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I enjoyed this article about a rent-a-friend service. I’m not at all surprised such a service exists now, and also, of course, various people are absolutely obligated to react to it as if it is the next horribly scandalous step up from rainbow parties and ritual sacrifice, but as someone who has routinely moved to an entirely new location where I have no friends or contacts, I can certainly see the use of such a thing.
It is nearly impossible to make friends as an adult, at least in this country, at least in my experience. If you’ve never had to try it, here are the problems you run into:
For one thing, people do not talk to each other, or at least people don’t talk to me. I never understand it when others rhapsodize about how easy it is to meet people, how everyone’s so friendly and outgoing. Perhaps I give off some uncomfortable vibe I’m not aware of, but my conversations with strangers are never successful. They usually go about like this:
Stranger: ’Hey, is anyone sitting here?’
Me: ’No. Go ahead.’
[Long, awkward pause, carefully avoided eye contact on both sides.]
Me: ’Have you heard this guy read before?’
Stranger, jumping as if I’ve just announced I have recently really gotten into cannibalism: ’What?! Oh. No.’
[End of all possible conversation forever.]
This is what happens if you go to readings or mingle-events or shows or craft’s fairs or volunteer events or whatever trying to meet people: other people hang out with their scads of friends, trying to strike up a conversation with a stray will likely get you maced, and before very long, a bizarre and smelly old, old, old man will begin a conversation with you from which you will never escape. You will spend your entire night listening to a very, very old man’s political conspiracy theories and theories on women and he will lean far too close into your face and you will go to the bathroom and then sit in a far-away place and he will come over and find you and sit by you there, too, and when the event is finally over, he might even follow you to the train station. True, sometimes he is younger, sometimes he is female, sometimes the drift of his conversation varies, but always, always he is obnoxious and boring and completely deaf to social cues. I mean, avoiding this old man alone is reason enough to rent-a-friend: to buy some out of work actor two beers to come to the reading with you and sit next to you and make jokes with you all night. If you met that same unemployed actor at the event and tried to strike up a conversation with them in the old-fashioned way, they’d probably piss themselves from the social impropriety of it all.
I think my generation has been raised to be overly suspicious of strangers and the implied message we’ve internalized (if you wind up talking to some loser, everyone will think there’s something really wrong with you) is making it really difficult for all of us to meet new people.
In fact, I’ve paid hundreds of hundreds of dollars to make friends. On the dotted line, I was paying for improv classes, but you know what I really didn’t need at the time? Improv classes. And some classes, you drop you hundreds of bucks and get there, and then you spend weeks doing something you’re not that interested in with a bunch of people who never go to the bar after class, because they need to get home to their families.
Also, like the rich getting richer, those with friends get more friends. Once you manage to make one friend, you’re pretty much out of the woods. It’s a lot easier to meet new people when you’re out with friends you already have than when you’re out by yourself. In our society, unattached people are viewed with suspicion. People are rightly afraid that if they’re nice to you, they’ll never get rid of you (see: old man above). But when you have friends along, other people know they’ve nothing to fear from talking to you – you won’t demand a commitment at the end of it all – plus these other people don’t find you crazy, so you must be alright. So really, if you don’t have any friends, then renting a friend might enable you to meet new, actual friends. Sort of like a wedding band gets guys hit on, because, hey, some woman thinks they’re worth sleeping with.
I’ve always made friends the same way: I pony up for classes I don’t want until I locate a likely target, and then I force myself on them. I invite them places and invite them places and invite them places, and I invite myself places with them, and when I meet their friends, I do the same with their friends, and I just keep at it until somehow I am in the midst of their friend group, even though I’m the only one who didn’t go to college with them all. I’ve done it twice now, in two different major cities, in the exact same way. It works for me, but it takes about 6 months to a year, plus money and time for whatever classes, and I can certainly see how some people would prefer to just pay $25 or so for a stranger to come to the movies with them.
On an only slightly related note, the article above has some people spouting off about how a “friend” you have to pay is no “friend” at all, which obviously. This has become a trend in cranky cultural commentary lately, with the most frequent lament being “thousands of Facebook ‘friends’ aren’t really friends at all!” Well, no shit. Nobody thinks they are. People who complain about this are saying, ‘I define a friend as someone with who you have a long-lasting, personal and caring relationship over a period of years based on mutual respect and shared experiences, and I will apply that definition to any usage of the word ‘friends,’ no matter how casual or commercial, and cry the end of civilization accordingly.’ We all still know what a friend is. Nobody really thinks a blog ‘friend’ is a friend in the sense above, or that a rented ‘friend’ is, either. By ‘friends,’ Facebook means ‘networking contacts,’ and this rent-a-friend site means ‘companions’ or ‘people you can pay to go to dinner with you, so that you can enjoy yourself and not have to feel like a self-conscious loser the whole time, and that’s fine, even if these people are clearly not going to attend your wedding or your funeral.’ It means, basically, escorts from back before escort became a coded term for prostitute (was there such a time? There was, right?). There is a need for a paid, platonic companion, and I can think of many situations where it would be helpful to pay for a fake date, in order to make a social situation less awkward for any number of reasons (for example, even after you have friends, sometimes showing up somewhere with a “date” is a quick, easy, no-hurt-feelings fix to a brewing problem, but somehow, you never have a date to bring just when you really need one).
