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!

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?