Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [96]
• The Wednesday Sisters, Meg Waite Clayton (2008)
• The Professors’ Wives’ Club, Joanne Rendell (2008)
• Friday Nights, Joanna Trollope (2008)
• The Friday Night Knitting Club, Kate Jacobs (2008)
FINDING FRIENDS BY LOOKING TO THE PAST
With all the advances in communications technology, it’s becoming easier to find that best friend from high school whom you haven’t heard from for ages and rekindle friendships from the past. You can Google her, search for her on a reunion site like Classmates.com or Reunions.com, or perhaps find her on one of the popular social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. Because school friendships are built upon common experiences—family, neighborhood, social and academic ties—these friendships remind us of our roots and the people we once were.
Last year, Kendall, 38, got a note on Classmates.com from an old friend from junior and senior high school. The two women hadn’t spoken to each other in nineteen years. Her friend reached her by e-mail and they reconnected even though they lived almost a thousand miles away from each other. “I went to visit her in Florida, which was a great decision,” says Kendall. “Now we stay in touch via phone or e-mail. It’s wonderful.”
Every attempt to reclaim an old friendship doesn’t turn out as well as Kendall’s did, but many do, and there isn’t much to lose by giving it a try.
SIX DEGREES: MAKING FRIENDS OF FRIENDS INTO YOUR FRIENDS
Another approach to making new friends is when you make a new acquaintance to try to figure out what you have in common or whether you know any of the same people.
Psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a landmark experiment at Harvard University in the 1960s that looked at the “small world phenomenon.” Using snail mail correspondence, Milgram asked his study participants to forward an information packet about the study to the person they knew—who was mostly likely to know the person ultimately targeted to receive the correspondence. Although the majority of the mailings never reached their destination, among those that did, the average length of the social path from the first person to the target recipient was 5.5 or 6 people. Based on this research, others later coined this phenomenon the “six degrees of separation” between people.
One very practical take-home message from this research: When you are in a classroom or at a cocktail party, conference, or other social event where you don’t know anyone, it’s always fun to try to figure out who or what you have in common. For example, by asking a few questions about where the person was raised or where she went to school, you may find the link. With any degree of luck, you may be able to strike up a new friendship based on shared history, values, interests, or friendships.
More recently, author Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The Tipping Point about the “funneling” that underlies the small world phenomenon. Gladwell pointed out that some people serve as social connectors. These individuals have large networks of friends and a talent for bringing otherwise loosely connected people together. It’s nice to know someone like that because by virtue of your friendship with a connector, you are likely to develop connections with some of their friends and social contacts.
Buried Treasure: 8 Tips for Finding a Long-Lost Friend
• Try finding the person using Google by putting her first name and last name in quotes.
• See what comes up. If you know the city and/or state where she lives or last lived, you can refine the search by putting that after her name in quotes.
• Check out groups from your high school or college on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace.
• Search for former classmates on sites like Reunion.com or Classmates.com—or e-mail or phone the alumni office of your school.
• Let your fingers do the walking—use the white pages directory on switchboard.com.
• No luck finding her in a directory? Are her parents or other relatives findable? Chances are they may still live in the