Experience required
Female friendships are essential to our mental health, our decision-making capabilities and our basic need for connection. But when Meg Mason met a woman 25 years her senior, she found a different kind of dynamic that offered even more
They say old friends are the best friends – but older ones may be even better.
She had a way of clasping her hands below her chin when she spoke that made you lean in, as though she was sharing a confidence and not speaking to an audience of 200. She had a rich Am-radio sort of voice that could have been introducing the Polish Philharmonic something-or-other on your mother’s kitchen radio. Her face was the kind that smiled in repose, and within minutes of seeing her for the first time, I decided we would probably have to be friends. It was that flicker of recognition that says, “Here she is. Here’s one of yours. Sidle up to her after this lecture, be sweet and don’t leave without her number.”
And it seems I’m not the only one to have experienced what researchers have dubbed “friendship chemistry”. In fact, this instant connection between two people is most common among females, according to a study in The Social Science Journal. It’s about instinct, and because us women are programmed to trust our emotions, that “friendship at first sight” feeling motivates us to pursue the relationship. With any luck, it marks the start of a conversation that will continue in instalments for the next 30 years, fuelled by mutual interests, shared loathings, life events that become increasingly interwoven, and quantities of gin.
“OVER-SIXTIES CAN AFFORD THE TYPE OF PINOT THAT DOESN’T BURN ON THE WAY DOWN”
It certainly didn’t steer me wrong. Ten years later, here we are. I was right. She’s a journalist, too, radio to my print. A reader and writer; short stories her, novels me. No matter how many lunches, walks or Saturday afternoons of not much that we fit in, we can never get through our list of talking points (there’s an iphone note of open threads), and the sensation of seeing her is the same as sinking into a sofa that still bears an impression of the last time I was there. So it doesn’t really matter that she’s 25 years older – maybe more, I’ve never asked. But much closer in age to my own mother than to me.
“The odd thing about these deep and personal connections of women,” wrote Gloria Steinem, “is that they often ignore barriers of age, economics, worldly experience, race, culture – all the barriers that, in male or mixed society, had seemed so difficult to cross.” That was in the ’70s, and thank goodness nothing much has changed because there are so many benefits to these friendships that I suggest we all scout a woman from the generation above.
It’s not that I don’t adore friends my own age but, collectively, I think it’s fair to say that none of us know the literal fuck what we’re doing. We’re tired, we have no time, the kids are relentless. But an older woman has done it all and survived. She remembers the madness of being a working mum, trying to fit a full working day into school hours, as though it were yesterday. For me, it was yesterday, so I can’t hear enough about how she made it work. All the times she didn’t, I find immensely comforting. If it turned out for her, it will for me, too, she says. That sort of reassurance, the kind with experience behind it, is something most of us could do with on a daily basis, which makes me wonder why intergenerational friendships aren’t more common.
More than once I’ve arrived at her house and burst into floods as she ushered me in, sat in the opposite chair and opened with an “alright then, let’s have it”. Wine appears at some point, and if there’s material benefit in a friendship like this, it’s that over-sixties can afford the type of pinot that doesn’t burn on the way down and leave you with that twitchy left eye my under-40 friends know as the Cleanskins Palsy. But even more valuable: she has time. It’s not that her days are in need of filling. It’s just that, for however long we’ve got, her attention is all mine. No stealthy phone checking, no sprinting off to the next thing. If I have a decision to make, she’ll workshop the 400 pros and cons I’ve come up with, showing what one writer called “high tolerance”, another marker of authentic friendship that now has me loath to make certain decisions without her input.
For some time we’ve known friendships improve mental wellbeing – the feel-good hormone oxytocin is released when friends connect with each other emotionally – but a link has now been established between the sort of tribal feeling we get from time spent with women and increased resilience. How funny that the sage Jane Fonda knew as much: “It’s my women friends that keep starch in my spine, and without them, I don’t know where I would be.”
I often wonder how I help my friend, since I’ve got no advice to give in return, I do sometimes stealthily check my phone and I’m two decades behind in the accumulation of anecdotes. But when she talks about her peers and their interests – primarily bung knees and arthritis – I can see mine are more diverse or, at least, less medically focused. I definitely know better restaurants.
At one recent dinner, as the waitress led me to our table she said, “Your mother is just over there.” I blushed, as though I’d been caught in a lie. I hadn’t said as much but also, I didn’t correct her. Do I wish she was my mother? She has daughters close to my age and I wonder if they’ve ever felt baffled by the relationship, or jealous of the time their mum spends with me. I’ve given it a lot of thought, fearing the invisible line and overstepping it. I don’t think I view her as a proxy – I’m happy with the mother I have. She lives overseas and I’m used to not having her around, but back in the era of screaming newborns and no-one to hold them but me, I couldn’t look at a woman with her baby and her mother, because my longing to have what she had was so overwhelming. I hadn’t met my older friend yet, but I wonder now about how much easier those years would have been with her in them.
Friendships between women are everything – the moments of connection, the sacrificial things women do for each other, the gap they fill that romantic partners can’t, no matter how much we love them. “Women know how to be friends,” the novelist Alice Adams said. “That’s what saves our lives.” But I like Keira Knightley’s version better. “Female friendships are fucking extraordinary.” To have another woman on your side, older or younger, experienced or on the same everyday hustle as you, is to be extraordinarily lucky.
You Be Mother ($32.99, Harpercollins) by Meg Mason is out August 21