Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
—Anaïs Nin
AS WE REMODEL OUR LIVES, every door we open becomes unhinged. When we get through it, we may find that the floorboards are rickety, too. Each move we make has an impact on the makeup of our circle of trust. We leave jobs where we had friends and take jobs where we have none, or move from neighborhoods where we raised our kids—to be near our children and grandchildren—to ones where we don’t know anyone else. Or we take off for parts unknown, leaving friends behind. Each new experience brings new needs and interests in the friend department.
Even if we stay put, the process of reinventing ourselves brings regular reminders that, as I point out in my books, we are not who we were, only older. You may not be the woman who, say, loved to travel with her pals, or sit at home and play Scrabble, or run things, or let other people run things. We are each a work in progress. So it figures that, since we see so much of ourselves reflected in our friendships, it would be invigorating to add to the circle who knew us back when, by making some new friends who know us as we are now. But how do you make friends, anyway? Especially at our age.
There are plenty of women who never really learned how to strike up a friendship. Remember, many of us grew up at the end of an era when women were taught that other women were not to be trusted, because they were rivals for the one accomplishment that mattered: snagging a man. My mother was an extreme case. She had barely any friends throughout her life, partly because she had a suspicious nature, but mostly, I am sure, because she was beautiful and the envy of other women, who had grown up believing that beauty and trust were not compatible.
When I was in high school, there was an unspoken covenant that any appointment with a girlfriend could be broken if you got an offer from a boy. Later, when women broke into male-only professions, others of our generation found themselves cut off from other women simply by being the only female in a given workplace. Again, other women were the competition, in this case for the token slot. At first it may have been fun to be singled out, but it wasn’t long before those pioneers realized they were being shut out, too. No matter how well they did their jobs, they began to see that the rules of the game remained mysterious and the granting of power took place in back rooms (or male-only clubs or men’s rooms).
Eventually, of course, it became clear that only by working together with other women, regardless of their rank, would we be able to force change. As women found strength in numbers, they forged friendships akin to battlefield comrades; they could be trusted to watch each other’s backs. Those professional alliances were the first non-competitive female relationships for many of us.
This was Margaret’s experience as well. Growing up, she had never really learned how to form intimate friendships. She thinks that issue goes back to her grade school years, when she was the only Catholic child in a predominantly Jewish student body and was also very tall. When she went out into the world, she entered an all-male corporate environment, where she was also the odd man out. It was only when she and other aggrieved women within the company took on a toxic boss that she found herself part of a tight team, despite the differences in their ages and job levels. Even though she is no longer in that organization, Margaret considers them her core group of friends, and they get together every couple of months.
Over the years, the lives of these girlfriends have changed in ways that are mutually enlightening. While she chose to forego having children, Margaret has gained some understanding of what is involved in parenting from the mothers in the group. She has learned how the workplace has changed from the younger women who are still within the corporate culture she helped change. Through them, she has kept in touch with the kinetic urban life, even after she and her husband moved to a rural community.
Within that community, she is once again feeling her lack of friendship skills. She still thinks of herself as a person who doesn’t fit in. Even when she opens up to someone, she is always on the lookout for rejection; recently, she heard about a gathering of women in the community, including some of the women she sees often, and was hurt because she hadn’t been invited. As it turned out, hearing about it through word of mouth was all the invitation anyone got. She misread or mistrusted the signals that a more experienced or confident friend might have interpreted differently. She needs more practice, she realizes, and is making a point of getting together one-on-one with the women she has met in the hopes that friendships click in.
Pat, the “hair theater” performer who calls herself “the Countess of Spit Curls,” didn’t grow up surrounded by girlfriends either. “There were no girls my age in my neighborhood, so I played all of the boy sports and games—and loved doing it. I also learned to fight, play tackle football, and hold my own in a confrontation. And,” she adds, “I had no dolls.” Growing up a tomboy in midcentury America, as Pat did, and I did too, was to feel you had little in common with girls, especially those who were operating within the traditional pink and dolls-and-jump-rope culture. For us, the time for trust-building came in the 1960s, when we defied those stereotypes alongside other women. But how do we connect with other women now?
Mary had just moved to a suburb and was working part-time from home. Cut off from her old comrades, she set out to make new ones. She signed up for a yoga class, where she saw a woman who looked interesting. “I wanted to get to know her,” she says, “but I didn’t have a clue how to break the ice. I felt as tongue-tied as if I was asking someone out for a first date.”
The analogy is apt. The same advice we heard about “meeting men” applies here too. Do things that interest you: Go places you want to see. If you want to learn, take a course (surveys of women over fifty who have gone back to school report that one of the top reasons is to meet other women). If you want to serve the community, find a volunteer program. If you are at the same job or a new one, start a water-cooler conversation with someone you don’t know. If you are setting up a business, seek out others who are new entrepreneurs as well. Or just take a chance.
