now that I’ve shown you mine, what are your very special ways to keep in touch with the long distance relationships that mean the most?

Being the friendspert that I claim to be; I once had a friend ask me what I thought about ditching friends.  Truth be told, I think most friendships have an expiration date.  While there are definitely moments in life that we have to “dump” friends, very rare are the moments that we have to brush off our “it’s not you, it’s me” speech so practiced with lovers past.  Friendships more than likely just seem to phase themselves out. Breaking off a friendship often ends without much effort at all, unless of course there’s an argument, friends just seem to vanish from our lives when they no longer seem to fit into our lifestyles.

A recent study has been released to make you feel less asshole-tastic.  Most people replace half of their friends every seven years.Huh, that’s interesting, that’s about the same time it takes for us to replace our tastebuds.  Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst at Utrecht University in the Netherlands studied the friendships of 1,007 people between the ages of 18 to 65.  What he found was that while the number of friendships in our inner sanctum seems to remain fairly constant, our core group of friends seems to be on a seven-year rotation cycle.

Now, having been the kind of person who has had the same BFFs her entire life, I think that there is a limit to the truth of this study.  I can’t help but notice, however, that while my closest friends haven’t changed much since the days of training bras and crushing on varying members of The New Kids on the Block, my close friends outside that small select group, do seem to ebb and flow in favor.

None of this is particularly shocking, seven years is a long time.  In seven years you can leave high school and end up with a masters degree; you can fall in love, get married, have oodles of babies; you can move to another country, change careers, change genders!  Our priorities and circumstances change as our lifestyles change, it only seems natural that with that will bring new friending opportunities.

I’ve decided to take the optimistic approach to this study.  While we may lose (or demote) half of our close friends in seven years, we continue to maintain and nurture the other half.  Just think how rich our lives can be if we’re forever nurturing old friendships, while continuing to foster and create new ones.

I’m a firm believer that people are in your life for as long as they need to be.  Some people need to be forever, and some for a little while.  Each person in our life fills a different role.  Some of those roles exist solely for a transitory moment in time. Wouldn’t it be nice if our romantic relationships could end the way many of our friendships end, just fade out without yelling or crying, just the memory of someone you loved being with for a moment in time?