Aristotle said, “Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.”
I am a very fortunate woman. I have an incredible group of women in my life. My friends, many of whom I see regularly and some of whom I haven’t seen in years, are a blessing to me. There are friends from high school that have recently come back into my life, friends from college I haven’t seen in years and friends from here who have moved away. There are friends I made while we lived in England that I haven’t seen in person since we left. There are new friends with whom the relationship is still being built. Real friends make all the difference in the world,something I've come to realize later than I should have.
Near or far, all these women enrich my life and just knowing they are there makes me happy. I have male friends too, and they are wonderful, but there is a type of support women can only get from other women that is somehow different. I didn’t always recognize this and the past several years I’ve really been working on learning how to be a friend. Living in the same place for fifteen years has helped. Although there are people you “click” with instantly, it takes time and effort to forge those connections.
Locally, I have a group of good friends that I meet for breakfast once a month. Every time we get together it is a fun, energizing couple of hours. Two other friends I’ve known for even longer and we meet monthly as well. Additionally, I have some terrific women in my neighborhood who have become very dear friends. We have formed a book club and while we do talk about the books, there is much more involved there. There are women from community groups and events I’ve come to know and become friends with. I don’t see some of them as often, but we stay in touch and meet occasionally.
All of these women are intelligent, creative and accomplished and they enrich my life in ways I can't even begin to describe. I have friends who share my political and social beliefs and friends who don’t; the same goes for spiritual beliefs. Having friends with a wide variety of beliefs in every area makes me a better person. I appreciate the differences. It keeps me from becoming complacent and forces me to think things through. My friends span the spectrum when it comes to age. I have friends who are several decades older and younger than I am, and I am grateful for all of them!
It used to be that I wouldn’t take the time to go out to lunch with a girlfriend unless I really didn’t have anything else to do. When I started to realize that it wasn't just a luxury, it was emotional sustenance, was while we lived in England. It was the first time in my life that I consciously realized how much emotional strength comes from having good female friends. I will love those women forever and I miss them.
In the years since high school I have learned to better recognize what is important in life. Relationships and connections with people you care about, that’s what makes life worth living. Now those planned get together times are set in stone, and unless something major happens, I’m going to be there. It matters. I am also lucky enough to have three wonderful sisters, plus a really amazing daughter who is becoming a great friend as she grows up. I also have other women in my family that I love dearly. My life is rich with wonderful, strong and supportive women.
The friendship between women is different than that between men or between a man and a woman (and yes, I do believe it’s possible for men and women to be just friends. In fact I know it is.). Women tend to make a deep emotional commitment to their female friends. They share thoughts, feelings and experiences. The women I am lucky enough to call friends support each other in times of trouble and celebrate each others’ triumphs.
As a teen and young twenty-something, I had more close male friends than female and excepting my brothers, where the whole sibling thing changes the dynamics, the only men I've ever had friendships with that are similar to those with my closest girlfriends are gay. This makes me wonder about biological reasons for the differences in friendship patterns and how that plays into sexual orientation. I don’t know if any studies have been done in this area and I haven't looked, but I would be interested in finding out. A project for another time! A study of friendship at Syracuse University concluded:
Women devote a good deal of time and intensity of involvement to friends. Friendships between women, more so than between men, are broad and less likely to be segmented.
Women usually make a deep commitment to their female friends and their friendships usually cover a broad spectrum, while men's friendships tend to be segmented and centered around particular activities (Gouldner & Strong, 1987; Lenz & Myerhoff, 1985; McGill, 1985; Pogrebin, 1987).
I grew up moving frequently and learned early on that making friends was a waste of time because we would just leave and it was hard. As a result, throughout Elementary and Middle School I had friends, but they were surface friendships, I never invested any effort. That way when me moved, it wasn’t hard. I had my siblings and they were always there. That was where my emotional stability came from. High School was the first time I actually made real friends outside of my family. It was the first time I’d been in a school for more than a year. I was able to graduate from the same school I started at, something my siblings weren’t able to do as after that brief break, the moving pattern picked back up.
To be honest, I don’t think I was a very good friend most of the time in high school, I didn’t know how to be. Fortunately for me, there were people who seemed to like me in spite of my deficits, for which I’m grateful. I also did not do a good job of maintaining those connections once I graduated. Honestly, it didn't even occur to me that I should, I was too used to moving on. As a result I missed out on a lot. I think I also probably really hurt some friends because I did just move on. Now that I understand it, I regret it and wish I'd done things differently. It wasn’t intentional; I just didn’t know how to do anything else at that time. I got a little better at it in college, but still didn’t do very well for the most part. Fortunately, I have been able to get back in touch with some of those old friends the past several years and I hope to be able to see all or most of them again in the future and strengthen those ties in person.
I didn’t really learn how to maintain a friendship until far too recently and it’s just been in the past ten years or so that I began to really appreciate the girlfriends in my life. Our family has had some serious challenges – job loss, health issues, etc., the past few years and I wouldn’t have been able to cope without the support of my family and friends. Women need other women. The importance of having girlfriends is often minimized, something far too many leave behind with high school and/or college. That is sad, because the kind of support that comes from good girlfriends is essential, both emotionally and physically, really!
It’s just been over the past fifteen years and after the federal government mandated that medical and drug testing be done on both sexes rather than just males (think that took long enough?!!), that scientists have started doing research on the biology of female friendships (there were psychological studies done previously). This came about in large part because of a landmark study by scientists at UCLA in 2000, reported in Science Daily* and in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Review. This study revealed the previously unrecognized differences in the way that men and women deal with stress. The results are amazing, but not surprising to most women. Smart women know they need their friends.
The “fight or flight” response has been accepted as a biological response to stress by humans for years and is still widely taught with no differential regarding sex, but no research until fairly recently used women as test subjects. The researchers found that while men did indeed follow previous patterns of fight or flight in dealing with stress, women were much more likely to seek the company of other women in times of stress, a reaction called the “tend and befriend” response.
Interestingly, research proved that this response to stress was far more effective in leading to a sense of calm. This is probably one of the reasons women are less likely than men to have stress induced high blood pressure and heart attacks, as well as other stress related health problems, as explained by Dr. Shelley E. Taylor, a Yale educated Psychology professor at UCLA, a principal member of the research team.
"Men are more likely than women to respond to stressful experiences by developing certain stress-related disorders, including hypertension, aggressive behavior, or abuse of alcohol or hard drugs," Taylor said. "Because the tend-and-befriend regulatory system may, in some ways, protect women against stress, this biobehavioral pattern may provide insights into why women live an average of seven and a half years longer than men."
Really, women need their friends. I know I need mine. Maintaining and strengthening my female friendships makes me a better wife, mother, person. So if it’s been a while since you talked to your college roommate or a friend from when your children were in kindergarten, now is a good time to get back in touch. Go out to lunch or at least check out their Facebook page and say hi. You’ll be glad you did and you might just be a little healthier for it too!
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