Just before the pandemic, a woman set out to meet 1,000 new people in a year. Countless knitting-group meetings, book clubs, happy hours, and dog walks later, the person she got to know best? Herself.
In 2019 I set out to meet 1,000 people in a year.
I was driving home from teaching my last class of the spring semester when the idea drifted in with the pollen. I gave it absolutely no critical examination, but it felt right. I like meeting people. (Most of the time.) I’m a journalist: Hand me a notebook, give me an assignment, and I can meet anyone. Now I had an assignment for all occasions. I could do this! As I rounded the curve toward home, I did some quick math—quick for me—and realized I needed to meet about 20 people a week, roughly three people a day.
Unless you’re in sales, 20 people a week is a crowd. Some weeks, when I’m trying to meet a deadline, I might not see 20 people. I might have to start introducing myself to strangers while pushing my cart through Kroger. None of this occurred to me as I pulled into my driveway. I had convinced myself it was doable.
In my journal a few days later, I note my plan. Do I reflect on my motives? I do not. It’s a stunt, ginned up not for this writing assignment but as a little challenge for myself. Or something. I was like a kid jumping from a high diving board—if I thought about the distance I was about to fly, I’d never take that step into the air. Of course, when you leap, the drop to blue water happens so fast, you don’t have time to work out a rationale. Suddenly, you’re seeing bubbles and bobbing to the surface. But this was no launch into gravity’s inevitability. It was a journey.
I just didn’t know where to.
That first journal entry is spare, a list of the people I met at a poetry reading. These were the first official meetings of my venture: a poet, several employees of a local publisher here in Louisville, a woman who runs a regular poetry reading, the manager of the Duluth Trading Company downtown, and a fiction writer. In retrospect, to say these quick handshakes—polite and forgettable—were actual meetings is laughable. But I counted them.
Twenty people a week is 1,040 a year. I have a 40-person wiggle room. That will vanish quickly. In fact, if this is going to work, I should aim to meet a few more than 20 people a week as a buffer. I end the week with 18 total encounters.
I need a strategy. I’ve lived in eight cities in my adult life, so I’ve read the articles about how to meet people. They all come down to one rule: Go places where other people congregate. I remember one small Michigan city where I tried to follow this advice by checking the paper for local events. About every third group was an A.A. gathering. (For a few months, I hit the bars so often, I seemed determined to meet the qualifications.) But Louisville’s alternative weekly is full of stuff to do. And Friday I drive through a cold rain to a pottery studio hosting an introductory lesson. A dozen people hunker mutely at potter’s wheels. I’ve been to noisier funerals. I introduce myself to the woman beside me, and I swear she flinches. I leave with clay-spattered damp clothing and the promise of receiving the two ugly squat-pots I’ve made. I’ve met no one, and it cost me $100.
Lesson learned: I need places where conversation is knitted into the fabric of the event. (Literally, it will turn out.) Another thing: If an event costs more than a cup of coffee, think twice.
I turn to Meetup.com, the website where groups pay to promote get-togethers and events. As I consider the riches of opportunities on offer, I find myself stalling. Am I scared?
I’m scared! The prospect of being the stranger at so many meetings, confronting people without a notebook as my shield and no clear role—it shakes me up. I read The Charisma Myth, the subject of a modest amount of buzz when it came out in 2012. Olivia Fox Cabane writes that charisma isn’t inborn but rather a set of learned behaviors that convey presence, power, and warmth through things like listening, eye contact, and pretending you’re a gorilla. She’s not talking about chest thumps but suggesting a confident stance, the kind of posture that takes up space. When you face uncertainty, she advises, sit quietly, breathe deeply, and mentally hand the weight of doubt from your shoulders to God’s, or to the universe—or that kid in ninth grade who made your life hell.
I take a few breaths and head out to an adult coloring group.
Jackpot! It’s a youngish, informal crowd gathered in a hipster bookstore/record store, Surface Noise, with a small gallery in the back. Lately I’ve had the bright idea of asking the people I meet if I can record short videos of them, which both deepens the connection and ups the awkwardness factor. (I watch these videos today and realize I was actually making people uncomfortable.) I meet and take videos of the owner, Brett, several of his friends, and other visitors. I exchange contact information with an aspiring fiction writer. Somehow, in my excitement at how well this goes, I manage to screw up most of the videos, but I’m buoyant as I head out to Baxter Avenue on the cool May evening. This was fun!
By the end of week three, I’m on track: Sixty-four total introductions and a calendar full of planned activities: neighborhood meetings, library events, an art class taught by a friend, a moviegoing coterie. Among the activities is a knitting group that calls itself Witty Women of Louisville. I like the name. They meet biweekly at a Panera Bread. I don’t know how to knit, but their notice says they’ll teach me if I show up with needles and yarn.
