After nearly 50 years of friendship, Venetia Sherson thanks her inner circle.
Over a decade ago, when British anthropologist Robin Dunbar deduced humans typically have 150 friends, of whom just five are intimate, I did a head count. My inner circle aced the test. I have five close women friends with whom I laugh, vent and share my angst on growing old (“please tell me if I have a hair sprouting from my chin”). We have been friends for nearly 50 years, initially bonding over toddler toilet training. Now we share helpful tips for joint pain. I can’t imagine life without them.
But beyond the inner circle, I fell well short of Dunbar’s number. To reach 150, I would have had to include the drycleaner who greets me warmly by name, people who mistakenly call me Vanessa but still seem pleased to see me, and colleagues whom I haven’t seen for yonks. Even then I would be stretched. Dunbar defines friends as people you would not be embarrassed to approach at 3am in an airport transit lounge and share a drink with (that cuts out the drycleaner who doesn’t drink). If push came to shove, he says, they would also lend you five quid ($NZ10.69) if you asked.
I’m not especially bothered by the numbers. Quality over quantity has always been my yardstick. I gave up on Facebook because the friend requests were overwhelming, often from people I barely knew. But a new book edited by Rachael Cooke, The Virago Book of Friendship, made me think about what truly makes a friend and why some friendships flourish over time and others fade away. Cooke says her book (just released in New Zealand) brings together thoughts about friendship by 100 mostly women writers, covering school friendships to last goodbyes, and “from fallings-out to longed for reunions”. It is, she says, the result of her determination to uncover female friendships that have been largely neglected in storytelling.
My best friend at school was Colleen. The texting term BFF hadn’t been devised in those days, but I believed we would be friends forever. We went to the same school and shared a love of horses; she had cousins (dozens); I had none. Weekends at her family farm were full of adventure and risk. We swam our ponies in the swift-flowing Waihou River, clinging to their manes as they splashed to shore. When we were 15, and waiting for our School Certificate results (we passed), we dyed our hair the same colour (Napro Red). I was brunette and Colleen was blonde. My hair stayed frustratingly brown with warmish lights; hers turned a tarty shade of orange.
We phoned each other almost every night and talked mainly about boys and horses. There was gossip, too. Was the flamboyant French teacher queer, whose parents had split up and which girls were already doing “it” with their boyfriends. But we had to take care. Her phone was a party line (two short rings, one long) shared by three others. Mine was in our hallway within earshot of my older sisters.
At 19, against the counsel of our mothers, we abandoned our first jobs and left to travel overseas. On the six-week boat trip we got drunk on cherry brandy and coke and flirted with the deckhands. Colleen was more sexually advanced than me (my mother’s cautionary tales had a chilling effect) and as we hitchhiked throughout Europe she would often disappear for nights. Two years into our travels, she fell for a US serviceman in Spain. Some weeks later, on a train to Paris, she told me she was pregnant. She knew she couldn’t tell her family. Instead, I phoned my godfather in England, a kind and liberal-minded man, who discretely arranged and paid for a procedure by a doctor friend in Harley Street. Eighteen months later, I came home alone.
When we met again, I was married with a toddler. Colleen was living in another city and had come out as gay. We hugged when we said goodbye, but the bond was not the same. We never spoke again.
The person who had filled the void, I shall call D. Not because she wants to remain anonymous. But because I know she has 150 friends and many of them would claim she is as dear to them as she is to me. It seems selfish to claim her as my bestie.
We met at the newspaper where we were cadet reporters. We both had wardrobes filled with home-made clothes. D had married at 19. I was living “in sin” with my boyfriend. When I became pregnant eight years later (“unmarried mother”), she listened without judgement as I mulled my choices. At my registry office wedding some months later she and her husband were the only guests. I wore one of her beautiful Laura Ashley print dresses to hide my pregnant belly.
