When I first heard that there was a new app, “Hey! Vina”, for women looking to make friends with other women, I had one reaction: it must be full of sad, desperate losers. I know, I’m the pathetic one: a grown woman talking like an insecure teenager about total strangers trying to have a nice time. Turns out a lot of people disagree with me. When the app launched in America, 110,000 users signed up to it in the first six months. It was so successful that the app has now launched worldwide. Tinder has even invested in it.
But the forging of friendships is such an important part of childhood, I started to wonder if my attitudes and fears around it were forever stuck there, too. You can’t use an app to make friends, my negative voices all hissed, you should just be able to find them in the real world, even though this is how people reacted to online dating years ago and it’s now so common that half the weddings I go to are of couples who met on a profile page. (I even went to one where the groom had printed all the wedding stationery in the Guardian typeface, to honour their having met on Guardian Soulmates.)
But however many “real life” friends you may have had at one point, life does change. Relationships break up, people move away, sometimes friendship groups implode. According to Facebook, I have hundreds of lovely friends, but most of them are faces on a scrolling screen only. In real life, I often think things like, “I could go to the cinema tonight, who should I text?” – and end up texting nobody.
So when I downloaded the app, I was relieved to find that the people on Hey! Vina seemed perfectly normal, or even a bit more interesting than that. Quite a few were women who’d recently moved to the UK from another country to study – from Holland, South Africa, Portugal. There was a British girl who loved galleries and wanted to find someone else who would wander round with her, staring at art. A trans woman who had only recently started living as one and wanted new friends for her new life. I realised this might be the perfect place for me to say that I really enjoy Iranian cinema – something I once mentioned on a dating website, leading to a painfully laborious conversation with a man who probably knew as little about it as I did. It’s not that it’s my specialist subject, I’d just like to go and see some. Perhaps, through this friendship app, I might actually get round to it.
So I do IT. I hit the button that lifts details from my Facebook page so I don’t have to fill in any forms, and can just get started. I start scrolling, and pressing the “Hey!” button on women who look nice. After a while I grow disheartened, as nobody is liking me back. I check back the next day and still nobody wants to be my friend. It turns out it is me who is the sad, desperate loser. So this is how karma feels. Why won’t they notice me? I am almost distraught – until I bother to actually look at my own profile and realise it has taken the photo from my Facebook page: a 1980s paparazzi shot of Princess Diana and Fergie, on a ski lift. Which, personally, is a female friendship I’d be more than happy to emulate, but people on here clearly want to see your real face.
I change the picture and quite soon am befriended back by Ana, a Portuguese 28-year-old who is in London for a couple of years to perfect her English. We chat a bit through the app, I apologise for Brexit and the failings of my countrymen, and we agree to go to a café. Except, being a true Londoner, I have to cancel twice before we actually meet up.
It feels weird, walking into a café I know quite well and realising that my blind date is that girl in the black coat at that table, smiling sheepishly. Am I suddenly about to realise that I’m actually a lesbian? Is this where my life changes? But no, it is not that kind of date.
“In Portugal,” Ana says, “you can just call your friends and say, ‘Let’s go for dinner tonight,’ and everybody comes. But in England, people say, ‘Yes we must meet up,’ but it’s more general. They don’t actually come. Or they have to organise it in their calendar three weeks in advance.” I tell her this is more of a London thing, and that it’s different in smaller towns, but she doesn’t look convinced. I feel a pang of guilt about my cancellations. And then the conversation moves on and I find myself mentioning Brexit again.
“It is making me depressed,” she says, which is exactly what I was going to say, so we are probably meant for each other. We do have a nice time, though – I find out all about her MA in marketing; she finds out about my theories on new money, old money, and why that scruffy guy over there probably went to Eton.
In my head, I am comparing the experience to online dating, in which there is always an end goal, a question of is this going somewhere, are they into me, am I into them? There is always a potential unveiling: of skin and of intent. With friend dating, you are also waiting to see if you click, but the end goal is not commitment or an after-dark frisson. It’s to organise another trip to the café, which Ana and I promise to do soon – then she has to leave. I stay in the café a bit longer, realising I have thoroughly enjoyed myself. But was it friendship, or something more performative? I’m not sure yet.
The same week, I see my old friend Melissa, who moved to New York to manage a bar, but is in London on a flying visit. Her job is inherently sociable, you would think, but when I ask how life there is going, she says: “I’ve not really found my people.” She does have friends, but says they don’t quite feel like her tribe. “I have a type,” she adds, “I’ve been analysing it and I’ve realised that the problem is I’m not meeting my kind of women. I have a definite type.”
That’s it, I think – it really is the same as romantic dating. We do have types. So perhaps, rather than accepting the friends we find at work, we should identify the qualities we want in one, and then look for them on an app. So I tell Melissa about it, and about the friend date I went on. She looks slightly horrified, so I show her it. “Wait,” she says, scrolling through the profiles on my phone, “These people actually seem… all right?”
Before I can stop her, she’s clicked through to look at my own profile. I am embarrassed. “Since when,” she asks, almost laughing, “were you interested in Iranian cinema?” And I think to myself that the other me, the one who describes herself to total strangers on the internet, has been interested in it for a very long time, actually.
