The research is clear about the positive implications of friendship.
There was, for instance, a 14-year project at Flinders University in Australia that tracked 1,500 women as they aged. The study found that close friendships---even more than close family ties---help prolong women's lives. Those with the most friends lived 22% longer than those with the fewest friends.
Linked by 40 years of experiences and memories, 10 women from Ames, Iowa, are a lesson in the power and lifelong benefits of friendship. Born at the end of the Baby Boom, their memories are evocative of their times. Their story is universal, even common, and on that level, it can't help but resonate with almost anyone who has ever had a friend.
In their adult lives after Ames, the women found newer friends. But these more recent friendships are built mostly around their kids, jobs or current neighborhoods. The bonds are limited to the here and now.
Duke University researchers looked at hundreds of unmarried patients with coronary heart disease and found that, of those with close friends, 85% lived at least five years. That was double the survival rate of those lacking in friends.
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 Ames girls do their share of talking about the aging process, but then they move on 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.
By the time women are middle-aged, most have built the friendships that will sustain them. That is the conclusion of a study that began in 1978 at Virginia Tech, when 110 women over age 50 were first asked to name their closest friends. Fourteen years later, when these women were ages 65 to 89, they were asked the same question, and 75% of them listed the exact same names.
Similarly, a Harris Interactive Inc. survey in 2004 found that 39% of women between ages 25 and 55 said they met their current best friends in childhood or high school. Women 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.
There's a Spanish proverb: "Tell me who you're with and I'll tell you who you are."
The story of the Ames girls will have many more chapters, of course. There will be losses ahead, they all know that, but there will be great joys, too. And they have no doubt they will be there for one another always, whatever happens.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2009
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