The Healing Power of Female Friendships

Female friendships are vital to a woman's health and may well prolong her life.
By Kathy English
From: www.Homemakers.com

Christmas almost didn't happen for Susan Warren last year. With her naval husband Tim deployed in the Arabian Sea serving in Operation Apollo, Canada's contribution to the war against terrorism, the Dartmouth, N.S., mom of Mackenze, then a little over a year old, just didn't have the heart to celebrate."We had no tree, I had no decorations. I wanted nothing to do with Christmas," recalls Warren. "Then a girlfriend and her husband invited me to their place in Moncton and Christmas Day ended up being OK, especially after my husband called and said his ship was coming home in March."
As she looks back on that difficult time, Warren, 30, feels deep gratitude for her friend who insisted she share Christmas with her family. That woman is one of many close friends Warren turned to for support and solace during the five months her husband was overseas. "I don't have any family here," says Warren, an American native who moved to Dartmouth with her Canadian military husband two summers ago. "I've made a lot of good friends though -- girlfriends who've become true friends I can always count on."

That's what friends are for
Counting on our girlfriends in good times and in bad is what we women do. Those of us blessed with great girlfriends understand implicitly that depending on one another and cheering each other on through both major and minor life crises is the currency of friendship.

Good friends talk, listen and simply show up for one another. After all, isn't
that what friends are for?
Actually, our girlfriends may play a far greater role in our lives than even the glam gals from Sex and the City -- today's poster girls for female friendships -- might imagine. New studies on women and stress provide strong evidence that those long gabfests with your girlfriends are vital to your health and may well help prolong your life. In June 2001, the renowned Harvard Medical School's Nurses' Health Study concluded that women's social networks play an important role in enhancing our health and quality of life. The study went so far as to conclude that not having at least one good confidante is as detrimental to a woman's health as being overweight or a heavy smoker.

Why gal pals are good for your health?
According to a ground-breaking new book The Tending Instinct (Times Books, 2002), by UCLA psychologist Shelley E. Taylor, the bonds between women run "old and deep" and have long been critical to our survival. Taylor, a world-renowned expert on stress and health, contends that women are genetically hard-wired for friendship as a means of coping with stress and, furthermore, we selectively seek out friendships with women -- not men -- when the chips are down.

Her research into women and stress has turned decades of stress research -- almost all of it based on male studies -- on its ear by suggesting that women respond to stress differently than men. While men tend to exhibit the well-known "fight or flight" response, Taylor theorizes that a more common female stress response is what she calls "tend and befriend." She says our evolutionary heritage suggests women who formed strong bonds with one another were more apt to survive (as were their offspring) than those who did not. Over time, women have learned to turn to one another for support and solace and have thus become crucial to one another in times of stress. "Female friendships play an important role in women's mental health," says Taylor.

"Women can hold off many stressors by affiliating with other women, by building
liaisons and forming friendships."

Somebody to lean on
Susan Warren depended on more than a little help from her friends when her husband was assigned to the war in the gulf in fall 2001, just three months after he had returned from a six-month overseas peacekeeping mission. She was once again left alone with a young baby and home to care for and a world of worry to cope with -- her husband was assigned to the "boarding party" that goes on board foreign ships to check for weapons and other illegalities. Warren turned to her "very, very, very important" female friends, particularly other military wives in the same situation. A couple of times a week she joined these women at Halifax's Military Family Resource Centre to chat, sip coffee and sometimes just tell one another how fed up they were. Warren's good friend Kim Dockrill accompanied her to doctor's appointments and helped her deal with immigration issues. Now Dockrill's husband is posted in Victoria for 11 months and Warren tries to reciprocate. "I'll see she's feeling stressed and say, 'Why don't you bring your son over here and we'll go to the mall for an hour.' Other people just can't understand what it's like to be alone for two winters, having a small baby and having to do everything on your own.
"...Women get close to one another through talk -- the "glue" of our vital bonds,
says Taylor. With words, we reach out to one another and come to understand each
other at a core level. We need to talk" Talk is at the very heart of women's
friendships, the core of the way women connect,..."

write journalists Ellen Goodman and Patricia O'Brien in a delightful book called I Know Just What You Mean: The Power of Friendship in Women's Lives (Fireside, 2000), which documents their 25 years of friendship. "At the heart of the connections made is one sentence that women repeat over and over -- 'I know just what you mean.'" Taylor says there may well be a biological basis for the empathy women seem to so easily give one another. She believes the hormone oxytocin -- the calming "cuddle chemical" released into a woman's bloodstream after childbirth to facilitate mother-infant bonding -- plays a role in pumping up women's tending instincts. Taylor theorizes that oxytocin -- which is also released during stress -- may be one of the driving forces behind forming and maintaining close social bonds because it enhances the ability to nurture and be nurtured. "Because estrogen increases oxytocin's effects, it's likely to be more important in women's stress response than men's," she says.

