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Connecting: The Enduring Power of Female Friendship
After years of taking a backseat to other relationships, women's friendships are finally being celebrated as never before. In Connecting, noted journalist Sandy Sheehy investigates why female friendships are so important, how they function throughout our lives, and how we can best experience the joys they offer. Sheehy introduces ground-breaking research, drawn from more than thirty psychologists and sociologists. Their intriguing, often surprising, findings are brought home with real-life stories and keen insights taken from more than two hundred interviews the author personally conducted with girls and women of all ages, races, and walks of life. The author provides a fascinating look at the qualities that initially attract women to their closest friends; how friendships change throughout life; and hwy female bonding is a vital part of a woman's psychological development, health, and sense of well-being at any age. Sheehy addresses such thought-provoking questions Why is making friends so easy for some and hard for others? How can friendships help us become better, more fulfilled people? What are the key ingredients to lasting and satisfying friendships? Recognizing how our relationships serve different needs aat different times in our lives, the author describes the ten basic types of female friendship--from soulmates to workmates--and shows how each nurtures and supports us. Sheehy then examines the six seasons of friendships, from girlhood to old age, devoting a separated chapter to the special characteristics and rewards friendship offers each age group. Just as important, she tackles the thorny issues, delving into the challenges that can strain and even shatter friendships, and offers sound strategies for handling difficult situations. And in "Sixteen Steps to Having Friends for Life," Sheehy shares the secrets for keeping and enriching friendships. In Connecting, Sandy Sheehy takes us on a journey of discovery and appreciation of the rich rewards of this special intimacy, pointing the way to growth-promoting, life-enhancing relationships--to becoming the best of friends and enjoying the best of friendship. How do friendships between women evolve at different stages of life? How do they differ from men's? Why can some women make friends easily while others have none at all? What are the key ingredients to lasting and satisfying friendships? Drawing on recent psychological research and her own firsthand interviews with more than 200 girls and women from all walks of life, journalist Sandy Sheehy takes an engaging and insightful look at these questions and more. She probes the nature and history of female friendships, pinpoints the major types, and shows how they function during the four main stages of women's lives and how they insure our healthy development. This book reads like an intimate and informative conversation with a close girlfriend. It will validate and reassure women about their friendships as never before.
- GenresNonfictionFriendship
416 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2000
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October 8, 2013
Quotable:
Long-term friendships often outlast marriages. And with families scattered geographically, close friendships provide an essential buffer against isolation for elderly women, six out of ten of whom spend their last years without spouses. If women don’t value and maintain friendships with one another, we risk dying alone.
In the 1950s and 1960s, middle-class women were encouraged to be cordial and helpful toward their neighbors and the wives of their husbands’ colleagues, but not to develop friendships for their own sake. After all, close ties would only have to be broken if their husbands were transferred. Magazines hailed “togetherness” in the nuclear family, and women who wanted to convey that they had perfect marriages asserted: “He’s not just my husband. He’s my best friend.”
All too often, what those housewives were revealing wasn’t marital success; it was emotional isolation.
For women who turned twenty in the 1950s and earlier, the following guidelines seem to apply: …
Relationships with men and obligations to family always take precedence over female friendship. …
If a friend engages in self-destructive behavior, don’t intervene.
Among women in their twenties and thirties, sacrificing female friendship for a heterosexual relationship falls somewhere between bad manners and treason. “That’s a big issue among most of the women I know,” said Kiran, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in New York. “To say about a woman, ‘Oh, she’s dating someone now. We never see her anymore’ – that tells something about her character, like, obviously, she doesn’t care about her friendships with women.”
Women have varied and often complex webs of friendships – different friends to share different aspects of their lives. These relationships can’t be easily pigeonholed with terms like “close,” “good,” or “best.” Rather, they are fluid and uniquely life enhancing.
Many women couldn’t imagine coping without a close friend to help them defuse hazardous emotions. Some also seek secure ground for a different kind of self-disclosure – the sharing of our darkest secrets. We want to be loved for ourselves as we are, not for some idealized version we construct for public view. It’s true that few female friendships offer a safe ground for full self-disclosure; most have their limits. But being able to be ourselves and allow our friends to be themselves – seeing each other literally and figuratively without our makeup – is essential to the elusive bond of intimacy.
