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chapter 1
Women Friends Talking
Kathryn and Lily, friends for over sixty years, hadn’t seen each other in several weeks. They both felt this was too long, so they arranged to get together. When Kathryn arrived at Lily’s home, they sat down and talked. And talked. And talked. They didn’t stop, and they didn’t get up, until two and a half hours had passed. They talked about books they were reading, their significant others, politics, movies, their children, their children’s children, and how their bodies and their living situations were changing with age Later, they exchanged emails. Lily wrote, “That was a wonderful and soul-lifting visit, my dearest old friend. Will let you know about the movie.” Kathryn replied, “I felt the same way about our time together.” Her email ended, “Let me know about the movie, and if we go to the other one I will let you know about that. Take care, dear friend.”
Andrea recalls that she and her best friend in middle school, Joelle, walked home together every day. They could take a bus, but they usually chose to walk instead so they would have more time to talk. At one point, there was a chance that Joelle’s family would move to another state. The prospect of losing her friend filled Andrea with dread. “I won’t be able to live without her,” she felt. “If she moves, how will I survive?” That feeling is usually associated with a life partner or parent. But a connection to a friend can be that strong, too. A deep sense of loss can result when a friendship ends. As with a romantic partner, losing a friend means losing a language. No one else can understand the particular meanings of words that you shared, the references that made you laugh or nod in understanding. That loss is a testament to the power of conversation—of talk—to create a connection, a shared world.
If a friend who is part of your daily life moves away, a hole is left that is palpable every day. Paula and her neighbor Nancy became fast friends by running together every morning before work. When Paula stepped out to pick up the paper in the morning, she faced Nancy’s house. During the winter months when days were shorter and mornings still dark, seeing the light in Nancy’s kitchen made her smile. It filled her with warmth to know that her friend was up, too, also preparing coffee and breakfast. Then Nancy and her family moved. Paula felt forlorn. She wasn’t motivated to run before work if Nancy wasn’t going with her. To her surprise, she found herself regarding the woman who bought Nancy’s house as an interloper. Now if Paula steps out to get the paper and spies a light in the kitchen across the way, though she knows it makes no sense, she feels resentment toward the woman who is moving around in Nancy’s kitchen.
A friend—just one single friend—changed the life of a girl named Maya. At eleven, Maya had never had a friend. Though she badly wanted one, she simply did not know how to relate to other children. As her much older sister, Chana Joffe-Walt, explained on the radio show This American Life, Maya had many of the traits associated with the autism spectrum: “sensitivity to touch, lack of eye contact, obsessive and intense interest in one topic, and difficulty with social emotional reciprocity, what many of us call conversation.” Having struggled her entire young life, Maya “had amassed a team of therapists” and “a series of diagnoses that all seemed to take her most obvious character trait and add the word ‘disorder’ to it.” Despite the efforts of these experts, Maya “stopped asking for playdates altogether. She stopped reading. She stopped smiling, and sleeping. And she was on edge all the time, especially at school. A kid would take her pencil or brush up against her at the bus stop, and Maya would blow up. She had to be physically restrained. She broke a window. She was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder. She got hospitalized for a brief period.”
Then the miracle happened. Maya went to a horse camp, race horses being her obsession. And there she met Charlotte, who became her friend. Charlotte and Maya had playdates. They laughed together. They had sleepovers. Until then, children had kept their distance from Maya. But Charlotte told her mother, “Maya is perfect.” Maya’s life changed so dramatically that her family referred to BC and AC, life Before Charlotte and After Charlotte. Maya herself explained that through Charlotte she learned how to relate to other people: “Be more flexible. Not just talk about what you want to talk about all the time. Do other stuff that your friend wants.” After two years of their friendship, Maya at thirteen “feels the feelings that come when you’re a girl and you have a friend who makes you laugh, and thinks about you when you’re apart, and gets you.” Maya was transformed. She “no longer regularly gets in trouble at school. She now does her homework and washes her hair without a struggle. She has not had one violent incident AC. She makes eye contact sometimes. She asks, ‘How are you?’ sometimes. She does chores. That felt impossible BC. All of it seemed impossible BC.” A friend accomplished what a decade of experts and therapists couldn’t.
She Was There for Me
Having a friend means feeling less alone in the world. You have someone to talk to, someone to do things with, someone you can call on when you need something—or, even better, who will come through without being called on. I heard accounts of friends volunteering help in vastly different contexts. When Aisulu Kulbayeva, a linguistics graduate student, talked to women in a village in Kazakhstan about their friendships, they told her of women coming through with help when needed, and of sharing what little they had. One woman, Valentina, explained that she has a niece who is also a friend. When either visits the other, she always brings something, like candy for the children. And if her niece’s husband has gone fishing, she will bring Valentina a fish. When Valentina’s father died, her niece came over as soon as she heard, helped at the funeral, and helped Valentina cook for the many guests who came not only for the funeral but also for traditional gatherings on the ninth and fortieth days following her father’s death. Switching to present tense, Valentina explained that during that time, in order to be there for Valentina, her niece “leaves all her household chores. The only thing she goes home for is to milk the cow.”
“She was there for me” is something many women said when telling me about friendships they treasured. Some of the most moving stories I heard were of friends who came through in difficult times, and they spanned the ages and stages of women’s lives. One woman recalled how her friends rallied around her when she faced a challenging life circumstance—in the third grade. Her family was going through a difficult time that her classmates got wind of. Her close friends did not ask for details—that in itself was a gesture of friendship—and they worked as a team to protect her. If a too-curious classmate seemed poised to ask questions that might be hard for her to deal with, her friends would move in and encircle her, so the inquisitive intruder could not get to her—literally or figuratively. I heard many accounts of friends bringing over meals and providing rides to medical facilities when a friend fell ill. Several women told me of friends who lived in distant cities coming to help when they were recovering from surgery—and staying for a week or more. A woman described how, following a painful divorce, her friends helped her turn the run-down condo she moved to into a home: “They came over with their rubber gloves and their buckets. It was like the maid brigade. They showed up to get down and dirty and gritty, because I was sort of dysfunctional at that point. I could do stuff, but I couldn’t organize it.”
