Our innate need for friendship
SPECIAL WOMEN'S HEALTH SECTION
Science is just now catching on to what women have known all along: Strong female bonds can protect against life's hardships.
May 09, 2005|Melissa Healy | Times Staff Writer
Women are keepers of each other's secrets, boosters of one another's wavering confidence, co-conspirators in life's adventures. Through laughter, tears and an inexhaustible river of talk, they keep each other well, and make each other better.
Across species and throughout human cultures, females have banded together for protection and mutual support. They have groomed each other, tended each other's young, nursed each other in illness and engaged in the kind of aimless sociability that has generally mystified male anthropologists.

But the power of girlfriends is beginning to yield its secrets to science. For women, friendship not only rules, it protects. It buffers the hardships of life's transitions, it lowers blood pressure, boosts immunity and promotes healing. It may help explain one of medical science's most enduring mysteries: why women, on average, have lower rates of heart disease and longer life expectancies than men.
"Women are much more social in the way they cope with stress," says Shelley E. Taylor, author of "The Tending Instinct" and a social neuroscientist at UCLA. "Men are more likely to deal with stress with a 'fight or flight' reaction -- with aggression or withdrawal." But aggression and withdrawal take a physiological toll, and friendship brings comfort that mitigates the ill effects of stress, Taylor says. That difference alone, she adds, "contributes to the gender difference in longevity."
Women's reliance on their female friends -- and the benefits they believe they get from those friendships -- crosses the lines of ethnicity, income and age.
"There's a sense of well-being with Liza; I just feel