All sorts of studies make similar points.
Duke University researchers looked at hundreds of unmarried patients with coronary heart disease and found that, of those with close friends, 85 percent lived at least five years. That was double the survival rate of those lacking in friends. A Stanford University psychiatric study found patients with advanced stages of breast cancer were more likely to survive if they had a network of people with whom they could share their feelings.
Friends such as the Ames girls, who’ve traveled the timeline together, tend to have more empathy for each other’s ailments. They knew one another when they were younger and stronger, and they’ve watched their bodies change. Gerontologists say longtime friends are often more understanding about health issues than family members are. Friends are more apt to acknowledge each other’s ailments without dwelling on them the way a parent or spouse might. A friend might offer a litany of health issues, especially as she ages, but then she might say: “Let’s forget about the pain we’re feeling today and have fun.” The Ames girls do their share of talking about aches, pains and the aging process—and, especially, about issues related to how their parents are aging—but then they move onward to the next conversation. And given how much they laugh, and how laughter is good for anyone’s health, they figure their time together is completely therapeutic.
“There’s this comfort zone,” says Marilyn. “It’s good for my mental health to know there’s a group of people I can turn to at any moment in my life, and they’ll be my safety net.”
The friendship between the Ames girls fits a common profile on other fronts, too.
Now that the girls have reached their forties together, they’re almost certain to remain enmeshed for the rest of their lives. By the time women are middle-aged, most have picked the people and built the friendships that will sustain them. That was the conclusion of a study that began in 1978 at Virginia Tech, when 110 women over age fifty were first asked to name their closest friends. Fourteen years later, when these women were ages sixty-five to eighty-nine, they were asked the same question, and 75 percent of them listed the exact same names. For almost all of them, their major friendships remained precisely in place. Similarly, a Harris Interactive survey conducted in 2004 found that a healthy 39 percent of women between ages twenty-five and fifty-five said they met their current best friends in childhood or high school. Women—and the Ames girls are proof of this—are likely to connect early and then hold tight to each other. This is despite our transient society or, in some cases, even because of it.
Jane thinks that the distance between all of the Ames girls actually serves to make them closer in certain ways. “Because we live in our own communities and have our own separate lives,” she says, “we become very safe and understanding ears for one another. We don’t have to worry about baring our souls—concerning ourselves or the lives of our family members—and then running into each other’s kids or husbands on the soccer fields or at school. And we have a pretty decent sample size for opinions and advice: nine other women weighing in about adult issues, with more than twenty kids’ worth of experience when it comes to children’s issues.”
Jane thinks the fact that they are all so different is helpful. “It’s not like we’re competing,” she says. “It’s not like I’m a makeup artist in L.A. and I have more famous clients than Cathy does. We’re all doing our own thing.”
As Kelly explains it, it doesn’t matter that the others aren’t plugged into her day-to-day life: “Because I have no actual sisters, it is my friends from Ames who’ve exposed me to every facet of womanhood. I feel I’m defined by our decades-long friendship. Despite being separated by miles, despite being married, despite having children, there is a compartment in my life reserved for them. These women are the only people who truly know me.”
Male relationships follow a different pattern. Men tend to build friendships until about age thirty, but there’s often a steady falloff after that. Among the reasons: Male friendships are more likely to be hurt by geographical moves, lifestyle changes or differences in career trajectories. And many men turn to wives, girlfriends, sisters or platonic female friends to share emotional issues, assuming male friends will be of little help.
The Ames girls see this in their husbands. Few of their husbands have long-standing groups of close friends, with decades of history together, whom they confide in and turn to week after week. Sure, their husbands have pals, former fraternity brothers, friendly colleagues. But men’s friendships tend to be based more on activities than emotions. They connect through sports, work, poker, politics. (In a study conducted by the Australian government, 57 percent of men said they are bonded to friends through “recreational activities.” That compared to just 26 percent of women who defined their friendships in those terms.) The Ames girls insist that they can and will remain friends right up until the end of their lives, in part because they won’t need much physical energy to maintain their bonds. All they’ll have to do is talk about their feelings, their memories, their current lives. They won’t have to play racquetball or walk eighteen holes on a golf course.
“It’s not like we’re couch potatoes,” says Marilyn, “but we could sit for hours talking, and we’d be totally happy doing that. If there was a recreational activity, we might be too busy talking to even pay attention.”
Bottom line: Women talk. Men do things together. Researchers explain it this way: Women’s friendships are face to face, while men’s friendships are side by side. In research labs, women have even proven themselves better than men at maintaining eye contact. Women’s bonds are explicit. Men’s feelings for each other might be strong, but their feelings are more implicit.
