By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 17, 2006; WE05

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.

"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.

"I just wanted somebody to hang out with, go out with, talk to," said Gursky, who moved to Washington in June after graduating from Cornell.

And?

"I found two other girls exactly like me."

GIRLS AND THE CITYhttp://www.girlsandthecity.com.

THE WASHINGTON WOMEN'S SOCIAL MEETUP GROUPhttp://www.women.meetup.com/79/?gj=sj5.

COSMOPOLITAN INC. -- THE LADIES OF WASHINGTONhttp://www.theladiesofcosmo.org.

URBAN DIVAShttp://www.urbandivas.org.

METRO WOMEN'S GROUP E-mailmetrowomen@gmail.com.