On the other hand, a woman, Shirley, talked of an opposite experience. When her husband began showing the debilitating signs of Parkinson’s disease, Shirley said, “There were women friends—women I thought were my friends—who just disappeared.” Particularly disappointing was the reaction of a couple who had been among their closest friends for years. As Shirley’s husband’s illness worsened, the wife’s visits became more sporadic, and her husband’s stopped altogether. The wife told Shirley: “My husband can’t handle seeing your husband that way.” The hurt in Shirley’s voice was evident as she said, “We had to live with his Parkinson’s every day, and she’s telling me her husband can’t stand it for an hour.” The experience led Shirley to contemplate the meaning of friendship. “If a friend isn’t there when you need her,” she mused, “what is a friend?”
One woman answered this question by saying that a true friend is someone she could “call at three in the morning and say I need $100 for an airplane ticket.” The same wee hour came to the mind of a woman who told me that if a friend called her at three in the morning and said, “I need bail,” she’d reply, “Okay, can I come in my nightie? I’ll be right there.” These scenarios were hypothetical, but I heard many real-life accounts of friends who jumped in a car or on a plane when a friend faced dire circumstances, such as that most unimaginable loss, the death of a spouse. One woman, when her friend’s husband died, flew across the country immediately and stayed to show her friend how to do the many things that he had done: write checks, balance a checkbook, shop for food and cook dinner. After returning to her own home, she called on the phone—and continued to call every day for a year. Even when she was physically distant, she was there for her bereaved friend—through talk.
The circumstances needn’t be cataclysmic for friends to come through by being there to talk. Another woman recalled a next-door neighbor “who called me one day when her son had dropped a jar of mayonnaise and smeared it around all over the kitchen floor then put eggs in it because he was going to make a cake. And she just left the mess and came over. We drank coffee and commiserated with each other.”
It’s All Talk
“For girls and women, talk is the glue that holds a relationship together.”
When my book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation was published, I said this so often in interviews that my mother would tease me by chanting the sentence back to me. I’d always go on to add, “For boys and men, it’s activities that are central. For girls, your best friend is the one you tell everything to. For boys, your best friend is the one you do everything with—and the one who will stick up for you if there’s a fight.”
Studies of children at play, such as Marjorie Harness Goodwin’s He-Said-She-Said, found that girls and boys tend to play with others of the same sex, and to use language differently when they do. Typically, girls’ social lives are centered on a best friend, and they spend a lot of time sitting and talking, especially exchanging secrets. Boys talk, too, of course, but they tend to do it differently and for different purposes. Typically (though, obviously, not every child is typical; patterns should not be misconstrued as norms), boys use language to take center stage by boasting, telling stories, making jokes, or telling others what to do—all ways of establishing their status in the group, and also ways of talking that girls find unacceptable in other girls. A boy who issues commands to others and gets them to stick is the leader. A girl who tries to tell others what to do is bossy, and the other girls don’t want to play with her.
Observing the ways children use language in same-sex play sheds light on differences in how women and men tend to use language among friends as adults. Students in my classes observing their own conversations frequently describe contexts where the young women talk and the young men use action. Here’s an example provided by Erika Duelks.
Saturday night, after a party, a group of us went to Matt’s house to hang out before we went home to bed. I (and the other girls) proceeded to sit down on the couch and we began talking about the night: what we thought was fun, what we wished had happened, etc. I was in the middle of giving my friend Sarah advice about a boy when all of a sudden the coffee table was pushed out of the way and the guys began to wrestle, throwing each other onto the couch and pushing each other off chairs. It was funny for me to see my big guy friends wrestling as if they were five-year-olds, but it also struck me that this is how we chose to relax: the girls began talking . . . and the guys got up and started play-fighting.
If the boys were acting like five-year-olds by roughhousing, Erika and her friends were also acting like five-year-olds—five-year-old girls—by sitting and talking.
I’ve often asked audiences, “When did you last communicate with your closest friend?” Most women raise their hands to indicate “this morning,” “yesterday” or “within a week.” A few women’s hands go up to show “within a month.” But many men, and very few women, raise their hands to indicate it has been a year or more. When I ask this question in conversation, men often say, “I haven’t spoken to him in a year—but if I needed him, he’d be there.” If talk is the glue that holds a relationship together, you have to talk to your friend to maintain the friendship. If friendships are focused on activities, then there’s not much to gain by talking to friends who aren’t there.
Journalist Jeffrey Zaslow was intrigued by the close friendships he saw his mother, sister, wife, and daughters enjoying—and sometimes suffering from. Like an anthropologist who goes to live among members of a different culture, Zaslow followed a group of women who had been friends for forty years, to figure out what drives their friendships. As he recounted in his book The Girls from Ames, he quickly realized that talking about their personal lives was key to their friendships—and completely different from the kind of talk he and his friends engaged in. “I’ve been playing poker with a group of friends every Thursday night for many years,” he wrote in his introduction to the book. “About 80 percent of our conversations are focused specifically on the cards, the betting, the bluffing. Most of the rest of the chatter is about sports, or sometimes our jobs. For weeks on end, our personal lives—or our feelings about anything—never come up.”