Certainly, women seem driven to form friendships with other females. Right from our early days in play groups and pre-school, little girls are drawn to one another and grow up to develop more intimate friendships than boys do and also create larger social networks. Women have long gathered in groups to support one another and share their interests. In the pioneer days, we held quilting bees. These days we gather and gab in book clubs, fitness challenges, investment groups and informal girlfriend groups. Many of us form "best friend" bonds with another woman and like Betty and Wilma, Lucy and Ethel, and Mary and Rhoda, stand by one another through all of real life's comedies and tragedies.

For better or for worse
Gail Gillespie and Jane Lang share that kind of bond. The two Peterborough, Ont., school teachers met 13 years ago when they were both assigned to the same school. As Lang, 55, tells it, the two "just clicked" and a great friendship was born. The women have stood by each other through many crises, including the deaths of Gillespie's parents and the end of Lang's marriage.

This past summer they faced their greatest crisis together when Lang was diagnosed with a rare form of skin cancer. "The skin doctor basically told me to go home and die," says Lang. Gillespie, 51, now a school principal, was devastated. "It was horrible, awful. I've lost both my parents and my husband's parents but I've never experienced anything like how I felt when I found out what the doctor told Jane," she says.

A friend in need
But neither of these strong women was about to give up without a fight. Much of their teacher's summer off was spent on the highway driving between Peterborough and Oshawa with Gillespie at the wheel delivering her friend to countless medical appointments. Gillespie regarded all of the time spent with doctors and lab technicians simply as "our appointments" and makes it clear that there was "nothing noble and nothing kind" about what she did for her friend.

"She's so important to me, so perhaps a part of being with her was selfish as
well. This level of friendship simply transcends."

And, it seems this story has a happy ending. By summer's end, Lang's prognosis was positive, with surgeons telling her they believe they have removed all cancerous cells.Toronto individual and couples therapist Carole-Anne Vatcher routinely seeks to find out if her clients have good friends in their lives, because she is certain those who do have "much better coping skills." "I have the sense that women's friendships help keep them sane," she says.

Certainly many women would agree with this.

"I can say with absolute certainty that my best friend Heidi has likely helped
me stave off several bouts of depression and insanity in my time,..."

says Vancouver writer Gwendolyn Richards, 26. "No matter what crisis I am going through -- and believe me, I seem to go through a lot of them -- I can call her and she will calm me down. If she is away and we have no contact, I feel like my arm has been cut off." (This is SOOOO ME & my best girlfriend, vp)
Facing challenges together
Over the course of our lives, our friendships with other women become increasingly important. As we move into our middle ages, the only sure thing we can expect is change and challenges -- illness, divorce, the empty nest, our parents' deaths. "It is our friends who keep us anchored and grounded amid the sea of changes within us and around us," says Patricia Gottlieb Shapiro in her book Heart to Heart: Deepening Women's Friendships at Midlife (Berkley Publishing Group, 2001).

While scientific and anecdotal evidence leaves little doubt that connections with other women are immensely important, time-crunched women often feel duty-bound to push friendship to the back-burner of their lives in order to juggle work and family pressures. "Women can't help but see friendships as the "treat" they can allow themselves only after the business of the day is done -- if it's done," write Goodman and O'Brien. Prioritize pals Taylor hopes her research into women and stress will convince women how important it is to commit time and energy to their friendships.

"Friends should not be something we attend to after everything else is done. If
we don't make a strong effort to build friendship into our lives we won't have
the protection, solace and support we need." (Absolutely! we must make time and invest our hearts & souls into our friendships, vp)

Perhaps we could all take a few lessons in tending and befriending from Margaret Campbell of Alliston, Ont., who celebrated her 90th birthday in August with her dear friend Winnifred -- her friend for more than 80 years -- at her side.
The women met in Sunday school sometime around the second grade and though Winnifred and her sister moved to the U.S. in their teen years, they've remained close through most of the 20th century. For many years they visited each other annually. Campbell says Winnifred always showed up to support her through the good and bad times of her life -- her wedding (Winnifred was a bridesmaid), the birth of her children, the death of one of her children and the loss of her husband when she was 62. "At times, we've been busy with our own lives, but we've always kept in touch, always phoned and sent Christmas and birthday cards," says Campbell.

"I think we just became a part of each other and now we're bonded for life. It's
like having an anchor to the past. We've both just turned 90 and now we've
decided we're going to head for 100 together."
So what are you waiting for? Go call a girlfriend now. You'll definitely feel better. And you might add years to your life.
vp - OH YES! This article spoke volumes to me about how I feel about my best bud in the whole world. We are partners in "crime" - we are there for each other through good, bad, ugly and in between. I couldn't have asked for a better person to come into my life, she is non-judgmental, a real angel and has a HUGE heart available to take on whatever issues comes her way. I sometimes feel like I can never give her enough back...but I know from my own personal experiences sometimes giving is the best gift of all! Love ya girl - you know who you are (CB) ;)
I hold for all of you women & men that you find or have a friend as special as that and your health is enriched with vitality and joy forever!