There’s a woman in my pottery class I would like to be friends with.
She sits two wheels down from me, and what I know about her is small and oddly specific. She thinks the good clay is worth the extra money.
Her mother is in a home in Michigan, and she has stopped correcting her about what year it is.
She said that last part with her hands still in the clay, not looking up, in the voice you use for something you’ve decided not to make a big deal of.
What I said was oh, that’s hard. Then I went back to my own bowl.
She went first, in a small way, and I had nothing to hand back.
I’m fifty-four. I have five or six good friends, and I have not made a new one since 2004.
Those two facts turn out to be connected. I didn’t understand how until I was standing in a room with somebody I wanted to know and couldn’t work out what a person does next.
Every friend I have was assigned to me
I went through them one by one, which I don’t recommend.
Ellen had the locker next to mine for three years. We were friends by proximity before we were friends by choice, and by the time anybody chose anything it was already done.
Priya and Dawn were at my first job. There was one microwave in that office and a line at it every day at 12:15, and we stood in that line for four years.
Marta lived four doors down when the kids were small. We spent four years on the same square of sidewalk while they fell off bicycles, and neither of us ever suggested any of it.
Every one of them is somebody I was put next to, over and over, in a place I couldn’t easily leave. None of it was chosen.
I used to think that said something warm about me, that I hold onto people. What it says is that I have never once done this on purpose.
School was doing something for me and never mentioned it
Sociologists have held since the 1950s that close friendships need three conditions, as Rebecca Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has described them: proximity, repeated unplanned interaction, and a setting that lets people put the guard down.
School gives you all three and doesn’t say a word about it. So does a first job, and so does a street with small children on it.
Nobody points this out at the time, because at the time it isn’t happening to you. It’s just where you are.
I have two of them on Thursday nights. Near each other, obviously. Guard down, because it’s difficult to be impressive with clay up to your elbows and a bowl going lopsided under your hands.
The missing one is the middle one, and it does most of the work.
Priya was at the microwave at 12:15 because there was one microwave. We were in the same eight square feet at the same time, five days a week, for four years, and a friendship assembled itself out of that with no effort from either of us.
The pottery class ends at nine, and eleven people walk out to eleven cars. Everyone had a reason to be there, and the reason is finished. There is no version of that evening where somebody accidentally stays.
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I can’t go first anymore
Two Tuesdays ago I found an article about a potter she’d mentioned liking, and I drafted a message, and I deleted it.
The article was fine. What stopped me was realizing, halfway through typing, that I was sending it so I’d have a reason to be in her phone.
Sending someone a link is a thing with a purpose attached. Do you want to get a coffee is not, and I could not make myself type it.
Thirty years of being careful not to be a bother, and somewhere in there I lost the ability to want somebody’s company out loud.
I stopped telling people things
Dawn knew about my brother within a month of meeting me. I was twenty-four, and it hadn’t occurred to me that this was information a person manages.
It came up because it was true, and because she asked how my weekend was and my weekend had been about him.
There are people I have known for six years who don’t know I have a brother. I am not going to explain him here either, which tells you how well the habit took.
Somewhere between then and now I learned to lead with the version of myself that has it handled. That version is useful at work, easy at parties, and requires nothing from anybody.
It is also the version nobody befriends. Nothing gets built on it, because there’s nothing on it to build on.
The odd part is that this caution is aimed at a reaction most people don’t have. Anna Bruk and her colleagues found that people judge their own displays of vulnerability far more harshly than observers do, and named the mismatch the beautiful mess effect.
From the inside it looks like too much. From the outside it mostly looks like courage.
The woman at the wheel two down from me has already gone first twice. Once about her mother, once about something with her son. I have given her the clay opinions and a joke about the parking.
She probably likes me more than I think
The thing that stops me is smaller and more embarrassing than any of that.
I think she’s being friendly. I think I’m the one who wants it, and if I ask her for coffee she’ll say yes the way you say yes to a coworker who asks.
Erica Boothby and her colleagues put people who didn’t know each other in a room, had them talk, then asked each of them separately how much they’d liked the other person and how much they thought the other person had liked them.
People came out underestimating how much they were liked, over and over. Boothby’s group called it the liking gap.
The part that should worry me is what happened next. They followed first-year students through a year with their dorm mates, and the gap held from September to February, and only closed in May, when the roommates had to decide whether to live together again and finally had to ask.
Familiarity did not fix it. Somebody putting the question directly did.
I have run this experiment twice already without knowing it. A woman from my old job I liked enormously, and a woman I met through my sister.
Both times we had two or three good conversations. Both times I couldn’t stand not knowing whether it was mutual, and both times I slowly stopped being the one who reached out, then told myself they seemed busy.
Neither of them ever heard the question. Neither did I.
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What I’m going to do on Thursday
I’m going to ask her to get a coffee on Saturday. Not after class, where it could pass as an extension of something already happening.
Saturday, with nothing attached to it, so it’s obviously a thing I wanted.
Then I’m going to spend a week not knowing how it went, and I’m not going to fix that by going quiet.
It’s possible I’ve got this wrong and some of the carefulness is a full life and a high bar, which is allowed at my age. But I don’t think so.
She told me about her mother in Michigan with her hands still in the clay. That was somebody going first, in a room, with no reason attached to it, hoping.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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