My husband, Joey, and I had lived in Louisville 11 years when I started my quest. I had made one close friend in those years and several close-ish acquaintances whom I occasionally met for coffee or a drink. The people I knew best lived in the cities I’d moved away from. But my life was full, with rewarding, interesting work. I didn’t think about loneliness. At most, I could admit to a secret mourning over the absence of a social network, a group of friends who know you and love you because of yourself and in spite of yourself.
Our first summer in Louisville, Joey received free tickets to Abbey Road on the River, a Beatles tribute-band extravaganza with Fab Four imitators from around the world. As the sun lowered over the Ohio River, I spied a group of women in front of the stage. I watched them as if they were the main act and the Japanese band playing with Beatles-esque charm was the sideshow. I watched them divide and come together again, welcome new members and disperse others as the music played. My throat squeezed and my eyes welled as I followed their pantomimed conversations, saw them sway and sing along and raise their arms and howl. I wanted to be them, to understand their inside jokes, to feel the kind of abandon you can in a group of close friends. But I labeled it a fleeting nostalgia, the magical thinking that whispers, Yesterday, life was so much better. You can’t live in yesterday. Best to move on.
I ’m not nostalgic as I head to meet the Witty Women knitting group. Just nervous. What if I’m not witty enough?
For one thing, I am now the kind of person who tracks the people she meets on an Excel spreadsheet—I’m at 84 introductions by the end of week four, just ahead of my goal. My attempt to keep accurate records reveals the inadequacies of my effort at every turn. In the first place, I keep thinking about what constitutes “meeting” someone. I know now it must be more than an exchange of names—names that I often forget, leaving me with entries like “Man with pornstache.”
The videos I’m taking gradually lead me to acquire short bios. Tell me why you’re here. Where are you from? What nationality is that name? How’d you end up in Louisville? My process is starting to feel adequate. These are meetings. I add the bios to my spreadsheet.
Kerry—looks like Alex in Orange Is the New Black.
Lin—author of 9 Little Words to Change Your Results—great short hair, dramatic earrings.
Brian—from Bolivia, been in the U.S. since he was 10; invents natural colors for foods.
Alex—was in The New York Times Monday talking about his vaping research; is that a goatee? A Vandyke?
Dwight—long gray-blond hair, backward U.S. Army cap; in town to “get my life together.” Goes to a drug-treatment facility.
Toni—was riding her bicycle to Miami, got a late start, ended up in the Jacobs neighborhood. Been here three years. Little dreads with red tips.
I was going to at least two events every week. The knitters screw up my plans because I like them so much. I keep going back, which means I have one outing every two weeks that yields only one or two new people, if any. It requires me to add a third weekly outing. At first, I use my status as a knitting tyro as my excuse to return: Can someone tell me why there’s a hole in my scarf? Really I keep going because it’s two gatherings a month that require no chutzpah. The conversation is easy. No one is showing off their erudition. They talk a little about family, a little about books, a little about what happened at work—the kind of conversations I remember my mother having at her kitchen table. The group is low-key funny and interested in each other. It feels good to be with them.
Maybe this is the point of meeting people in the first place.
At just under 200 people—around week nine—I’m feeling strain. I stand in the doorway of a brewpub looking at a crowd in business casual—although one guy wears a kilt. I’m nearly undone by self-consciousness. I question the whole enterprise; my mission seems ridiculous. I can’t find the story line. It still feels like I’m just toting up handshakes and meaningless chatter.
In fact, what I’m learning with each new encounter—the awkward, the weird, the instantly fascinating, the guy playing himself in a starring role, the woman who takes the phone out of my hand so she can make the video herself because I’m not doing it right, the lady who wonders what my real motives are—is that they’re all me. I’m the frightened one, the overconfident one, the entertaining one, the funny one, the interesting one, the dopey one, the suspicious one, the one who’s failed over and over and who hopes that this time, maybe this time, I’ll get it right. There isn’t an emotional response I encounter I can’t find in myself, and that’s what connects us.
The things that separate us? Giant craters of experience, and background, and family, and wealth, and education, and belief—but they are as thin as tissue, as diaphanous as rainfall.
A secret: I’ve jousted with loneliness for years. I’ve watched every dissolving friendship and seen an inevitable force at work. When it goes well, I wait for the storm that will tear it apart. I was single until I was 43, and I never found a way to gracefully suffer through a failed romance. I remember an older coworker, a dear woman, looking at me, puzzled, as I tried to scrape myself together after my latest disappointment—the one right before I met my husband. She said, “Doesn’t it get easier?” And I couldn’t answer, because the truth was, it had only gotten harder.
