Genre: Memoir, Self-Help
Rating: ★★★
Pages: 349
Pages: 349
Published: 2011
Publisher: Ballantine Books
It's ten o'clock. Do you know where your best friend is?
Rachel Bertsche is a young, newly-married woman who is new to Chicago. While she loves her work, her husband, her adopted city, and Entertainment Weekly, she finds that her life is missing something rather important: friends. It isn't that she's totally friendless — stories of past friendships quickly inform the reader that Bertsche left a fairly rich social life behind in New York — but she is doesn't have a BFF in her new city. You know, the kind of BFF who she can call last minute for a pedicure, to go out to brunch with, talk about reality TV with...you get the picture. Deciding that she Can't Go On with the way things are, Bertsche decides to take matters into her own hands and issues herself a challenge: she will go on 52 new friend dates for the next year. Over the course of the year, she goes on blind dates, takes improv classes, and makes the rounds on the book club circuit. In doing so, Bertsche hopes that she will meet her next Best Friend Forever.
I can't remember how MWF Seeking BFF crossed my path, but since moving to Virginia, I feel like I can definitely identify where Bertsche is coming from. Finally, following one lonely weekend, I felt vulnerable enough to click the "add to cart" button on Amazon and eagerly awaited for Bertsche's book to help me out of my slump.
While there were parts of MWF that I could have done without (talking about her honeymoon, interactions with strangers who she doesn't go on a friend date with, talking about how much she misses her father* — basically events that I didn't think had much to do with her challenge), I really liked the first third of the book, which is where Bertsche really delves into the psychology and sociology of friendship. One concept that I found especially interesting from her research is Dunbar's number, which (according to Wikipedia) is a "suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships."**
Bertsche used the number to calculate where she stood friend-wise and found that she was short of the "stable" friendship types illustrated below. (She says that she was 20 people shy of hitting Dunbar's 150) While calculating the number of individuals I would include in my Dunbar's total seems to be a little tedious (and suspicious, I'll admit), I did find the concept that our brains can only handle so many certain kinds of relationship to be interesting.
MWF is technically a self-help book (in that it's marketed as such), but I didn't think that it really compared to other self-help books I've encountered (namely: Jen Sincero's You Are a Badass and Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up). While MWF did chart the journey of one woman to improve her life, its tone was more aligned with a memoir-sociological-psychological hybrid. Bertsche wasn't telling me what to do so much as she was explaining the quest she went on to (and the various methods she used) find a new BFF.
I don't think that MWF is for everyone; while its core lesson is ~basically~ "you can never have too many friends," Bertsche is a pretty specific personality to get used to while writing, and I know that there were times I found her voice to be annoying and self-congratulatory. I also found myself slogging through the last third of the book due to what seemed like a lack of plot development. (I can only read about friendship membership services for so long.) And, hello, there is a ton of name-dropping in this book (At least 52 of them, in fact)! MWF is an easy read, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's consistently fun or light.
I think that MWF works as a good companion for anyone undertaking their own "friendship challenge," but it shouldn't necessarily be used as a bible or manual in the friend-making process. Important social lessons can be learned from Bertsche — follow up on emails, don't be upset if someone doesn't "click" with you right away, body language matters, etc. — but I would be skeptical of anyone following her plan to the letter. I think MWF will be useful to me as I work on expanding my social circle in the DMV, and it has encouraged me to consider the ways in which I reach out to people around me. However, I can't see myself ever re-reading this book or suggesting it to anyone unless they have a prior, specific interest either in it or in making new friends.
* In regards to the dad feels, I've been there, done that, gotten the crappy T-Shirt. I feel for her. But I felt that her attempts to tie in her father's death to her friendship quest were pretty weak.
** Apparently Dunbar himself described it as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them at a bar." (My man!)
While there were parts of MWF that I could have done without (talking about her honeymoon, interactions with strangers who she doesn't go on a friend date with, talking about how much she misses her father* — basically events that I didn't think had much to do with her challenge), I really liked the first third of the book, which is where Bertsche really delves into the psychology and sociology of friendship. One concept that I found especially interesting from her research is Dunbar's number, which (according to Wikipedia) is a "suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships."**
Bertsche used the number to calculate where she stood friend-wise and found that she was short of the "stable" friendship types illustrated below. (She says that she was 20 people shy of hitting Dunbar's 150) While calculating the number of individuals I would include in my Dunbar's total seems to be a little tedious (and suspicious, I'll admit), I did find the concept that our brains can only handle so many certain kinds of relationship to be interesting.
A visual representation of Dunbar's number. Dunbar calculated the human threshold of relationships to be 150. Via.
MWF is technically a self-help book (in that it's marketed as such), but I didn't think that it really compared to other self-help books I've encountered (namely: Jen Sincero's You Are a Badass and Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up). While MWF did chart the journey of one woman to improve her life, its tone was more aligned with a memoir-sociological-psychological hybrid. Bertsche wasn't telling me what to do so much as she was explaining the quest she went on to (and the various methods she used) find a new BFF.
I don't think that MWF is for everyone; while its core lesson is ~basically~ "you can never have too many friends," Bertsche is a pretty specific personality to get used to while writing, and I know that there were times I found her voice to be annoying and self-congratulatory. I also found myself slogging through the last third of the book due to what seemed like a lack of plot development. (I can only read about friendship membership services for so long.) And, hello, there is a ton of name-dropping in this book (At least 52 of them, in fact)! MWF is an easy read, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's consistently fun or light.
I think that MWF works as a good companion for anyone undertaking their own "friendship challenge," but it shouldn't necessarily be used as a bible or manual in the friend-making process. Important social lessons can be learned from Bertsche — follow up on emails, don't be upset if someone doesn't "click" with you right away, body language matters, etc. — but I would be skeptical of anyone following her plan to the letter. I think MWF will be useful to me as I work on expanding my social circle in the DMV, and it has encouraged me to consider the ways in which I reach out to people around me. However, I can't see myself ever re-reading this book or suggesting it to anyone unless they have a prior, specific interest either in it or in making new friends.
* In regards to the dad feels, I've been there, done that, gotten the crappy T-Shirt. I feel for her. But I felt that her attempts to tie in her father's death to her friendship quest were pretty weak.
** Apparently Dunbar himself described it as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them at a bar." (My man!)
