Hey baby 6 June 2003, 13:10

I ran into someone from high school I didn’t really know all that well, on the street about four years later. I can’t recall exactly, but we exchanged a few calls and then finally had lunch (she came to my work downtown). She has become one of my closest friends. What was the initial spark that allowed it to happen?

Perhaps at the time we were generous with the benefit of our doubt, not so quick to judge on appearances. Or simply of an active and vivacious enough temperament to follow up on impulses to socialize, rather than slink reclusively to our accustomed lurks. Somehow the fertile ground was laid. All I remember is that it was so easy. But it might just as easily never have happened. More recently, it’s been a little uphill.

Making friends in a foreign country, I found it difficult to crack the peculiarly Dutch appointment book. People were booked three weeks in advance, at least to me. Other than that, people were already blessed with a full complement of friends, their social calendars bursting with sports activities, activism, the arts, etc. so that they literally had no room to accomodate more. There didn’t seem to be this fluid moving about that I’ve read about in Miss Manners: gathering new people and releasing those from whom you’d grown apart.

After I’d lived abroad five years, language began to be a barrier; I’d been there long enough to pick up a lot of Dutch, but not enough to conduct an entire friendship in a foreign language. This bothered prospective friends. And there were also cultural barriers: I missed hugs, which are not done there. In the rush to accommodate a host of strange things, you don’t miss your own rituals until there’s a gaping hole in your life.

The difficulty for the last several years is that I have no close friends in the area in which I live. This happened to me rather suddenly, when a few friendships dissolved under relationship or housing circumstances, and I promptly left the country. In the last year and a half of my tenure in Europe, I met fabulous gals at school and work, and then promptly returned to Canada.

So there’s decidedly a dearth of female companionship in particular. This means I am vastly, vastly on the make as far as acquiring friends. I will call people back who annoy me. I’m the platonic equivalent of a sleazy bachelor in a leisure suit and big, gold chains. I’m cheap and easy.

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