For The First Time In My Life, I Didn't Have Any Friends

After a big move to a new city, Ruth Whippman felt lonely and isolated — until she decided to make finding friends her job.

- Ruth Whippman

IT WAS 10 P.M., and I was two glasses of wine into the evening and recklessly updating my Facebook status.This was a few years ago, in the odd era when we were all using a stilted, slightly self-important third-person format on Facebook (Britney Jones loves her kids; Bryan Smith is eating a sandwich). This time, though, the language was perfect for what I was about to write, helping me pretend I was not actually referring to myself or about to make a full-frontal public declaration of loserdom. Ruth Whippman…goaded Facebook’s prompt. I typed: …has no  friends. Can anyone help her find some?

We had moved to California from London with our 1-year-old son a few months earlier for my husband’s job. And for the first time in my life, I was lonely. Painfully, achingly lonely. Before our move, I’d had a busy job, a crowd of friends and enough casual acquaintances to be confident that I would have a cheerful encounter with another human adult several times a week. Now I had no friends or acquaintances and 12 cavernous hours to fill each day before my husband returned home from work. I didn’t like the person I was becoming. I felt unlikeable and strangely ashamed.

I had decided to take the opportunity of the move to quit my frenetic job directing TV documentaries to stay home with my son, Solly, and to do freelance writing. But the isolation was getting me down. My son was the delight of my life, but he knew only five words, and four of those were the names of digging tools. I could go for days without having an adult conversation.I began spending time in parks, eyeing other moms needily, like a high school freshman who has yet to learn that anything other than feigned indifference to the prospect of friendship is socially toxic.