I made a lively new friend by doing something I had never done before: I followed up on a fan letter from a woman who had interviewed me on the radio. I remembered how smart and energetic and feminist and funny she sounded on air, and so, when I found myself in her home city with a couple of hours free, I thought, what the hell? and invited her for lunch. When I arrived at the restaurant, I recognized her right away. She looked just like she sounded: open, enthusiastic, unabashedly overjoyed to meet me. It was a little awkward at first since she was gushing—a personality trait we now laugh about—and I was uncomfortable with being put on a pedestal. But her enthusiasm for changing her life was so real, and I had so much fun sharing my experiences with her, that our meeting turned out to be a great success. The conversation hasn’t stopped since. We email, visit, and do radio interviews regularly; our on-air discussions have evolved from Q-and-A into girlfriend talk. For the more intimate stuff, I call in several minutes before we go on the air, so we can have some private time. We have become friends.
Amy was particularly resourceful. When she got divorced, she stayed in the suburban house she and her ex-husband had lived in. She soon discovered that things had changed socially. “I think the women worried that I was after their husbands,” she says. She wasn’t after their husbands though; it was her women friends that she missed. In desperation, she decided to attend a singles night—a notoriously unsatisfactory place to meet men, but it suited her purposes. “I met some really great women there who were in the same situation I am,” she says. “We go out together all the time now and really enjoy ourselves.”
My favorite finding-new-friends story is the saga of “Jewelia.” Several years ago People magazine reported on a group of women who had come together to invest in and share a diamond necklace they all coveted. (The jeweler who had observed their separate interest and wanted to make the sale came up with the idea.) The arrangement was that they would transfer the necklace, which they named Jewelia, at monthly meetings. There were only two provisos: If one of the women was going to Paris she would get to take the necklace even if it wasn’t her turn, and all of them had to make love wearing it at least once. It didn’t take long before the meetings became more precious than the necklace they were set up to pass along. A woman whose sister had died said that the group enabled her “to reconnect with life again.” Another, who was going through a divorce, was sure the group’s support got her through it. And a self-described “biker chick” learned something about women’s friendships. She couldn’t believe that thirteen women could “share such a gorgeous piece of jewelry and not fight over it.”
Liz, who manages a thrift store, didn’t have to look very far for a new friend. She has her thirty-eight-year-old daughter-in-law, Ginny. “I totally relate to her,” Liz says with delight. “It’s clear to me that she is of a different generation, but that makes it interesting. I see her as a young woman.” They talk every day, usually on the way to or from work, about marriage—including both of theirs—and work and life. And they talk a lot about the family they share. “It’s like when you sense a particular kind of affinity with a certain woman, you can talk freely to her,” Liz adds. “You don’t have to think about what you say.”
The Internet, that fertile ground for romance, has produced some solid friendships, too. There are endless websites designed specifically to make those introductions. Meetup.com, for one, connects people with others who live in the same area and who have similar interests. Chris is an enthusiastic consumer of its offerings. Now fifty-nine, she was recently divorced when she joined. She currently belongs to several hiking groups, a movie group, a book club, a museum group, a scrabble group, and a coffee shop group. Some she attends regularly, others occasionally. “It’s a safe way to get out and try new activities,” she says, “without a big commitment of time and money.” But best of all, she has made some very good friends and lots of acquaintances of all ages and lifestyles. Often when she meets someone, she says, “they mention a group they belong to and before I know it I am trying a new activity.”
The Internet may not be the ideal format, though, for making the profound and empathetic connections that women require for a real friendship. Certain crucial elements are missing: making eye contact, reading body language, laughing so hard you have to hang on to each other to keep from falling over, picking up vibes. Eye contact is an essential requirement when we share our news over a cup of coffee; the absence of it, in fact, has been an ongoing problem between men and women. When men look away or only want to have a serious conversation when they are driving with eyes straight ahead, women tend to feel shut out. Sharing thoughts online has some of that distance-making quality.
Psychiatrist Michael Civin has studied what he calls “Internet-mediated relationships” and poses some provocative questions. “From the nearly infinite inside to the nearly infinite outside, we can reach out, we can be in touch,” he writes in his book Male Female e-mail. “But to what are we reaching, and what is doing the reaching? What does it mean to be in touch when neither side can touch?” We know one thing: Words, or even an image, on a screen do not activate the soothing dose of oxytocin that in-person interaction does.
The Internet is wonderful, though, for the more practical elements of friendship: making arrangements, checking in, reporting on experiences and events with several friends at once, staying in touch with far-flung friends in inconvenient time zones, and especially finding long-lost friends. In the past, you really had to want to track someone down—and often failed to do it—by tracing addresses and phone numbers; you couldn’t impulsively Google them. Linda Yellen described on Facebook how she “reconnected with members of my Campfire Girls troop (arguably the un-coolest girls on earth); corresponded all fakey-fakey friendly with a guy who once broke my heart.” ”Your children are lovely,” she wrote him, but added, to herself, they should have been mine. She also “spent an entire day immersed in a conversation about salmon patties.”
Cyberspace is also the place to mount a dress rehearsal of behaviors and personas that you think might be more authentic without committing to them. You can also see how your emerging self plays among strangers. You can ask questions that you may be ashamed to ask even your intimates. (There is no quicker resource for information on health or legal issues, for example.) No matter what you are looking for online, and no matter what you reveal, the response is that most reassuring message: You are not alone.