I have never admitted any of this out loud. I have been ashamed of my broken friendships, my empty hours. I’m enough of an extrovert and, in fact, an optimist that I always pushed myself forward, always found the next handhold, always made eye contact even when I didn’t want to, because loneliness can vanish as easily as it can arrive.
Years ago, after my friend Beth moved several states away, we’d talk on the phone and bemoan the lack of “me people” in our lives—you know, the ones who get your jokes and appreciate your stories. Eventually we’d each find our “me” people, although sometimes it took years. Surely more “me people” were out there. It could be the next person I met.
I had to believe that.
You just never know when you’ll find them or where.
When I found Joey, my husband, he gave me that secure place to stand so it never overwhelmed me again, but I still spent time in counselors’ offices wondering why I couldn’t seem to make friends. What was I doing wrong?
Maybe nothing. But with this mission to meet people, it occurred to me I was reprising a lesson from when I was 4 or 5. My mother had been a shy child—she spoke only Slovenian when she started school, so no wonder. She was determined that her children would be outgoing, not frightened like she was. And I was, it turned out, the perfect student for her lessons. “When you see someone your age,” she told me, “go up and tell them your name. Then ask them their name. And ask them questions about themselves: What school do you go to? Where do you live? Do you have brothers and sisters?”
I added to my mother’s suggested list a few questions of my own, including “Are you Catholic or public?” a question no public school child ever knew how to interpret.
With my mom’s junior Dale Carnegie course under my belt, I’d scope out other kids my age during our weekly library outings and introduce myself. It gave me a little thrill every time I did it, even when some puzzled girl stood silently trying to figure out what it meant to be public.
By the time I’m at over 300 meetings, I’m using any excuse to meet more people. I have videos of a cashier with fabulous hair at Nordstrom Rack and a genius at Apple. I have a video of a woman I bumped into in front of church; she was in town for a conference and always checked out nearby church architecture. I talk to the college student selling home security systems who’s been dropped into my neighborhood for the day. If I sense the person I’m dealing with has a minute, I try to turn that minute into a meeting. I’m on a roll.
Near the end of July, I’m invited to join a group going to see King Lear during Louisville’s Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. Of course, I go. As I expected, the meeting is a disappointment in terms of numbers for my project—it’s mostly knitting-group members. I meet only two new people, Nancy and Scout. They’ve brought their dog, Tigger. People with dogs are always easier to talk to. I’m instantly comfortable. Scout tells me about a book club she loves, and soon I’ve joined two book clubs that meet monthly.
By this point, my bookkeeping system has gone the way of all organizational systems I’ve ever established. I’m accumulating videos at such a clip, I don’t go back and watch them, so I’m not adding people to my database. By August, and the start of fall semester, I’m overwhelmed with work; the book clubs Scout told me about are about all the extracurriculars I can manage. Eventually, Joey and I meet Scout and Nancy for dinner. That’s February 27, 2020. We hit it off.
Two weeks later, the world shuts down.
Had Covid happened a year earlier, we would have been isolated. Instead, we go into Covid with friends. The book group meets on Zoom, then breaks up, then comes back together—eventually in person. We see Nancy and Scout every week we’re reasonably sure none of us has been exposed. We make dinner and talk—they keep a running list of questions they want to discuss, usually involving politics or ethics or some quirky topic, and it’s endlessly stimulating. A couple of times we try those conversation-starting question cards. (From a good deck called Table-Talk: “What too often goes wrong in conversation?”)
Throughout the social famine of Covid, we had friends. It was a little thing. But it was a big thing.
I never meet 1,000 people—I’m pretty sure I was just short of 600. But it doesn’t matter. Instead, I have something more: burgeoning connections, friends who give me a safe place to stand in the world, an understanding of my own need to nurture even the smallest encounters, to see the human in them reflect the human in me.
Knowing lots and lots of people a little bit is nice, but that’s not friendship. It turned out to be very fun to meet them, even if I didn’t really need 1,000 new people in my life. But maybe I had to try to meet 1,000 people to find just a few wonderful, true connections. That’s sort of what life is. Think of how many people you meet in life, and how many become real friends. But it always starts with a first meeting. “Hi; what’s your name?” is the first step to finding out “Do we go together?”
And until you stick that hand out (or, in my case, stick that phone camera in someone’s face), well, you never know.
Looking back on all the people I met, and all those slivers of myself I saw in them, I think of the mirrors at the old department store where we went for school clothes when I was little, and the thrill of seeing myself reflected forever and ever in two opposing mirrors. I can’t help wondering if each glimpse into another person is the best way to see the far reaches of the world around us. Maybe not the whole world, but farther than you’ll ever see without them.
Oh, and Nancy and Scout? Joey and I are hosting their wedding at our home this summer.
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