Looking for new friends

7.4.3. Looking for new friends

Ole is sitting at the bar facing the street in his regular coffee bar, Java at St.

Hanshaugen. He is writing on his laptop while sipping a cortado. He is in his mid-forties and a regular here. Two or three afternoons every week, at about four ‘o’ clock, he comes in, orders the same, finds a barstool in the window, and opens his laptop:

I started going here in the mornings; maybe four years ago. My intention was very clear. I wanted to make new friends, as I was newly divorced. I found myself without as many friends as before. After the divorce, what I had thought were our friends turned out to be mainly her friends. So I had to do something.

And this “something” is the coffee bar. Ole is the only one of my informants that has said this so bluntly, but I also find that some of the other people I have got to know are motivated by the same intentions. When life changes, then the need for new anchors, for new relationships become apparent. The customers who are open towards meeting new people often said that a coffee bar is a place where you can gradually get to know people. The coffee bar represents a “soft” introduction to new people that makes it possible for them to explore the potential for new friendships. If you are a regular, you are somehow a part of the same modus operandi, as Ole puts it:

… after three days you start to nod; after a week you might exchange a few words, and after two weeks it’s possible to develop more regular conversations; and then the rest is up to you. You can actually find new friends, people that you take a serious interest in, and that you have something in common with.

Ole has made new friendships, some of which he calls high quality

friendships. People he goes on vacation with, people he goes to the cinemas with and people who are now a part of his social network. “It works for me at least” said Ole.

But I don’t think it would work everywhere. I like this coffee bar. There are a lot of people here of my age group and in similar professions.

Ole is a designer, and finds that the regular Java customer is very often in the creative industries, people he can easily relate to. Ole is probably right about the cultural profile of the majority of the customers and this can be easily observed if you visit the coffee bar. Not only are many of the guests more or less well known to the public due to their work, such as actors, architects, designers and academics, but also their conversations and appearance provide evidence that they come from this segment.

Ole operates his very small laptop, and the reason why he has brought it with him is not only due to the fact that he has things to write but because he is also online and logged on to Facebook – a community network:

Before I leave work I sent out a message to my network (on Facebook) that I will be sitting here today for an hour or two.

That makes it easier for my friends – let’s call it my network – to drop by.

He checks to see if other people in his network have answered, or if there is anything else of interest going on. By combining digital and physical space, Ole is able to enhance his interface with his friends, and said that this is one way of making the coffee bar into a more convenient place to chat.

The coffee bar profits from people like me; you can be alone without experiencing any discomfort; but you don’t have to be alone; if someone comes along, there’s always room for one more. You don’t experience the feeling that you do in so many other places; in a café for instance, you will often feel

awkward, if you’re occupying a table on your own, and if you

see a group of three or four people desperately trying to find a table.

Ole is not the only one pursuing a new life by combining Internet and a physical location; he probably represents a growing group of customers for the coffee bars, although in my study I have only have met two such people who use this duality of tools.

Ole may be defined as someone who is looking for friends; and it is easy to see that his ambitions can be realized in a space where people of his age group and with similar perspectives on life can meet; however, as mentioned above, very few state this aim explicitly.

For instance, Trude is in a similar life situation to Ole’s. She works as a media planner; she is also single, a little younger, and looks after her two kids every second week; this means she always has one week when she is totally free from commitments; and that lack of obligations makes her a little nervous:

For a long long time I’ve been totally locked up in the atomic family structure. It’s very strange... very … you feel a kind of insecurity when you’re suddenly out there on your own.” She explains that the coffee bar offers her a space where she can develop a feeling of having control with the new life she suddenly has been thrown into. “Even if the divorce was my choice, I never thought that I’d have to establish a new life.

Our little family had its own borders and its own crops, its own rhythm. Now that’s gone, I have to find new spaces.

Trude is a morning user; she is a frequent guest at Kaffebrenneriet in Ullevålsveien, and places special significance by the fact that the coffee bars are open at hours when the rest of the commercial world is more or less closed:

“hen I drop by here every day, every other week, a little after eight, sometimes only for a coffee, sometimes for a whole breakfast, it’s a way of ensuring that I get a good start to the day; it’s like someone is hugging you and saying: ‘hey, life isn’t that bad after all’.

Her way of describing her mornings and allocating them a position in her everyday life interests me; it is as if she has understood something.

She said:

There’s a morning-world in there, a world of coffee and newspapers. I like that universe. I didn’t really know it existed.

But it does.

Trude likes to draw attention to her own understanding of the use of her mornings in the coffee bar: The coffee bars are for people like her – who have lived many years with the routine of family life – they help her at a vulnerable time:

It’s a ritual that I like because I’m able to interact with new people. I won’t say I’m desperately seeking contact, but rather someone I can chat to; I’m open to new situations… new people.

Trude finds life a little bit difficult after the divorce. The longing for a social morning procedure; because the need for a life in a social setting is always there:

It’s nice to be without them; I can sit in my kitchen, drink coffee and read the newspaper in peace and all that. But at the same time, it’s a little bit too peaceful. In the coffee bar at least I’m in the same room as other people. All we regular customers share something.

Trude has thought a lot about her new morning relationships; some of them have expanded into relationships she also nurtures when she is not at the coffee bar:

I think a woman of my age is somewhat disturbed by that fact that she can’t make new friends so easily anymore. For instance, when I was studying, it was easy to make new friends

quickly. I have some old friends, but only a few. I suffer from a kind of ‘single-life after broken-up-family syndrome’. Not only do I have to find new friends, but also new ways of building and maintaining friendships.

For several years Tina was a regular customer of Kaffebrenneriet in

Ullevålsveien. She finds that coffee bars, and especially this one, have been a social connecting point for her:

When I settled in Oslo I was in my late twenties; I was educated elsewhere and had no friends here, absolutely none.

But I came because of a job, and although I was introduced to very kind and interesting people in the company (she works for a law firm), it was in the coffee bar that I made my first friends... well maybe not friends for the first half year, but...

that feeling, the feeling of knowing someone, somehow a place I could describe as mine, out there in the big city all alone. I was comforted by the inclusive feeling in that coffee bar.

Tina said that it is important that coffee bars are constructed in such a way that they welcome you even if you are on your own, or perhaps especially because you are on your own. The ability to be both one and two and at the same time and having the feeling of being equal; the feeling that you are a one hundred percent worthy person when you are on your own is in her opinion the most important feature of a coffee bar.

That’s what made me a regular, and after a year I even made real life friends there… and even found a lover¹⁸.

she said, laughing. Now Tina has moved out into the suburbs and is married with twins:

At the age of thirty three, life is very different than it was four years ago. For instance, I didn’t meet my husband in a coffee

18 An incident I will return to later.

bar – he doesn’t have time for that kind of life. But the coffee bar gave me, for a limited but important period of my life, a kind of protection and a feeling of belonging. God knows where else I could have gone.

In document Coffee and the City (sider 157-162)