Getting online is also a great way for making an initial foray into a new flesh-and-blood community. If I ever doubted that the longing to connect was there, but sometimes stymied, I was resoundingly refuted by “Diva Night” in Milford, Pennsylvania. A local woman wondered why the amazing women she knew in the area didn’t seem to know each other. So she posted a notice on a community website inviting women to come meet their neighbors over a $20 supper at a local hotel. The group, she announced, would meet once a month. The first meeting attracted a handful of women who had a wonderful time. By the second, the word had spread and fifteen women showed up. The third brought in sixty women. And when I attended the fourth, there were even more. What was amazing was that, for the most part, the women who greeted each other so enthusiastically were not long-lost friends, but newfound friends, women who lived among other interesting women but hadn’t known how to meet them. The energy in that room was absolutely exhilarating.
Karin had made a few sort-of friends when she moved to a new state several years earlier but missed the “circle of trust” she left behind. Then, in memory of her mother, who died of cancer, she signed up for a sixty-kilometer fund-raising walk. To get in shape, she joined a group of women who train almost every day; all are either cancer survivors or caregivers. Over the past three years, they have walked hundreds of miles and talked for hundreds of hours about the experiences only they can truly understand, sharing the expertise that they have accumulated. Of course, Karin adds, “that’s only when we are not talking about flowers or food or our children.” After all, they have become friends, and that’s what friends talk about.
Sarah found a most unlikely new friend—a woman twenty years older—during a crisis with a grown child. “It all began when my son was having his meltdown,” she explains. “I was having lunch with a friend, and when I told her what was happening she said, ‘I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but my mother is going through the same thing with my brother.’” Desperate for someone who really understood the helplessness she felt, Sarah asked her friend “if she thought I could write to her mother, she said yes, so I emailed her saying ‘I gather we are both having the same heartbreak.’” A channel of profound intimacy was opened, almost without the usual getting-to-know-you phase, between people who rarely see each other or talk on the phone. Now, four years later, they email every day and share so much about their lives beyond their problem children that Sarah has stopped journaling. When she is “talking” to her friend, she is talking to herself. There are no barriers.
For Wendy, too, the connection with a true girlfriend was instigated by a family crisis—her husband’s depression. Over decades of married life, she and her husband socialized with other couples, Noah’s Ark style, in which everyone in the foursome had to be compatible. The couples got to know what was going on in one another’s lives, and they never doubted that they could count on each other. But, she admits, “when couples get together it is on a different level—less intimate.” One-on-one with a girlfriend “you might talk about yourself or your partner, but you’re certainly not going to talk about your partner when they are there and make believe they are not there.”
When Wendy’s husband went into an extended depression and stopped talking altogether, she really needed someone to talk to about her partner. She met a woman in her aerobics class who had gone through a depression herself, and was very forthcoming and understanding. They now have lunch once a month and “really pour out our hearts to one another.” Unlike Wendy, this woman is not married, and though she has a twenty-year-long relationship, her social life is not limited to couples. “I think that sometimes you can be intimate with a woman when she travels in a somewhat different circle,” says Wendy.
This new friend arrived just in time. “I feel like I have been saved these last several months by having lunch with this dear woman. I cannot tell you how helpful and supportive it’s been, where I can either vent, or I can get my mind off of stuff, and I don’t feel like I’m going to be judged or criticized.” She is learning something about woman-to-woman friendship. “Women know how to listen and how to respond, they just do.”
Of course, new friends may not be all you expect. I recently got all excited about a feisty and creative woman I met. We had so much in common and seemed to bring the same kind of intensity to the conversation. We had lunch several times and it felt as though we were on the same wavelength. After a while, however, I began to feel our conversations were getting short-circuited. It sounds silly, I know, but I found myself pulling back, because she didn’t laugh at my jokes. Truly. If we couldn’t laugh together, I was sure the friendship was going nowhere.
Trish had high hopes for a new friendship, too. “A few years ago, I made a concerted effort to become friends with a woman I met through my work. She was going through a divorce, contemplating leaving the company and starting a new career. I became her cheerleader, encouraging her to date, improve her CV, and work on her qualifications for a new job. She finally succeeded in all those things. Then she dumped me. I still don’t know why.” The former new friend probably didn’t want to have any reminders of the bad old days. Not nice.
Friend-making is a matter of trial and error, risk-taking, and building trust. We proceed by degrees. A good example is Jane’s account of the close/closer/closest sifting process she went through when she relocated to a new town. Given her work in textiles, she selected this particular place because it was known for its artist community. Soon after she arrived, she was invited to join a group of women artists who met once a week to talk about their work (close). Soon, though, the group evolved into what Jane calls “a therapy group.” So she stopped going to the meetings, but stayed in touch with three of the women (closer). Two of them enjoy going places and doing things that neither Jane nor the third one do. Jane and the third woman have become real friends (closest). “I trust her,” says Jane. “I can tell her anything.”