The healing power of female friendships

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.