Women’s friendships are generally more personal and empathic, based more on emotion, than men’s. Women care more about giving one another understanding, acceptance, and support; men care more about having fun. Both sexes place a high value on trust, loyalty, and reciprocity; but men emphasize offering one another practical assistance, from helping a buddy fence his backyard to carrying a comrade off the battlefield, while women stress being there for each other in less tangible ways – with an attentive ear, with unfailing emotional support.
Throughout our lives we teeter between belonging and individuation – the sense of ourselves as distinct, autonomous, complex individuals. Close friendships may be the one form of human interaction that strikes that balance perfectly.
To feel true empathy with another requires having nothing at risk beyond the companionship and validation inherent in the relationship.
For a woman in her twenties, the better the quality of her friendships, the higher her self-esteem, expectations for achievement, and even personal independence are likely to be. Friends are much more than companions of convenience for single women. Often, they serve as surrogate families.
One of the tender ironies of marriage is that a happy husband doesn’t want his wife to change. He may take a dim view of her decision to explore another side of herself – to go to law school once her youngest child enters kindergarten, to quit a boring job with a plumb salary to teach in an inner-city school, to climb the ten highest peaks in North America. For a caring but less self-interested sounding board, she needs a female friend.
“She manages to have this huge network of hundreds of women friends,” Flora Maria Garcia, a fourth-three-year-old administrator of arts organizations, said of her friend Penny, an artist. “It’s amazing. Usually I have one or two really good friendships, because to me, it requires so much energy and history.”
Any test of friendship requires a choice: We can respond in a way that brings us closer together, or we can respond in a way that pushes us apart. A single friendship may be tested numerous times, and each test can either strengthen, change, or break it. Some friendships disintegrate when they are tested. Others experience a hiatus. Those that survive either increase in intimacy and importance or go back to the structuring stage to be rebuilt as virtually new relationships.
Women friends serve as role models and encourage our growth. Beyond that… the work we do in building the relationship strengthens us as individuals.
By avoiding close female friendship, a woman avoids her own growth. Women can grow in relation to their parents, their children, their siblings, their lovers, their husbands, their colleagues, and their clients, but the most fertile ground for development is female friendship.
“Because you don’t have the familial obligations of the old issues,” Jean Baker Miller explained, “you can start on a more mutual basis, and you can be freer to be yourself.”
By the very act of interacting with us as individuals, apart from our family roles, friends give us relief and perspective even when they don’t serve up direct insights. We don’t need to use all out time together to dissect our problems in order for friendship to help us grow. A lunch spent speculating on the other people in the restaurant, an afternoon beachcombing, an hour laughing about a shared misadventure back in high school can serve as a vacation for our emotions. Friends do each other good merely by helping each other put some of their problems aside and simply enjoy themselves.
Draining friends may seem pathetic on the surface, but underneath, they are narcissists who control their close relationships by jealously keeping attention focused on themselves and their problems. And as long as they get that attention, drainers can avoid making the changes that would improve their lives.
Some friendships grow with us, like trees, changing in size and shape but bringing us pleasure and comfort year after year. Others are like flowering annuals, with us for a single season but no less beautiful for that.
Marriage, jobs, and motherhood presented limitations, but they had surprisingly little influence on what female friends mean to women.
One study has shown that when it came to bringing on depression or anxiety, friendship difficulties could do as much damage as parental divorce.
Just at the point when girls need each other most, they get a countervailing message: It’s time to set female friendship aside in order to focus on boys. Women who had gone through their teens before 1975 told me that this message had come through loud and clear from their families, schoolmates, and the media. Even if you had a long-standing date with your best girlfriend, convention allowed you to – even encouraged you to – cancel it on short notice is a boy asked you out.
This practice may have been socially acceptable in the past, but many adolescents and young women I interviewed told me it wasn’t any longer. While divorce is so common, they knew that landing the right man didn’t guarantee that you would live happily ever after.
That doesn’t mean that many adolescent girls don’t still neglect their female friends when boys enter the scene. In fact, a 1995 study reported that both boys and girls involved in romantic relationships were less intimate with their friends of the same sex. But girls today no longer accept this shift of loyalties as right and natural.
