Cross-pollination

On Saturday night, which probably (definitely) deserves its own blog post, a bunch of us were sitting around wearing snuggies, drinking Four Loko and shooting alcohol-infused whipped cream into our mouths (see: Saturday night deserving its own post), when somehow it came up to discuss how we all knew each other. And so we started along the lovely road of, “Well, I know so and so from college, and then X and Y met through a mutual friend but then we became friends, and then there are high school friends and roommates of ex-boyfriends,” and on and on and on.

And then my friend’s boyfriend said, “I don’t think guys do this cross-pollinating thing with all their friends.”

It’s funny he said that because I’ve been meaning to write a post about this “cross-pollinating thing” for about a month now. I always thought it was more of a New York thing than a girl thing but maybe it’s a little of column A and a little of column B.

Ever since I graduated college and moved to NYC I’ve loved the fact that seemingly everyone here becomes friends with everyone else’s friends. Some people don’t like the blending of their worlds and there’s certainly a benefit to being able to occasionally compartmentalize the people you hang out with in different situations, but most of the time I’m all, “HOORAY WE ARE ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY.”

There’s a point where “friends by association” becomes just “friends,” when you no longer need the middleman (or I suppose woman, most of the time?) there for you to hang out. And while our insane mix of people on Saturday night definitely involved a lot of what used to be friends-of-friends, for the most part that’s not how we think of it anymore. Everyone is just friends. You certainly could have taken any 2 people from the room and put them off by themselves and they would have had more than enough to talk about, Four Loko-induced craziness or not.

Over the summer, I went to the NYU cafeteria to try Chick Fil-A for the first time. The person I went with was someone my [male] high school friend met in an acting class. Afterwards, he told me that he was slightly bothered by the fact that his friend and I went together, partially because we didn’t invite him (sorry!) but mostly because we were his friends from 2 separate circumstances and he didn’t like us being friends with each other. This certainly supports the prior assertion that men don’t like cross-pollinating their friends, though aside from us neglecting to tell him the date and time we were planning on consuming delicious chicken sandwiches, I don’t see the harm. You can never really have too many friends in this city, and why bother trying to stake your claim on someone by saying, “I saw her first! She’s MY FRIEND AND NOT YOURS!” Cool people are friends with other cool people and every new cool person helps make your life that much more awesome. And I am pro-awesomeness. And also, when people know and are comfortable with each other, there’s no sense of having to babysit the more shy friends. When everyone feels comfortable enough to participate in a snuggie-couture fashion show complete with Michael Kors-style commentary, it makes the night that much better.