THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP


It Sustains, Nourishes and Supports Us by Judith Fertig


Make New Friends,


Keep the Old Today, making and keeping friends can be challenging, due to distance, frequent life changes, overprotective parenting and substituting social media for more intimate face time. It all makes friendship more fl uid than we might realize, says Shasta Nelson, the San Francisco founder of GirlFriendCircles.com, a women’s friendship matching site and author of Friendships Don’t Just Happen: The Guide to Creating a Meaningful Circle of Girlfriends, plus the upcoming book, Frientimacy, about deepening such relationships.


For a reason, a season or a lifetime, friends help us cope with challenges, motivate our best work and celebrate life. Friendships take many forms, crossing generations and self-imposed boundaries, and even spring up between unlikely confi dants.


C


hildhood friends Matt Damon and Ben Affl eck collaborated on the Oscar-winning screenplay


for Good Will Hunting. Fierce tennis competitors Serena Williams and Caroline Wozniacki like to get together for a gal-pal getaway after a major match. Country music artists Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood married following an 18-year friendship; “We had a lot more in common than I ever dreamed we did,” says Brooks. Rafts of research confi rm how friendship enriches us. Carlin Flora, of New York City, spent years as a Psychology Today writer and editor before penning Friendfl uence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are. She notes that among the varied and perhaps unforeseen benefi ts, friendships can help us “shed pounds, sleep better, stop smoking and even survive a major illness.”


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An ongoing, two-decade-plus study of nearly 1,500 seniors by the Flinders University Centre for Ageing Studies, in Australia, found those with a large network of friends outliving others with the fewest friends by 22 percent. The University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center also reports people with fi ve or more close friends as 50 percent more likely to describe themselves as “very happy” than those maintaining fewer confi dants. “Friends past and present play


powerful and often unappreciated roles in determining our sense of self and the direction of our lives,” says Flora. “Even in a supposedly meritocratic society, friends give jobs and assignments to each other, so having friends that share your career interests and aspirations can get you much farther than you could ever get on your own.”


Central Florida natural awakenings


“Most of us replace half of our close friends every seven years,” says Nelson. Although this might seem alarming, she considers it a natural ebb and fl ow. “We all need a couple of very close friends, while others that come and go might just be what we currently need—at work or school, among fi rst-time parents, in a new neighborhood, starting a job, in retirement or during some other life change,” she says. Canadian Greg Tjosvold, a married middle school teacher in Vancouver, Canada, has enjoyed great friendships with women, including his wife, partly because he doesn’t relate to men’s generally competitive nature and interest in sports. But when a close female friend moved away, he wanted to expand his circle to include men. He joined a group called The Barley Brethren that sample craft beers and talk about life. Although not into suds, he values “having a safe and enjoyable place to discuss deep issues, victories and temporary setbacks.” He admits, “That’s over-simplifi cation, though.” Finding a group of men he can feel a part of has validated him, making this unique man still feel like one of the guys. Nelson categorizes the concentric


circles of developing friendship as starting with a mutually agreeable acquaintance or contact, and then moving emotionally closer with someone that we fi nd similarities with. Then the original bond can enter the confi rmed friend category. A group of friends, like a longtime book club, can constitute a community. The highest


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