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bunked with summer after summer.
    “Oh, that’s great.”
    “Yeah.”
    And then … nothing. Silence. I fiddle with my chopsticks just to have somewhere to direct my attention.
    I can tell Heidi and Michelle interpret my interest in making this friendship happen as pure desperation. And it feels like it from my end, too. To fill one long pause, I find myself asking Michelle, “Soooo, what TV do you watch?”
    As I tell Sara during our recap phone call, if TV or books don’t come up organically, we’re really not meant to be.
    On Tuesday morning, the three of us exchange “We should do it again!” emails. But considering that when I took Michelle’sphone number she didn’t ask for mine, I’m not holding my breath.

    Having ruled out 75 percent of my potential best friends after only a month, I need to home in on exactly what I’m looking for. What is a BFF, anyway? Most people lump bestfriendship in with love, one of those you-know-it-when-you-feel-it intangibles. But I can’t continue blindly on this quest looking for something even I can’t define. I’ll wade through the year like Goldilocks—this one was too grumpy, that one was too old. If I’m lucky, I’ll find the girl who’s just right, but trying to cast someone in a role is a lot tougher when you don’t know what the part calls for.
    If I take the
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
route, a friend is both someone “before whom I may think aloud,” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) and who lets me have the “total freedom to be myself” (Jim Morrison). She “leaves footprints on my heart” (Eleanor Roosevelt) and “gets me a book I ain’t read” (Abraham Lincoln). Which is why I can’t stand quote books. These definitions all sound lovely, but don’t provide me with any actual help. If Abe had his way, librarians would be the most popular people in the world.
    It turns out that while we may think best friends are people with that magic something we can’t put our finger on, researchers have fairly accurately defined the traits that propel someone from acquaintance to friend to BFF. Journalist Karen Karbo details this ascent up the friendship ladder in
Psychology Today.
In order for someone to move from girl-date to friend, she says, we need intimacy. Not intimacy in the turn-the-lights-down-lowsense. Friendship intimacy starts with self-disclosure—sharing personal information you wouldn’t tell just anyone—and reciprocity, meaning if you tell her your secrets, she better tell you hers. But it’s not just about disclosure. Friendship intimacy calls for whoever is on the receiving end of the information to offer “hefty helpings of emotional expressiveness and unconditional support.” Yet, as Karbo points out, they can’t be too opinionated. So if I’m enraged that Matt canceled our Friday night plans, again, she better huff and puff and agree it was lame of him, but she would never say “He’s such an ass. I’ve never liked him.” Such are the unwritten rules of friendship.
    In order to move from a regular friend to a best one, I will need über-intimacy but also what researchers call social identity support. That is to say, my best friend is someone who will reaffirm my social role in society—as a wife, a writer, a pop-culturist—and thereby boost my self-esteem. Sounds a bit self-indulgent, sure, but who am I to argue with science?
    Given these criteria, I see why only Hannah so far has been deemed a potential bestie. She’s the only one with whom I felt comfortable mentioning my father’s death and the unfortunate timing of my father-in-law’s lost battle to pancreatic cancer two weeks after my wedding. She listened, said “that’s horrible,” and didn’t harp on it enough to make me feel sad. In turn she told me about her parents’ divorce and the challenges of moving back home. Intimacy and reciprocity. That she invited me to join a Chicago book club told me she respected me as a true reader—social identity support in