Even though the influence of peers increases throughout adolescence, parents retain significant power in shaping their children’s behavior. In fact, adolescents who have strong relationships with their parents tend to imitate their drinking behavior. If a girl feels close to her mother and her mother abstains or drinks moderately, she’ll be inclined to follow her example. She’ll also emulate her mom if her mom is an alcoholic.
A connection that doesn’t end at high school graduation but continues down the decades is the kind of friendship many adolescents dream about. One girl observed: “I think that it is better to be friends with someone your whole life – and they will go to your funeral and you will go to their funeral – than to have twenty friends that you will see through high school and that will be it. You’ll be looking at the yearbook fifty years later and say, ‘Yeah, I sort of remember that person. I think that she was one of my best friends.’ “ By recognizing early the irreplaceable value of lifelong friends, this girl is already well on her way toward having them.
By letting her close friends know the details of her life and telling them when she feels threatened, she gains a genuine measure of safety. Rather than encouraging dependency, friends who look after each other’s well-being in this way help each other become, and remain, independent.
For history friendships to provide more than nostalgia value women in them have to get to know and appreciate the adults their childhood friends have become.
Finding the time and emotional energy for female friendship is more difficult during the years from twenty-three to thirty-nine than at any other life stage, yet women this age need friends as much as ever. The women at his stage are relatively new to adulthood. Especially in the first half of this life stage, they may not know what their limits are, what they need, and that they have a right to what they need. Specifically, they may not recognize how much they need one another. Swept along on a flood of opportunities and responsibilities, they may push female friendships aside.
The thirties are the first decade when losing a parent to death becomes relatively common. Speaking of her friend Claire’s mother’s death, Rene noted: “It was a milestone: Like, now that we are really adults, we are moving on this path of growing older ourselves. These are always times you take stock of what life is about, who your friends are, that you’re really happy that you have lifelong friends.
These crises are true tests of friendships, and some don’t pass. Jillian, a thirty-nine-year-old Houston clinical psychologist, was completing her training three hundred miles away fromhome when her mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Over the phone and during frequent weekend visits, she noticed that Rita, one of her closest friends, seemed increasingly distant. When Jillian confronted her, Rita blamed their separation: Seeing each other every three weeks or so they couldn’t expect to have the rapport they’d had as part of each other’s daily lives. But after Jillian returned to Houston, the relationship didn’t improve.
“It kind of limped along for six months,” Jillian told me. “I called her on it and never could get a direct answer.”
But Rita finally did say, “You need too much.”
“We’d called each other best friends, Jillian said, outrage and disbelief lingering in her voice. “We celebrated the anniversary of our friendship. And she said I was too needy. My mother had just died after being sick all this year. So I thought: What is ‘too needy’ in this situation?”
If, instead of withdrawing, Rita had worked at staying connected, she would have been able to support Jillian in this crisis and would have strengthened both the friendship and herself. Remaining close to Jillian during the death of her mother would have helped Rita prepare for the eventual loss of her own mother. As it was, Rita abandoned both a valuable relationship and an excellent opportunity for personal growth.
When Cleo Berkun studied sixty women aged forty to fifty-five for her doctorate in social work from Berkeley, she discovered that those “who had maintained contacts with other middle-aged women…exhibited the most positive attitudes and optimistic moods.”
A woman’s social adjustment to widowhood depends on when it occurs. If it happens at eighty, she has plenty of company. If it happens at forty-five, she is likely to be the only widow in her crowd.
My model of friendship is me as the center of a rose with a lot of petals around me. And some of those petals are tighter clustered and some are more peripheral.
At midlife, the conditions are perfect for female friendship to flower: Resources and flexibility enrich the soil. Experience and increased self-awareness furnish the sunlight. And tears and laughter provide the water. This is the season to cultivate this garden, for the joy it offers now, for the sustenance it will offer later.
Reams of research confirms that one of the main things women sixty-five and over do for their friends is help them extend both life’s duration and its quality.
