In her mid-30s, Gloria Hildebrandt decided she needed a change. Instead of staring at snarled traffic, she wanted to look out her living room window and see horses grazing. So she left Toronto and moved to the countryside near Georgetown, Ont., where she grew up. That was 11 years ago. Hildebrandt was single, and her career allowed her to work from home. Her return felt like a homecoming in all but one respect: her old friends had moved away.
"If a crisis arose or if I just wanted to share a funny story with someone, I had to call long distance," recalls Hildebrandt, 47. Delighted as she was with her decision to leave the city, she missed the texture of everyday friendship in her life. But it wasn't long before she realized her situation presented an opportunity to reach out and make new friends.
Life opens wide for many women, as it did for Hildebrandt, when they enter and move through their midlife years. Less preoccupied with careers and no longer anchored by young children, women in midlife have the energy to give friendship its proper due. But after years of busyness and emotional self-sufficiency, how do you make new friends?
From lonely to lively
That question has particular resonance in a society characterized by high mobility and low stability. Women change jobs, get divorced and depend on friends now more than ever, write Ellen Goodman and Patricia O'Brien, co-authors of the book I Know Just What You Mean: The Power of Friendship in Women's Lives (Simon and Schuster, 2000). "Many who once believed family was the centre of life now know that friends may be the difference between a lonely life and a lively one."
Dr. Miroslava Lhotsky, a Toronto family doctor specializing in midlife health, reached a similar conclusion while researching The Juggling Act: The Healthy Boomer's Guide to Achieving Balance in Midlife (McClelland and Stewart, 2002), a book she co-wrote. "A common thread among the hundreds of midlife women we interviewed was the centrality of friends in their lives," she says. No longer a question of mere companionship -- shopping for a killer outfit to wear on Saturday night or taking toddlers to the park -- friendship constitutes "a lifeline for midlife women who may have divorce or chemotherapy on their plates and count on their friends for moral support," says Lhotsky.
If friendship feeds a woman's soul, it also appears to protect her body. A recent University of Chicago study found that socially connected people had more robust hearts than people with few social ties. Even the common cold gives in to the warmth of friendship. In his study of cold patterns in healthy volunteers, Sheldon Cohen, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, discovered that people with diverse social ties were less susceptible to developing colds than their socially isolated counterparts.
"Tend and befriend"
A widely publicized study from the University of California in Los Angeles proposes yet another link between female friendship and physical health. First reported in 2000, the study suggests women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that drive them to bond with other women -- to "tend and befriend" rather than to "fight or flee," as men are more apt to do under stress. That bonding behaviour, in turn, leads to a surge of the hormone oxytocin in the brain, which further counters stress and calms your mood. According to Lhotsky, this new theory may help explain why women live longer than men.
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