An ode to female friendship

BLOEMFONTEIN airport. A freezing winter's morning in July 1996. The Truth Commission is in session at the city hall, and I have been sent to pick up a South African filmmaker who has just returned from exile and who is to join our SABC team.

The woman who walked into the arrivals hall that morning was to become one of my closest friends. We have held each other through love and grief and marriage and divorce and childbirth (mine) and adoption (hers) and dying parents (mine), emigration (her) and parenting teenagers (both), and menopause (of course). We have lived together and travelled together and are godmothers to each other's children. We hold each other's deepest secrets and fears. And 27 years after that cold Free State morning, we still speak almost every day.

I have three extraordinary brothers. And I have extraordinary male friends. But if there is a generalisation I have come to experience as truth, it is that men think, love and show kindness differently. 

“Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses … swapped back and forth and over again,” writes Michelle Obama in her beautiful book, The Light We Carry.

Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, in their book Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close, call female friendship “society's most underappreciated relationship … a bond that transcends life phases, geographical locations, and emotional shifts."

And Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of the television series Fleabag (about friendship), says female friendships are the “greatest romance of most women’s lives".

Ring of fire

After my father died, J sent me a plane ticket to Italy, rented a beautiful house on a remote island and invited two other close girlfriends to come and stay. For two weeks in winter, our little band of soul sisters walked the hills, swam, cooked and talked late into every night. 

In a world that values strength above vulnerability, and assertiveness above empathy, female friendships are our ring of fire. And the older I get, the more central these friendships become in my life. I am fortunate to have the always-there solidarity of my beloved blood brothers, but it is my chosen sisterhood and their energy, kindness and compassion that has kept me sane and standing through the deep shifts in my emotional landscape over the past few years. 

The science of female friendship

There is scientific evidence to underscore the importance of female friendships. 

For instance, this study found that friendship can be literally life-saving. It showed that women with 10 or more friends were more likely to survive breast cancer than women who do not have friends. Socially isolated women were 64% more likely to die from cancer and 43% more likely to have a breast cancer recurrence.  

Another landmark study from UCLA says friendships between women not only shape our inner worlds and fill the emotional gaps in our non-platonic relationships, but they are also a primary way women deal with stress.

Women have a larger behavioural repertoire than fight or flight, the researchers suggest. When the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress response in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response with what they call a “tend and befriend" response. And when women engage in this tending and befriending, more oxytocin is released, further reducing stress and producing a calming effect. This does not occur in men because testosterone seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. 

The researchers looked at how women functioned after the death of their spouse; they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those who had close friends and confidantes were more likely to survive the experience without physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality

The study concludes that “women more reliably turn to their social contacts in times of stress, responses that are … protective of health and longevity. The fact that men may be somewhat more likely to cope with stress via fight or flight and women to cope with stress via tend and befriend may help to explain the worldwide gender gap in mortality.”

A thousand kindnesses

A courier drops off a package. It is the second from my other J these past few months. I open the recycled Takealot box to find a bright pink Post-it with “Sterkte skat. Bon Courage" written on it. There are two printed recipes (one for the green herb and miso paste she made for me once, which I loved) and a jar of her preserved lemons. And  anchovy paste, dried porcinis and other treasures from the Italian deli in Orange Grove.

H sends me a belated birthday present — a necklace to replace the one I loved so much and lost in the chaos of a discombobulated life.

I return late from a work assignment. J runs me a bath, and when I fall into bed, there is a warm water bottle for my feet.

Godmother J checks in on my daughter via WhatsApp to ensure she is coping.

P sends me a poem.

E says she will translate my article for me.

S arrives with a box of vegetables and makes us soup for supper.

J sends me a message telling me to look out the window at the rainbow arcing across the ocean.

V cooks me a curry just because it's my favourite thing.

E fetches me for an early morning walk. We sit at the slipway and watch the sunrise.

S phones me from faraway Stella — just because I am on her mind.

A thousand kindnesses every day from my female firebirds. Warrior women. Scatterlings across the globe. 

In a world that places so much emphasis on romantic relationships, female friendships are indeed, for me, the greatest romance.

Research tells us that the average female friendship lasts 16 years, six years longer than the average romantic relationship. And when we turn 55, as I have just done, our friendships have, on average, lasted 23 years.

They are the net we fall into when we fall apart. The place we store our deepest sorrows and greatest fears. Where we find emotional equilibrium. Where we go to be seen, to be heard and understood when life unmoors us. And where we heal our broken hearts.

♦ VWB ♦

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