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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)
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"It's our fifth date, and we've never even kissed," one woman comfortably planted on a bar stool is saying.
"Well, he might wanna do that after he drops $400 on a date," another responds.
That was the conversation between virtual strangers 10 minutes into a gathering of the Metro Women's Group before even a single drop of sangria had been poured.
And from then it was on. Between bites of tapas and sips of martinis, the dozen women settled into a private room at Agua Ardiente covered literature and job stresses, travel plans and, naturally, guys.
"I just wanted a group of girls to hang out with, do girl things with. It's kind of like that slumber party thing from high school," said Konigsberg, a 31-year-old Falls Church resident who has become a regular face at the group's events over the past year.
Amy Pickwick didn't start out to form a women's organization. She wanted to meet others who shared her passion for nature, so in 2002 she launched the Maryland Outdoors Club. "But a lot of the girls there said they were joining just to meet other women, and they were getting creeped out by the older men in the group," she recalled.
So last year Pickwick founded Girls and the City, a group that meets monthly to visit art exhibits and hold potluck dinners. Most of the members, whose average age is 29, actually have husbands and boyfriends, Pickwick said, but they're just looking for "things to get them out of the house . . . people to hang out with."
Toll, of the Metro Women's Group, held her first, unofficial meeting three years ago after reading all the Craigslist messages from individual women looking for activity partners. Having just moved to the area herself, she posted an open invitation for other women to meet her for happy hour. Five people showed up. They decided to do it again two weeks later, and 15 women came. A nerve was struck, and Toll's e-mail list eventually grew to more than 2,000 "members."
But "members" doesn't translate to "attendees," of course. Most of the time women come for a while, make a friend or two who become intimates and find they no longer need the formal structure of the group.
"They branch off and do their own thing -- I've had people e-mail and say, 'I met my best friend at your group, and now she's the maid of honor at my wedding,' " Toll said.
Toll's fiancee, Bruce MacNair, started a corresponding organization for men after watching the women's group bloom. But it seems that men are not quite as willing to put themselves out there with a group of strangers. Bite Club DC's events -- dinners, whiskey tastings and the like -- are growing in attendance, but the response is not nearly as resounding as it was for Toll. (Note to guys: The odds are in your favor when you show up at a mixer between the two groups.)
Not that it isn't initially awkward for women. The first time Gursky, 22, showed up at a Metro Women's Group event, she was nervous about the dynamics of a dinner among strangers and worried that everyone would be significantly older.
