Men's and Women's Friendships

A girl's best friend? Someone just like her


By SUSAN SCHWARTZ, The Gazette


Women, more than men, seem to hold on to old friends.

"Time passes," it begins. "Life happens. Distance separates. Children grow up. Jobs come and go. Love waxes and wanes. Men don't do what they're supposed to do. Hearts break. Parents die. Colleagues forget favours. Careers end.

"But ... a girlfriend is never farther away than needing her can reach. When you have to walk that lonesome valley and you have to walk it by yourself, the women in your life will be on the valley's rim, cheering you on, praying for you, pulling for you, intervening on your behalf, and waiting with open arms at the valley's end."

Which is not to say that family and partners aren't incredibly important. But when I think of what life would be like without the girlfriends who have been in it for the better part of my time here, the women who know how to finish my sentences, who get me, who know what's upsetting me even when I can't figure it out, there's a huge hole.

Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote a column some years ago on why women, more than men, seem to hold on to old friends.

He spoke to women whose friendships with other women had endured for decades - and they told him that they believed their friendships thrived because they had raised some expectations and lowered others, he observes in his introduction to a lovely new book that grew out of that column.

The women said that they had come to expect loyalty and good wishes from their girlfriends - but not constant attention.

"If a friend didn't return an email or phone call, they realized, it didn't mean she was angry or backing away from the friendship; she was likely just exhausted from the day," Zaslow writes in The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship (Gotham Books, 2009, $32.50).

Bingo, I thought. I feel guilty sometimes, more often cheated, that there isn't more time for my girlfriends, for our wonderful, meandering conversations in which we talk about everything and nothing. But I know I am blessed to have them.

There are strong bonds in friendships that have lasted for decades - and there is power in those bonds. Studies have shown how having close friends helps people in all kinds of ways: to sleep better, improve their immune systems, keep dementia at bay and even to live longer.

I know little of men's friendships - but Zaslow writes that they are different from women's. He illustrates: he has been playing poker every Thursday night for years with a group of friends, he writes - and fully 80 per cent of their conversations are about the cards. Most of the rest is about sports. Or work.

"For weeks on end, our personal lives - or our feelings about anything - never even come up."

Among the hundreds of emails Zaslow received when his column ran, from women telling him their stories about enduring friendships, there was one from a woman who had grown up in Ames, Iowa, with 10 close friends. They are in their 40s now - one died in her early 20s - and they live all over the United States. Two have faced breast cancer. Three are divorced. One has lost a child to leukemia. Some have buried parents. They have made friends since, but none to whom they are as close as to each other.

"They feel like they are every age they ever were, because they see each other through thousands of shared memories," Zaslow wrote of them. And shared memories are powerful glue: sleepovers and parties, proms and weddings.

Think about it. How many people knew you when you were an awkward 12-year-old or through dating disasters? When you were trying to find your place in your craft or profession?

The girls from Ames agreed to let him into their lives, and he spent two years getting to know them and even, as they came to know and trust him, reading the diaries they had kept.

As the father of three teenage girls, Zaslow described himself as feeling "an almost urgent need" to understand women and their friendships.

He has observed his mother, sister and wife build close and loving friendships over the years, he says: he knows he wants the same for his daughters.