The GirlAlive Blog

Real friendly, or Seattle friendly?

November 7, 2009 on 12:07 pm | In Life In General, Scotland | 2 Comments

My husband and I have been planning to move back to the US, or maybe to Canada for a while now, but the question remains of where to move. I grew up in Duluth, and a significant portion of my family still lives there. My brother lives in Illinois. A bunch of my family lives in Iowa. Quite a few of my friends live in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

It’s pretty easy to look online and find information about the cost of housing and job markets in different places. It’s even pretty easy to look up information on bus schedules and routes. Pictures of local landscapes are plentiful. But the one thing that is probably most important is nearly impossible to quantify. There is no way to measure how friendly the people are.

In Minnesota, the people are friendly, with provisions. Out in public, people keep to themselves. Even staring at a stranger is considered rude. The norm is to simply ignore all people you don’t know and if you can’t do that, short and polite noncommital statements only. You see, in Minnesota people mostly believe that if you are too friendly you are inviting someone deeply into your life. Minnesotans are not against friendship, but they also don’t want to commit to a friendship until they have collected the necessary information to know if you are worth it. But once you’re accepted, you have friends for life. My mom still exchanges Christmas cards with people she worked with 20 years ago. I am Facebook friends with a ton of people I knew from high school, college, and even the one year that I worked in Duluth before I moved to Scotland. Once you’re in, they will be on your side for life. They want to be in each other’s lives in a good way.

Seattle is a different story. I lived in Seattle for 5 years. People there are welcoming and friendly from the first minute you meet them, but they don’t mean it. They expect friendship to only exist while you’re standing in front of them. Out of sight, out of mind. If you change jobs, your former co-workers won’t talk to you again after that. People from Seattle will have long friendly conversations with you on the bus one day and look at you as if they don’t recognize you the next day. Relationships are friendly, but completely shallow and fleeting. I had a group of “friends” that I hung out with several evenings a week for about two years. I went on weekends away with them. I even went to Russia with some of them. When circumstances in my life changed and I stopped attending the same church as them, they all disappeared from my life. Now, about half of them won’t even accept me as a facebook friend and the ones that will never speak to me. I witnessed several of them be very friendly and welcoming to someone when they were in the room and then talk about how annoying she was when she left the room. Basically, you can’t trust them for a real friendship. They might be friendly, but that doesn’t mean they want to be your friend. (To be very clear, I have a few actual friends from my years in Seattle, but most of them were not originally from there.)

Then there’s Edinburgh. There is no definition of “friendly” that applies to this area. It was even once voted “the unfriendliest city in Europe.” If you’re the least bit different, they will taunt you in the streets and harass you even if they’ve never met you. They make it very clear the first time they meet you that they don’t like you and want you to go away. I’ve met some friendly people here. I had some great co-workers at my last job and I even still keep in touch with a few of them. My husband’s family and friends have been great. But they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Most of the people here hate outsiders just as much as the people of Seattle do, but they’re much more open about it. In some ways, that’s preferable. I don’t have any illusions of friendship here. I know that I don’t have friends. They don’t wait until you’re out of the room to say how much they hate you.

So where to move? It’s hard to know where I can move that the people will be genuinely friendly. There is no easy statistical friendliness index. Even if there was, Seattle would no doubt come off as very friendly, even though you’re more likely to find real friends in Minnesota, where people seem cold and distant. I don’t have any answers on that one.