The Ames girls declare their love for each other effortlessly and all the time. Some of their husbands, like a lot of men, don’t ever talk about loving feelings for their male friends. (Some researchers say Freud is partially to blame because he delved into undertones of homosexuality in close male relationships. Ever since Freud raised the issue more than a century ago, many heterosexual men have resisted expressing affection for each other or getting too deeply involved in each other’s personal lives.) Men find it easier to dump unwanted or marginal friends, while women are far more apt to obsess about troubles with friends. “Men place less emphasis on friendship, and so friends are easier for them to discard,” says Rebecca Adams, a sociologist who does friendship research at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Meanwhile, like millions of other women, the Ames girls learned early on, even in grade school, that the way to keep female friendships alive was to listen and talk, in that order. This formula remained in place through every decade of their relationship, though some decades have been easier than others.
The Ames girls found that the early adult years—their twenties and thirties—required them to work harder to stay connected. That’s a familiar story for women everywhere, because those are the years when women are starting their careers, getting married, having babies. They’re busy.
Again, the research is consistent on this. More than two hundred girls and women were interviewed by Sandy Sheehy for a five-year study that culminated in her book Connecting: The Enduring Power of Female Friendship. Of the women, 85 percent said they had trouble maintaining friendships between ages twenty-five and forty. “Then all of a sudden, around age forty, an equal percentage reported an uptick in friendship activity,” Ms. Sheehy explains. “It’s like all of a sudden a light goes on and they say, ‘I need women in my life.’”
In studies before the 1990s, researchers attributed this uptick to women’s lockstep march through the life cycle. After a couple of decades spent finding a mate, building a marriage and raising kids, women finally had time for themselves because their kids were more self-sufficient. In previous generations, at age forty, the average woman already had sent her oldest child off to college or into the workforce, while her youngest child likely was in high school.
These days, at age
forty, a woman might be busy having her first child or starting her second marriage. (Indeed, when the Ames girls hit forty, none of them had children older than age thirteen. Angela’s daughter was three years old, and Jenny still hadn’t had her first child.) Yet in this new century, even women busy with careers and child-rearing duties become more friendship-focused entering their forties. “We’ve begun to understand that it has to do with a life stage,” says Ms. Sheehy. She identifies patterns that the Ames girls fit very neatly. In their early forties, she says, “Women are asking, ‘Where do I want to go with my life?’ Female friends show us a mirror of ourselves. Even lesbians say they see a need for non-sexual relationships with women at about age forty.”
For middle-aged women, trying to figure out who they are, one path to self-reflection comes from getting in touch with who they were. That’s part of the thrill at Ames girls’ gatherings. Karen says the friends she has made in adulthood—the other mothers in her neighborhood in suburban Philadelphia—“know me and like me for who I am now.” But that’s all they know; it’s not a complete picture. “My friends from Ames knew me before I became a mom and a wife,” Karen says. “They really know the original me—and that’s the person they like.” When she’s with them, she thinks about the “original me.” Who was that girl? How was she different or similar to the woman she has become?
Money tends to be less of a stumbling block for friendships as women get older. Middle-aged women often have more discretionary income to travel to see friends from their past. These days, the cost of a plane ticket or tank of gas is rarely an issue when the Ames girls make plans to reunite. That’s in contrast to the financial decisions that kept half of them from Sheila’s funeral when they were in their early twenties.
Why, in middle age, do so many women decide that good friendships are worth this price of admission? Partly because they sense that, no matter what it costs to keep these bonds intact, there are positive ramifications in other areas of their lives, including their relationships with their husbands.
Women with strong friendships often have closer marriages, according to research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. One explanation is that women who are good at intimacy with friends are good at intimacy with husbands. But researchers also say that women with close friends don’t burden their husbands with all of their emotional needs. That 2004 Harris survey found that 64 percent of women between ages twenty-five and fifty-five confess things to their friends that they wouldn’t tell their husbands.
The Ames girls’ husbands want the best for them, of course, but like a lot of men, they tend to show their love and concern by being solution-oriented. They want to be fixers. When a woman tells her husband that she’s having issues with her mother, the husband is apt to recommend strategies: “Here’s what you ought to do. . . .” She’ll mention it again, and he’ll say, “I already gave you my advice. As I told you, here’s what you ought to do. . . .”
But a female friend is more apt to say, “I have troubles with my mother, too. And no matter what your mother says, I think you’re terrific.” Or a female friend might say: “Maybe your mom is thinking about what you were like in high school, when your judgment wasn’t always perfect. But I think you have excellent judgment now.”
The Ames girls strive to be careful in how they advise each other. “They all know my history, every twist and turn I have taken,” says Kelly. “They also have a sense of where I am going. They don’t pass harsh judgments. They simply accept.” Like Marilyn, Kelly uses the word “safe.” “Gathering with them involves landing in a safe place,” she says.
The Ames girls say they let each other vent, then strive to tell each other that they are competent. They aim to “fix” problems by validating each other’s feelings, by encouraging. It’s a process their husbands might find frustrating, but it’s a typically female way of handling things. Because the girls can talk to each other, their husbands don’t feel as much of a burden or responsibility to listen to their issues or complaints for the umpteenth time.