Mothers who felt secure about themselves and their relationships and who responded to their babies warmly and consistently produced securely attached children who developed into adults who were comfortable with close relationships. Mothers who couldn’t connect with others and rejected their babies emotionally produced avoidantly attached children who grew up to be incapable of close, reciprocal relationships. And mothers who were anxious about their relationships and responded sometimes with warmth and other times with anger or frustration produced ambivalently attached children who sought close relationships but never quite trusted them. A securely attached adult can balance work and play and maintain close, mutually rewarding relationships.
If two sisters spend their childhood sniping at each other, they will tend to grow up reluctant to make themselves vulnerable to other women.
When social psychologist Frances Marie Costa studied 596 people in their twenties, she found high self-esteem to be one of the most important predictors of a person’s ability to form satisfying friendships. Self-esteem and female friendship go together: Friendship builds self-esteem, but a woman needs a certain level of self-esteem to be a good friend.
Self –absorption is another major friendship killer. Two women can’t connect if one only wants to talk about her experiences, her problems, and her feelings and quickly brings discussion of anything else back to herself.
Until late in this century, women have been taught to believe two lies: Other women aren’t worth our time, and neither is friendship. Behind these two lies were the beliefs that men were more interesting and important than women, and romantic and family bonds were the only significant relationships available for women.
“[I]n devaluing other women,” psychiatrist Jena Baker Miller wrote, “women inevitably devalue themselves.”
Physical and emotional abuse threaten a women’s female friendships, as well as her survival. Caught in an abusive relationship, she needs her friends desperately, to provide both a reality check and practical help extricating herself. Yet instead of reaching out, many women let their net of female support unravel. The first thing an abusive husband often does is to try to isolate his wife from other women. This isolation makes it easier for him to beat or berate her, and it also makes it easier for him to control her.
Whatever demands family members and romantic partners make, women must acknowledge the importance of female friends and take the time to nurture their friendships. Their personal growth, and sometimes even their survival, depends on it.
The average age for a woman at divorce is about thirty-three; for a woman at a husband’s death, sixty-nine.
Having a close friend let you down in a crisis or react in a way we never expected can be shattering. Learning how to manage conflict, how to fight well and make up well, is essential to healthy, life-enhancing female friendships.
Holiday letters and Christmas card notes… are an effective way to maintain at least a tenuous connection with the people who’ve left our daily lives but not our hearts.
The old adage holds true: To have a friend, you have to be a friend. Often, that comes down literally to being there. Being there for a friend can be as simple and straightforward as pitching in to help at a party. Or it can be as sensitive as comforting a friend after the death of a loved one.
If you have good friends they form a community around you.
Women are finally beginning to value themselves and each other fully. Women are making clear to their husbands and lovers from the start that their female friendships are essential, and we are insisting on time for them.
Long-term friendships often outlast marriages. And with families scattered geographically, close friendships provide an essential buffer against isolation for elderly women, six out of ten of whom spend their last years without spouses. If women don’t value and maintain friendships with one another, we risk dying alone.
In the 1950s and 1960s, middle-class women were encouraged to be cordial and helpful toward their neighbors and the wives of their husbands’ colleagues, but not to develop friendships for their own sake. After all, close ties would only have to be broken if their husbands were transferred. Magazines hailed “togetherness” in the nuclear family, and women who wanted to convey that they had perfect marriages asserted: “He’s not just my husband. He’s my best friend.”
All too often, what those housewives were revealing wasn’t marital success; it was emotional isolation.
For women who turned twenty in the 1950s and earlier, the following guidelines seem to apply: …
Relationships with men and obligations to family always take precedence over female friendship. …
If a friend engages in self-destructive behavior, don’t intervene.
Among women in their twenties and thirties, sacrificing female friendship for a heterosexual relationship falls somewhere between bad manners and treason. “That’s a big issue among most of the women I know,” said Kiran, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in New York. “To say about a woman, ‘Oh, she’s dating someone now. We never see her anymore’ – that tells something about her character, like, obviously, she doesn’t care about her friendships with women.”
Women have varied and often complex webs of friendships – different friends to share different aspects of their lives. These relationships can’t be easily pigeonholed with terms like “close,” “good,” or “best.” Rather, they are fluid and uniquely life enhancing.
