"Next Time" or: The Free Lunch

When I first met Z, she and I immediately hit it off. Eager to make a new friend, I emailed her afterwards with some information I knew she would want, and suggested we get together for lunch sometime. She replied, "I really enjoyed meeting you as well. I would love to get together for lunch." But her schedule turned out to be too busy, and she couldn't find the time. 

Two and a half years later I tried again, we found a day and time, and met for lunch.

Lunch was lovely. We had a lot in common. When I complained about the self-absorbed people in Orange County, she was quick to agree. She felt strongly about it.

When the check arrived, I reached over and took it.

My friend seemed surprised. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"I'll pay," I said, as I got out my credit card.

"Why would you do that?" she asked.

"I'll pay this time, and you'll pay next time. That way I know there'll be a next time."

Z thought that was so clever. She liked the idea of ensuring that there'd be a next time. She wanted me to meet her husband, who got a PhD in my field before leaving mathematics.

Nearly a year later, having heard nothing from Z, I asked my friend K whether I should remind Z that she owed me a lunch. He told me not to; doing so would be terribly rude. So I emailed Z, "How time flies! I remember how much we enjoyed our lunch together in January, and was thinking we should do it again. Do you have time over the break?" and I added some info that I thought her ex-mathematician husband would be interested in. A few weeks later I wished her a happy New Year, asked if she had gotten my message, and said I hoped that everything was OK with her. 

She replied that she'd love for us to get together. She invited me to dinner at her home, for a date a couple of months in the future.

In the interim I invited F, a mathematician in my field, to give a seminar talk at UCI. He wanted to fly in on the evening of Z's upcoming dinner. I thought to myself, "What are the chances that the dinner with Z will really happen? Should I tell F that I can't pick him up at the airport or go to dinner with him because I committed to something else? Or should I reschedule with Z? After all, this is Orange County, the land of ghosting and bailing. Z will undoubtedly cancel at the last minute."

I decided that if I cancelled on Z to accommodate F, I'd be succumbing to unwarranted cynicism, in addition to being a bad person. So I told my colleague F that I couldn't meet him that evening.

Sure enough, a few days before the planned dinner, Z "postponed" it.

When Z emailed a month later and made a vague suggestion that we meet in two or three months for dinner at a restaurant, I again asked K whether I could remind Z that she owed me a lunch. He told me to let it go. Knowing that I didn't have the self-discipline to go to a restaurant with Z and not mention our "next time" discussion, I didn't reply to her email.

Years later my colleague G, who was a patient of Z's, told me that my name came up when she saw Z. Z told G the basics of our story (but not the part about her free lunch), and wondered whether it was too late to get in touch with me. G told her it was. I wish she hadn't. It's stories like this that make me think of Orange County as the land of missed opportunities.

Casseroles and Dinner Parties

Soon after I moved to Irvine, California, I became "friends" with X, who was always happy to take a beach walk with me when I invited her, but never asked me to do something with her. 

"I don't understand the `friends' who are happy to do things with me when I initiate it, but never initiate contact with me. What's going on there?" I asked X during one such beach walk.

"I know! I really hate that! What's wrong with those people?" exclaimed X animatedly. She clearly felt strongly about this, but didn't seem to realize that she was one of those people.

I decided to perform an experiment. I stopped inviting X, and waited to see if she would contact me. Of course, she didn't (or else I wouldn't have a story). For good measure, I tried the same experiment on Y, the one other "friend" I had made when I moved to Irvine, with the same result.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer about a year later. 

"The only nice part is that when you have your surgery, everyone will bring you casseroles," said an East Coast friend who had earlier gotten a similar diagnosis.

"No one will bring me casseroles," I replied, "because no one will know I have cancer."  I was in the middle of my experiment to see what would happen if I didn't initiate interaction with my two "friends" X and Y. And I didn't feel comfortable telling my work colleagues because I had heard that some of them use that sort of information against their colleagues in the "merit reviews" that determine our salaries.

After going through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance of the evidence that my concept of friendship didn't exist in Orange County, I decided to get more assertive about obtaining human contact, if not real friendship.

I started to accost people I met and ask them, "I'm going through culture shock from moving to the OC. People seem to have a different concept of friendship than I'm used to. What do I need to know, to help me survive here?"

The answers ranged (not very widely) from  "everyone is self-absorbed" to "there's a lot of narcissism and bipolar disorder in the OC. It's from being too close to Hollywood" to "When I want to talk to a friend, I pick up the phone. When I want to be with a friend, I get on a plane."

Someone told me, "you can't have a dinner party here."

"Why not?" I asked. "Is it because too many invited guests say no?"

"Not just that. The main problem is that they don't respond."

"Doesn't that mean they're not coming?"

"Not necessarily."

"They'd just show up, without telling you in advance? Why would anyone do that?"

"They're waiting to see if something better comes along."

The woman I had this discussion with was so impressed with our similar views about friendship that she enthusiastically added, "I like you. I'm going to invite you to a dinner party."

My first thought was "How nice!" My next thought was, "Oh, no. If she does that, I'll have to reciprocate. What a burden. I don't want to throw a dinner party." I had been living in the OC long enough to have absorbed its laziness.

I never got that dinner invitation, perhaps because she and I didn't exchange names. Maybe she too didn't want the hassle.

When the "fighting for my life" stage of my medical adventure wound down, I realized that I should swallow my pride and end the experiment with the two "friends" I actually had. I went on a beach walk with X, and clothes shopping with Y, where I told them about my diagnosis. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but their fear about whether I'd expect something from them seemed more palpable than their empathy. They certainly didn't offer to bring me casseroles. Nor, I'm sorry to say, did I bring Y any casseroles when she was diagosed with breast cancer a few years later, though I did express my sympathy.

If I had to do it again, I'd have kept inviting X and Y when I wanted company, and not worried about whether they reciprocated. "Friendship" in Orange County is often transactional. If you want something, you ask for it. I'm surprised by how generously my neighbors respond to pleas for help from total strangers on the neighborhood listserv, from supplying crutches to giving rides to the hospital. Here, friends can be people who do things for you or with you, rather than people who care about you.

Friends

"I have a friend who's a mathematician," people have said to me in Orange County, when I tell them I'm a mathematician.

"Oh, what's their name? Maybe I know them," I reply.

They give me a "deer in the headlights" look. They struggle to speak, but nothing coherent comes out.

"Do they not trust me enough to tell me their friend's name?" I wonder to myself. "Or have they forgotten the name of their friend?"

I prod. Eventually, it turns out that they don't know the name. Their "friend" is someone they met once at a party. If they were even told the name, they promptly forgot it.

That wasn't what I considered to be a friend. I knew the names of my friends.

I promised myself that I'd never become so Orange County as to declare that someone was my friend when I didn't know their name.

I've broken that promise. I've now lived in the OC long enough that I've become the deer in the headlights, when I realize that I don't know the name of someone I just referred to as my friend (and saw every day for the past month at the boathouse).