For Women, A Circle of Many Friends

The Metro Women's Group draws women looking for friendship, including Jessica Grinspan, left, and Jessica Toll. (Michael Williamson - The Washington Post)

Let's deal first in the hypothetical.

A girl grows up in a suburban patch of, say, Washington state. She reigns supreme over the backyard clubhouse and grows up to be captain of the varsity basketball team. Four years studying art history in Chicago made her worldly; two years in a sorority house made her a champion bloody mary mixer. Idealism and an entry-level job at the Smithsonian Institution lures her to the District but gives her a paycheck just big enough for a small room in a group house on Capitol Hill. All the better, actually, because now she has an instant set of friends.

Fast-forward five years: She still has friends, except one took a humanitarian aide job in Africa last year. Another went to graduate school in Toronto. Two got married and moved to Gaithersburg because they couldn't afford a decent place in the city. Her lawyer buddy is too swamped to meet for cocktails, and her political pal is out campaigning for the next six months. Suddenly, she has a lot of time to catch up on that reading list, which is great, really, but maybe just a little, um, quiet.

Now the actual.

Gwen McFaden woke up one day and realized she didn't have any friends outside of work. Rachael Gursky moved here six months ago after college without knowing a soul. Sherry Konigsberg has lived in Washington for most of the past 12 years, but you won't believe how many of her intimates have come and gone while her life inside the Beltway rolled along.

This is going to sound sad, almost pathetic, but let's just say it: There are a lot of slightly lonely women floating around this town. (Men, too, obviously, but let's stay tight to the ladies for the moment.)

"When you're in college, meeting people is no problem. You're in class with them, and they're like, 'Let's go grab a beer.' It's just very natural. But then there comes a point, after you start your job and you've been working there a while, that you're only going out with your colleagues," McFaden said. "You come to a point where it's, 'My God, I used to be a social creature, what happened?' "

And so McFaden ("in my 30s") found herself, a year and a half ago, wading into a restaurant on her own, taking a seat at a table and dining with a group of women she had never met. "It is a little disconcerting . . . but it does get easier."

The organization McFaden latched on to, plucked from a Craigslist posting, is the Metro Women's Group, but it could have been any one of half a dozen organizations -- including Girls and the City, Urban Divas, Cosmopolitan Inc., the Washington Women's Social Meetup Group -- that have cropped up in the past few years solely to give women like her an opportunity to make female friends.

They don't pretend to be book clubs, and they aren't ruses used to meet men. It's socializing under a simple pretext: Every woman in attendance wants a fuller social life.

"I think in this area in particular, it's so transient with people coming and going and people so focused on their jobs, it's hard to make friends outside of work or school," says Jessica Toll, founder of the Metro Women's Group. "People want to, but they don't know how to do it. What do you do? Go into a bar and say, 'Will you be my friend?' It doesn't work like that."

It doesn't work like that unless everyone is silently asking that question just by showing up.