Many women couldn’t imagine coping without a close friend to help them defuse hazardous emotions. Some also seek secure ground for a different kind of self-disclosure – the sharing of our darkest secrets. We want to be loved for ourselves as we are, not for some idealized version we construct for public view. It’s true that few female friendships offer a safe ground for full self-disclosure; most have their limits. But being able to be ourselves and allow our friends to be themselves – seeing each other literally and figuratively without our makeup – is essential to the elusive bond of intimacy.
Women’s friendships are generally more personal and empathic, based more on emotion, than men’s. Women care more about giving one another understanding, acceptance, and support; men care more about having fun. Both sexes place a high value on trust, loyalty, and reciprocity; but men emphasize offering one another practical assistance, from helping a buddy fence his backyard to carrying a comrade off the battlefield, while women stress being there for each other in less tangible ways – with an attentive ear, with unfailing emotional support.
Throughout our lives we teeter between belonging and individuation – the sense of ourselves as distinct, autonomous, complex individuals. Close friendships may be the one form of human interaction that strikes that balance perfectly.
To feel true empathy with another requires having nothing at risk beyond the companionship and validation inherent in the relationship.
For a woman in her twenties, the better the quality of her friendships, the higher her self-esteem, expectations for achievement, and even personal independence are likely to be. Friends are much more than companions of convenience for single women. Often, they serve as surrogate families.
One of the tender ironies of marriage is that a happy husband doesn’t want his wife to change. He may take a dim view of her decision to explore another side of herself – to go to law school once her youngest child enters kindergarten, to quit a boring job with a plumb salary to teach in an inner-city school, to climb the ten highest peaks in North America. For a caring but less self-interested sounding board, she needs a female friend.
“She manages to have this huge network of hundreds of women friends,” Flora Maria Garcia, a fourth-three-year-old administrator of arts organizations, said of her friend Penny, an artist. “It’s amazing. Usually I have one or two really good friendships, because to me, it requires so much energy and history.”
Any test of friendship requires a choice: We can respond in a way that brings us closer together, or we can respond in a way that pushes us apart. A single friendship may be tested numerous times, and each test can either strengthen, change, or break it. Some friendships disintegrate when they are tested. Others experience a hiatus. Those that survive either increase in intimacy and importance or go back to the structuring stage to be rebuilt as virtually new relationships.
Women friends serve as role models and encourage our growth. Beyond that… the work we do in building the relationship strengthens us as individuals.
By avoiding close female friendship, a woman avoids her own growth. Women can grow in relation to their parents, their children, their siblings, their lovers, their husbands, their colleagues, and their clients, but the most fertile ground for development is female friendship.
“Because you don’t have the familial obligations of the old issues,” Jean Baker Miller explained, “you can start on a more mutual basis, and you can be freer to be yourself.”
By the very act of interacting with us as individuals, apart from our family roles, friends give us relief and perspective even when they don’t serve up direct insights. We don’t need to use all out time together to dissect our problems in order for friendship to help us grow. A lunch spent speculating on the other people in the restaurant, an afternoon beachcombing, an hour laughing about a shared misadventure back in high school can serve as a vacation for our emotions. Friends do each other good merely by helping each other put some of their problems aside and simply enjoy themselves.
Draining friends may seem pathetic on the surface, but underneath, they are narcissists who control their close relationships by jealously keeping attention focused on themselves and their problems. And as long as they get that attention, drainers can avoid making the changes that would improve their lives.
Some friendships grow with us, like trees, changing in size and shape but bringing us pleasure and comfort year after year. Others are like flowering annuals, with us for a single season but no less beautiful for that.
Marriage, jobs, and motherhood presented limitations, but they had surprisingly little influence on what female friends mean to women.
One study has shown that when it came to bringing on depression or anxiety, friendship difficulties could do as much damage as parental divorce.
Just at the point when girls need each other most, they get a countervailing message: It’s time to set female friendship aside in order to focus on boys. Women who had gone through their teens before 1975 told me that this message had come through loud and clear from their families, schoolmates, and the media. Even if you had a long-standing date with your best girlfriend, convention allowed you to – even encouraged you to – cancel it on short notice is a boy asked you out.
