In the introduction to this column I talked about a young bride visiting an older relative of her new husband. The female relative gave the bride advice to "get herself some girlfriends." One of the most significant parts of this little story is that the bride is young. We need to start building our support system when we are young because as we mature, marry and have children, we have less time to meet new people. If we do not marry, we sometimes concentrate so much on the building of a successful career that we wake up one day and realize we are alone with very few friends in our life. When we are young and make friends, it gives us knowledge of the value of friends in our life.

I started to understand the value of friendships when I was in grade school. I grew up in a small town in northern Ohio and attended a small grade school. After graduating from 8^th grade, we proceeded to junior high for one year and then to "heaven" (our last 3 years of high school) – only we didn’t know it was heaven.

We graduated from high school in 1964 in a class of over 300 students. We have reunions about every 10 years and have a wonderful time together. We dance to oldies, laugh, cry and reminisce. In the past 40 years we have gone through the Vietnam War; the drug era; President Kennedy was killed our senior year; we landed on the moon; we communicate via email instead of the phone; we have a very high divorce rate; but when we are together we still love, care and feel the warmth of what we shared between 1960 and 1964. The important aspects of friendship that I learned in those 4 years was that I was capable of making friends, that I needed "girl friends" and enjoyed being part of a group of women who could laugh, cry, support, and be there for each other in good times and bad.

I still have friends from those years that I keep in touch with often and one who lives near by. We try to have dinner together as often as possible. Annie and I haven’t always been there for each other’s life crises but now we live in close proximity we talk more often and consequently support each other more. The bond we forged in high school has survived all these years. We look back at slumber parties, talking about boys, and listening to Johnny Mathias, talking about boys, going to basketball and football games and talking about boys. Today we support each other through our parents’ deaths, our children’s problems, our divorces and remarriages and our own health problems. We value our connection and the threads that have kept our friendship together all these years.

My friends who are my age are very valuable to me but I also like having friends of varied ages. I enjoy the wisdom of the older, more experienced friends and the energy and excitement my younger friends bring to my life. If we develop an openness to different ages of our friends as well as political leanings, diverse social groups, ethnicity and level of education, we tend to stay more open regarding changes in life styles and our society.

"Best Friend" Stigma

When I look back on my younger days and especially in high school, I seemed to have a lot of friends but never one that I could call "my best friend." I thought I was missing out on something or I didn’t have the capacity or potential to be someone’s "best friend." With maturity and confidence I have learned it is better to have several good friends rather than just one "best friend."

If we have a best friend and we depend only on her to share the good and bad in our lives, we become stagnate and at times, very lonely. Our best friend may be busy with her job, family, or going through her own crises and cannot be there for us when we need them. This style of relationship is very vulnerable to jealousy. Sometimes one friend starts to branch out into other social groups and the other friend feels left out and becomes jealous. Alan Loy McGinnis discusses jealousy in his book "The Friendship Factor." McGinnis says according to Shakespeare, jealousy is a "green-eyed monster" and has ruined many intimate relationships.

McGinnis discusses the importance of expanding our own interests and making friends in several groupings. One of his reasons for this is that no one person is ever going to make us happy. Therefore, in building our interests and friends we are building a support group/system.

Also, growth comes through fresh, new challenges and ideas. We need to allow other opinions and ideas into our lives. When we are young we do this in order to test our beliefs and discover if what we think is right, good, comfortable for us is really what we want for our personal standards. It is a type of experimenting with our own moral, traditional, and religious values. This is another important reason for cultivating friends of different life styles, religious inclinations, political leanings, and intellectual levels.