Marilyn says she discusses everything of major importance with her husband. However, because he’s busy at work all day, “he’s not always available to have lengthy discussions right away,” she says. “But I can easily get on the Internet and send a message to the other girls to get their ideas about an issue.” She calls herself a fact-gatherer, who then refines all the input from the others so her husband “doesn’t have to hear my stream-of-consciousness thoughts. By the time I talk to him, he can just get a summary of how I’m thinking. Or sometimes, what may seem like an issue resolves itself before I even get a chance to discuss it with him.”
This talking, hashing out and confiding between women actually leads to physical reactions, according to Penn State University researchers. They found that there’s a chemical called oxytocin released in women’s bodies when they are doing what researchers call “tending or befriending.” Oxytocin helps ease women’s stress. It calms them. When men are stressed, they produce testosterone, which tends to reduce the effect of oxytocin. (Meanwhile, a Harvard Medical School study found that for women without close friends to talk to, the sense of isolation can be as damaging as smoking, overeating or drinking too much alcohol.)
In the end, though, even if you set aside all the health studies, the research into emotional well-being and the observations about men versus women, there’s a simple way to understand what connects women such as the Ames girls.
The Roper Organization has conducted a poll asking people what in their lives says the most about who they are. About a quarter of respondents said “my home.” Others cited their jobs, their clothes, their hobbies, their favorite music, their automobiles. But the most frequent top answer, given by a full 39 percent of respondents, was not a tangible “thing.” When people really want to define themselves, they look beyond how they decorate their houses or what they do for a living or what songs are on their iPods. In the poll, the number one answer was “I am most defined by my friendships.”
For the Ames girls, of course, their friendships encompass who they are, who they were, how they viewed themselves long ago and how they see themselves now. And on all of these fronts, so much reveals itself through the prism of Ames, Iowa.
Ames was actually a town that, early on, formally recognized the value of friendship, especially among girls. During World War I, Ames High chartered an afterschool chapter of the YWCA’s Girl Reserves, dedicated in part to improving relationships between female students. Annual dues were 35 cents then, and members recited a pledge:
As a Girl Reserve I will try to face life squarely. I will try to be . . . Gracious in manner . . . Impartial in judgment . . . Ready for service . . . Loyal to friends . . . Earnest in purpose . . . Seeing the beautiful . . . Eager for knowledge . . . Reverent to God . . . Victorious over self . . . Ever dependable . . . Sincere at all times . . . .
The group hosted lectures on topics such as “Popularity vs. Success,” “What Are You Laughing About?” and “Gossip vs. Conversation.” Evidently, even then, there was an awareness of mean-girl tendencies.
By the 1970s, Girl Reserves at Ames High had morphed into a Big Sister/Little Sister program, without the sober pledge and pointed lectures. As incoming students, the Ames girls appreciated being assigned to an older girl whose job it was to look after them and care about them. They also got a kick out of the ceremonial aspects of the program. The Big Sister’s identity remained secret for months; she’d send the Little Sister small presents and encouraging notes. It was a special moment when everyone gathered for “Discovery Night,” and the younger girls learned who their big sister was.
From the earliest days, Ames High educators stressed the value in nurturing friendships. About sixty years before the girls got there, the principal was Albert Caldwell, a man who had survived the sinking of the Titanic along with his wife and infant son. In speeches, he talked of how he and other survivors were bonded by their shared experiences that night. The take-away m
essage was that the strongest friendships are often forged from adversity.
After being rescued, Caldwell’s wife, Sylvia, had told reporters that when she boarded the Titanic, she asked a deckhand if the ship was really unsinkable. “Yes, lady,” she quoted him as saying. “God himself could not sink this ship!” It became a famous line, though some people suspected that Mrs. Caldwell was a publicity-seeker who’d made it up. She later published a book, The Women of the Titanic, about the “fortitude and bravery” of this band of women who had heard the dying screams of their sons, husbands and brothers—and soldiered on without them. Surviving the Titanic created lifelong relationships among some of the women. And though they found solace in their friendships with each other, their marriages didn’t always survive. The Caldwells got divorced in 1930.
Ames was known as a “high-IQ town,” and for good reason. Many of the Ames girls’ classmates were the offspring of professors at Iowa State or engineers at the Iowa Highway Commission or scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. The parents who worked at Ames Lab could seem like the most mysterious people in town; everyone knew they had quietly helped develop the atom bomb by producing high-purity uranium for the Manhattan Project.
Given the brainpower all over town, some adult friendships revolved around highbrow cocktail parties with visiting scholars. Marilyn’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. McCormack, were benefactors of the Central Iowa Symphony, so their friends were classical music lovers. Jenny’s mom, always active in politics and volunteer work, traveled in the civic-minded crowd. Because Sheila’s dad was a dentist, he and Sheila’s mom socialized with other young professionals.
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