This practice may have been socially acceptable in the past, but many adolescents and young women I interviewed told me it wasn’t any longer. While divorce is so common, they knew that landing the right man didn’t guarantee that you would live happily ever after.
That doesn’t mean that many adolescent girls don’t still neglect their female friends when boys enter the scene. In fact, a 1995 study reported that both boys and girls involved in romantic relationships were less intimate with their friends of the same sex. But girls today no longer accept this shift of loyalties as right and natural.
Even though the influence of peers increases throughout adolescence, parents retain significant power in shaping their children’s behavior. In fact, adolescents who have strong relationships with their parents tend to imitate their drinking behavior. If a girl feels close to her mother and her mother abstains or drinks moderately, she’ll be inclined to follow her example. She’ll also emulate her mom if her mom is an alcoholic.
A connection that doesn’t end at high school graduation but continues down the decades is the kind of friendship many adolescents dream about. One girl observed: “I think that it is better to be friends with someone your whole life – and they will go to your funeral and you will go to their funeral – than to have twenty friends that you will see through high school and that will be it. You’ll be looking at the yearbook fifty years later and say, ‘Yeah, I sort of remember that person. I think that she was one of my best friends.’ “ By recognizing early the irreplaceable value of lifelong friends, this girl is already well on her way toward having them.
By letting her close friends know the details of her life and telling them when she feels threatened, she gains a genuine measure of safety. Rather than encouraging dependency, friends who look after each other’s well-being in this way help each other become, and remain, independent.
For history friendships to provide more than nostalgia value women in them have to get to know and appreciate the adults their childhood friends have become.
Finding the time and emotional energy for female friendship is more difficult during the years from twenty-three to thirty-nine than at any other life stage, yet women this age need friends as much as ever. The women at his stage are relatively new to adulthood. Especially in the first half of this life stage, they may not know what their limits are, what they need, and that they have a right to what they need. Specifically, they may not recognize how much they need one another. Swept along on a flood of opportunities and responsibilities, they may push female friendships aside.
The thirties are the first decade when losing a parent to death becomes relatively common. Speaking of her friend Claire’s mother’s death, Rene noted: “It was a milestone: Like, now that we are really adults, we are moving on this path of growing older ourselves. These are always times you take stock of what life is about, who your friends are, that you’re really happy that you have lifelong friends.
These crises are true tests of friendships, and some don’t pass. Jillian, a thirty-nine-year-old Houston clinical psychologist, was completing her training three hundred miles away fromhome when her mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Over the phone and during frequent weekend visits, she noticed that Rita, one of her closest friends, seemed increasingly distant. When Jillian confronted her, Rita blamed their separation: Seeing each other every three weeks or so they couldn’t expect to have the rapport they’d had as part of each other’s daily lives. But after Jillian returned to Houston, the relationship didn’t improve.
“It kind of limped along for six months,” Jillian told me. “I called her on it and never could get a direct answer.”
But Rita finally did say, “You need too much.”
“We’d called each other best friends, Jillian said, outrage and disbelief lingering in her voice. “We celebrated the anniversary of our friendship. And she said I was too needy. My mother had just died after being sick all this year. So I thought: What is ‘too needy’ in this situation?”
If, instead of withdrawing, Rita had worked at staying connected, she would have been able to support Jillian in this crisis and would have strengthened both the friendship and herself. Remaining close to Jillian during the death of her mother would have helped Rita prepare for the eventual loss of her own mother. As it was, Rita abandoned both a valuable relationship and an excellent opportunity for personal growth.
When Cleo Berkun studied sixty women aged forty to fifty-five for her doctorate in social work from Berkeley, she discovered that those “who had maintained contacts with other middle-aged women…exhibited the most positive attitudes and optimistic moods.”
A woman’s social adjustment to widowhood depends on when it occurs. If it happens at eighty, she has plenty of company. If it happens at forty-five, she is likely to be the only widow in her crowd.
My model of friendship is me as the center of a rose with a lot of petals around me. And some of those petals are tighter clustered and some are more peripheral.
At midlife, the conditions are perfect for female friendship to flower: Resources and flexibility enrich the soil. Experience and increased self-awareness furnish the sunlight. And tears and laughter provide the water. This is the season to cultivate this garden, for the joy it offers now, for the sustenance it will offer later.
