Women are keepers of each other's secrets, boosters of one another's wavering confidence, co-conspirators in life's adventures. Through laughter, tears and an inexhaustible river of talk, they keep each other well, and make each other better.
Across species and throughout human cultures, females have banded together for protection and mutual support. They have groomed each other, tended each other's young, nursed each other in illness and engaged in the kind of aimless sociability that has generally mystified male anthropologists.
But the power of girlfriends is beginning to yield its secrets to science. For women, friendship not only rules, it protects. It buffers the hardships of life's transitions, it lowers blood pressure, boosts immunity and promotes healing. It may help explain one of medical science's most enduring mysteries: why women, on average, have lower rates of heart disease and longer life expectancies than men.
"Women are much more social in the way they cope with stress," says Shelley E. Taylor, author of "The Tending Instinct" and a social neuroscientist at UCLA. "Men are more likely to deal with stress with a 'fight or flight' reaction -- with aggression or withdrawal." But aggression and withdrawal take a physiological toll, and friendship brings comfort that mitigates the ill effects of stress, Taylor says. That difference alone, she adds, "contributes to the gender difference in longevity."
Women's reliance on their female friends -- and the benefits they believe they get from those friendships -- crosses the lines of ethnicity, income and age.
"There's a sense of well-being with Liza; I just feel stronger -- more alive -- when I talk to her," Brea resident Susie Gonzalez, 27, says of her best friend Liza Melendez.
To be sure, friendships -- the feeling of being connected to a supportive network -- profoundly affect the health of both genders, according to researchers. Men and women who report loneliness die earlier, get sick more often and weather transitions with greater physical wear and tear than those who say they have a support network of friends or family. "Loneliness is simply one of the principal causes of premature death in this country," says Dr. James J. Lynch, a Maryland-based author and psychologist who works with cardiac rehabilitation patients.
Men rely heavily on their marriages -- on their wives, specifically -- to ward off the corrosive health effects of loneliness. Married men are markedly healthier and live longer than bachelors or widowers.
Married women, by contrast, are only slightly better off than unmarried women or widows when it comes to health and social support. Researchers attribute the difference to women's greater reliance on friendships outside of marriage. These friendships make women's support networks broader, deeper and more resilient than the webs of support that men have.
"When a romantic relationship ends, a woman still has other sources of intimacy -- her friends -- and that provides her with another source of support," says Beverley Fehr of the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, author of a scholarly study of friendship titled "Friendship Processes." When a man loses his primary female partner, says Ohio State University psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, "he's in trouble."
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Calming hormone
Increasingly, researchers think that the hormone oxytocin is, for women especially, the elixir of friendship -- and, by extension, of health.
Present in both men and women, oxytocin levels spike in females following childbirth and when nursing. But oxytocin levels also increase at times of isolation and stress. And when the hormone interacts with estrogen, studies have shown, it impels females to seek the company of others. "We call it a 'social thermostat' that keeps track of how well [females'] social supports are going," Taylor says. When the thermostat reads too low, females tend to reach out to others. When they reach out to others, oxytocin levels rise again and with that prolonged exposure comes a distinctive "calming, warm" effect, says Taylor. "We don't see the same mechanisms in men," she adds.
Stacy Anderson, a 36-year-old Culver City mother of two young children, recognizes oxytocin's effects. That, she says, must be the chemical that delivers that "wash of love" she feels when she sits down to breastfeed her baby. When she and her friend and fellow mother Terese Jungle leave the kids with husbands and take themselves out for an evening, there's a special warmth as well, she says.
The women talk about poetry and architecture and jewelry, and mimic the British-accented commentary of television naturalists while they people-watch. "We laugh a lot," says Anderson. "It's almost romantic."
