34. Find Your Meilleur Ami
French people make their true friends at crèche or maternelle and keep those friends forever. I, too, don't really fuck with you unless I saw you wet the bed at a third grade sleepover.
When I first moved to Paris, I basically wanted to copy and paste a version of my best friend from New York and find one here. My criteria, outside of the whole must-be-a-kind-and-decent-person business, for this potential best friend was as follows:
Must love most types of Asian food.
Must be real when it comes to money, the world, and the importance of dessert.
Must be able to get silly about many topics -- we can and should have serious discussions but really, you should be a deeply silly person at heart.
I went on a series of friend dates and met many nice people, but none of them were my best friend. At a certain point, I wondered if you can only make a best friend when you are very young or in your twenties. Many people told me that French people make their true friends at crèche or in maternelle and keep those friends for the rest of their life, not making room in their lives for new ones. I was cool with that -- I, too, don't really fuck with people unless I saw you wet the bed at a third grade sleepover.
So in that case, I suppose the whole best friend endeavor was doomed. But then the entire world got a proverbial EDIT + UNDO with the pandemic. Many of the friends I made when I first moved to Paris moved away, or I promptly lost contact with. This was mostly my fault because during most of the pandemic, I was pregnant, first in 2020 and then again in 2022.
By the time I finally reemerged to make friends again, I was presented with the task of making a new type of friend: mom friends. At first I thought: I am knee-deep in a post-partum haze, do I really want to talk about babies with someone else when babies (and society and lack of sleep and my genetic makeup) are what got me into this depression in the first place?
But the answer is mostly: yes. It turned out the people who could vibe the most with a post-partum depressed new mom the most was a fellow mom. I had no energy to go on a series of friend dates this time around, so I enlisted the help of a matchmaker: my French teacher.
One day she told me she had a new student with a kid who was older than mine but wanted to meet new people. We met up a few times to eat various Asian food. She was real about money, the world, and the importance of dessert. She was a deeply silly person. And most startlingly of all: she didn't mind that I was basically a husk of a person after giving birth to two babies in two years.
Through her, I met other moms, and before I knew it, I had mom friends. We talked about babies but we also didn't. The main perk of a mom friend is you never feel that gnawing thought in the back of your head that goes: Am I talking about my kids too much? Because you totally can. Or, for that hour, you can pretend you have never heard of a baby in your life and that the two smiling children on your lockscreen is just a generic stock photo.
In the end, I never found my new best friend. I made new friends that I cherish, but they are not a carbon copy of my best friend from New York. That's because my best friend, like all great love stories, is one-of-a-kind. So I continue our friendship through different time zones and shared photos of Jeremy Allen White eating chicken wings while shirtless, and here in Paris, I have my mom friends, who also enjoy those photos, to be honest.
I'm still accepting applications for a best friend in Paris, though it's on a rolling basis. I have less energy and time to undergo a very rigorous vetting process, but I hope one day it'll happen naturally, as is the case for any good love story.