In the 1970s, our friendship flourished against the backdrop of the women’s movement. We read the same feminist literature, subscribed to Broadsheet magazine and attended United Women’s Conventions. We joined smaller workshops to learn more about our bodies, holding mirrors to our own vaginas.
The changing social climate gave us courage to speak out about reproductive rights, childcare, equal pay and who should clean the toilet in a marriage. We felt empowered and bullet-proof against the changing social landscape. But when my first son was born in 1978, I dissolved into a quivering wreck, thwarted by the competing stress of work and motherhood and breasts that would not feed my hungry baby on demand. The women who now form my inner circle were safe havens to vent, share survival tips and laugh. “New mothers make natural allies,” writes Rachael Cooke. “The swapping of secrets, a shared bottle of wine [engenders] the fortifying embrace of unity.”
How does friendship develop and endure? Research by the University of Kansas deduced it takes around 50 hours of socialising to move from acquaintance to casual friend and 200 hours to cement a “close” friendship. Proximity is an advantage. Friends are often co-workers or people who share the same pastimes. The more often you see someone, the more likeable you find them. But close friendship is much more than weekly coffees and walks in the park. Bonding is based on shared intimacies, values and respect.
My inner circle is united in our political views (I’m not sure how things would go if one of us supported Trump), a love of good food, books and despair over misplaced apostrophes. But more than that we share what one psychologist describes as “a depth and breadth of self-disclosure”. That means a willingness to reveal the things that sadden as well as gladden us. The ability to support one another during tough times is crucial to a friendship.
Over our lifetimes, each of us has suffered grief, trauma and major disappointment. In 1984, D’s parents died prematurely within weeks of each other, leaving her bereft and mourning the gaping loss of grandparents for her two young sons. We held each other in my kitchen. When one of my sons was diagnosed with cancer, she was the person I turned to. When her husband went into care with a cruel and debilitating illness I saw her navigate each change with unfailing love and dignity. “It must be a relief,” some said when he died. Her friends knew it was the cruellest thing to say.
There is much speculation about whether women’s friendships are different to men’s. Some studies have shown women have high expectations of their relationships, especially in terms of reciprocity (mutual support) and intimacy. Men less so. A study by the University of Oxford concluded male friendships are more likely to flourish around a shared activity while women prefer close, one-to-one interactions. But to suggest men only open up after a few pints at the pub is a sweeping generalisation, especially among younger men today.
And yet, in my view, there is nothing to compare with the glorious solid structure of female friendship that holds you close in times of trouble, lifts you up when you are flat and laughs with you until your belly hurts at silly anecdotes. Over the years, my women friends have become my family.
In her book, Rachel Cooke traces the growing acknowledgment of the power of female friendships through history. Victorian women, she writes, wore jewellery made from the hair of their female friends and lived together in marriage-like partnerships that were accepted, even exalted by family, wider society and the church. The feminist movement also created bonds between women frustrated by a system built on misogyny and exploitation. She laments the modern trend of “ghosting and frenemies” in which friends can be dropped unceremoniously from social media and mobile phones.
But my daughter-in-law, just turned 40, has the same type of close network of women friends as me. She calls them her “universe of trust – a place, where we can be ourselves, share our anger and insecurities, knowing we will not be judged by our friends in the cold light of day.”
The value of friendship is undisputed. The alternative – loneliness – is known to adversely affect mental and physical health and welfare and is now considered as bad for your health as smoking. But close friendship is also good for the soul. “An hour with a friend is pure oxygen, the relief of being seen and known and seeing and knowing in return”, wrote Guardian columnist Emma Beddington.
My five women friends are the kindest, wisest and wittiest women I know. Among them are two former teachers, a counsellor, a lawyer and two journalists. We are all now in our 70s. Some of us have retired and become artists, potters and volunteers. We are all active grandmothers. Over coffee or wine, we forcefully debate the issues of the day, set the world to rights and compare and share the books we love. I may not have 150 people I would class as friends, but I will happily settle for the gifts of love and understanding my inner circle offers every time we meet.