Reams of research confirms that one of the main things women sixty-five and over do for their friends is help them extend both life’s duration and its quality.
Mothers who felt secure about themselves and their relationships and who responded to their babies warmly and consistently produced securely attached children who developed into adults who were comfortable with close relationships. Mothers who couldn’t connect with others and rejected their babies emotionally produced avoidantly attached children who grew up to be incapable of close, reciprocal relationships. And mothers who were anxious about their relationships and responded sometimes with warmth and other times with anger or frustration produced ambivalently attached children who sought close relationships but never quite trusted them. A securely attached adult can balance work and play and maintain close, mutually rewarding relationships.
If two sisters spend their childhood sniping at each other, they will tend to grow up reluctant to make themselves vulnerable to other women.
When social psychologist Frances Marie Costa studied 596 people in their twenties, she found high self-esteem to be one of the most important predictors of a person’s ability to form satisfying friendships. Self-esteem and female friendship go together: Friendship builds self-esteem, but a woman needs a certain level of self-esteem to be a good friend.
Self –absorption is another major friendship killer. Two women can’t connect if one only wants to talk about her experiences, her problems, and her feelings and quickly brings discussion of anything else back to herself.
Until late in this century, women have been taught to believe two lies: Other women aren’t worth our time, and neither is friendship. Behind these two lies were the beliefs that men were more interesting and important than women, and romantic and family bonds were the only significant relationships available for women.
“[I]n devaluing other women,” psychiatrist Jena Baker Miller wrote, “women inevitably devalue themselves.”
Physical and emotional abuse threaten a women’s female friendships, as well as her survival. Caught in an abusive relationship, she needs her friends desperately, to provide both a reality check and practical help extricating herself. Yet instead of reaching out, many women let their net of female support unravel. The first thing an abusive husband often does is to try to isolate his wife from other women. This isolation makes it easier for him to beat or berate her, and it also makes it easier for him to control her.
Whatever demands family members and romantic partners make, women must acknowledge the importance of female friends and take the time to nurture their friendships. Their personal growth, and sometimes even their survival, depends on it.
The average age for a woman at divorce is about thirty-three; for a woman at a husband’s death, sixty-nine.
Having a close friend let you down in a crisis or react in a way we never expected can be shattering. Learning how to manage conflict, how to fight well and make up well, is essential to healthy, life-enhancing female friendships.
Holiday letters and Christmas card notes… are an effective way to maintain at least a tenuous connection with the people who’ve left our daily lives but not our hearts.
The old adage holds true: To have a friend, you have to be a friend. Often, that comes down literally to being there. Being there for a friend can be as simple and straightforward as pitching in to help at a party. Or it can be as sensitive as comforting a friend after the death of a loved one.
If you have good friends they form a community around you.
Women are finally beginning to value themselves and each other fully. Women are making clear to their husbands and lovers from the start that their female friendships are essential, and we are insisting on time for them.
June 20, 2008
My upbringing wasn't conducive to learning how to make or have friends for that matter. This book was a hugh eye opener. It is very detailed and took me a long time read I recommend it to any women who truly wants to understand the special dynamics of the bond of female friendship.
February 7, 2023
Connecting: The Enduring Power of Female Friendship delves into an understudied topic, but it was a very Western and heteronormative focus. Sheehy made some interesting and powerful points, but a lot of the book tied back to heterosexual marriage, and there were bits I strongly disagreed with, such as “Female friendship also promotes strong marriages by keeping women from demanding too much from their partners” (53). Let female friendship exist independently outside of marriage!
March 5, 2013
I am a woman in my early twenties who grew up with no sisters and a mom in a similar position. She has never had the best luck with female friendships and I have always struggled to maintain mine. I was looking for a book that would help me analyze the patterns female relations take, that offered advice on ways to deal with conflict resolution and that outlined strategies for knowing what to look for in a friend. I would recommend this book to anyone seeking similar knowledge, especially to women who have struggled with female friendships. It uses anecdotal narratives, social science and the insight of several hundred of women interviewed by the author.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews