FRIENDS at FIRST SIGHT
We know you can fall in love at a glance. Now scientists say friendships can start instantly too – and these women prove it
AS THEIR eyes locked, Gillian Assor felt a thunderbolt strike her very core. Irresistibly drawn to the stranger, she couldn’t help but smile. To her delight, the stranger smiled back, and they struck up a conversation.
And 22 years on, the pair have shared every heartbreak, every joy together.
You might imagine this was the moment Cupid’s arrow struck, but Gillian had met her husband David three years before. No, the good-looking stranger was the woman she calls her best friend, Emma Cohen.
For rather than love at first sight, Gillian had been struck by friendship at first sight, a feeling of meant-to-be togetherness scientists are claiming is as real as the romantic spark that can occur when couples meet and hit it off.
It’s not sexual, but the feelings it promotes can be just as powerful.
When Gillian began talking to Emma at a mutual friend’s wedding in 1994, she felt an inexplicable connection — a sensation she’d had only once before, when she met David. This, scientists say, is friendship chemistry, which more than 60 per cent of us have experienced.
For Gillian, 46, from Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, it was an unforgettable experience. She says she instantly felt as if she’d known Emma all her life.
The pair were glued in conversation for the entire wedding, and in the decades since have shared a deep friendship Gillian can only describe as ‘like sisters’.
‘There was this deep-seated feeling she was going to be a very good friend,’ says Gillian, a mother of three who runs the Nanny To The Rescue agency.
‘I don’t know if it was her open face and warm smile or just how easy it was to talk to her, but the next 20 years or so of friendship were sealed in that moment.’
Her friend agrees. ‘We laughed so much at that wedding and just clicked,’ says Emma, 46, a nursery administrator and mother of four boys, also from Borehamwood.
THEY speak an astonishing four or five times every day, thrashing out life’s big issues or just asking if they can please nip round and borrow an onion.
‘Gillian is the only person I’ll phone past 11pm at night,’ says Emma. ‘No time, no subject, is out of bounds with her.’
While it all sounds wonderfully supportive, experts say such intense connections can bring complications, not least that partners can feel excluded.
‘There can be a co-dependency in these types of friendships that can preclude the need for a romantic partner,’ says social anthropologist Jean Smith.
‘If you have a wonderful friend with whom you can share great times and conversation, why do you need a man?’
But while Emma has recently divorced, she insists her friendship with Gillian never took precedence over her husband.
‘However, it’s true I could tell Gillian things I couldn’t tell anyone else. I think my new partner took a while to get used to the fact I told her everything.’
Emma and Gillian live just a few minutes from each other, and Jean Smith believes it’s this proximity and repeated exposure that makes a bond last.
‘You can have instant friendship chemistry, but you need to have things in common with that person and see them often and in settings that encourage you to let down your guard,’ she says.
Today, best friends Ruth Sparkes and Nikki Baron live 190 miles away from each other, yet are as close as the moment their eyes met across a photocopier in 1995.
‘Nikki had the shiniest red hair I’d ever seen and looked so cool,’ says Ruth, 47, a marketing director from Andover in Hampshire. ‘We worked at the same newspaper in Cornwall, selling advertising. ‘But Nikki worked with bigger clients than I did, and I was in awe of her. I said something silly and she found it hilarious.’ The seeds of the friendship flourished when both discovered they were about to go on a weekly management course and Ruth offered Nikki a lift. ‘Every Wednesday I’d look forward to those journeys because we both had high- pressure jobs. It was an escape to talk and laugh,’ says Ruth. Nikki, 45, who is an advertising manager and married mother of one from Truro, was also struck by the chemistry of that first meeting. ‘It’s weird to think how two complete strangers suddenly connected over a photocopier, but that’s how it was,’ she says. ‘We both love having fun and an adventure — we’ve even gone on impulsive day trips to France and Milan — but we’re there for the serious stuff, too, such as when a relationship ended and Ruth asked me to join her and her husband Simon on a villa holiday in France.’
Ruth moved to Andover in 2009 and the pair see each other much less frequently.
‘We can go for a long time not talking, but I know Nikki is there if I need her,’ says Ruth.
As well as that initial spark, making intense, long-lasting friendships has a lot to do with timing, says Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford.
‘University or secondary schools are a hotbed for developing those intimate friendships that have the feel of a romantic relationship, but without the sex side,’ he says.
‘This is because these are very emotional, intense times when you do a lot of dancing, weeping, singing — all the mechanisms that bind friendships.’
The downside is that if things go wrong then it can feel just like splitting from a lover.
Jean Smith says: ‘If the friendship does come to an end, you will suffer intense feelings of heartbreak similar to when you’ve broken up with a romantic partner.’
That’s certainly not the case with Caroline Bacall and Andrea Kahn, always known as Andy, whose ‘telepathic friendship’ was present from when they met in 1989, while at university in Manchester.
‘It was a very wet day and I had just flown back from Dublin, my home town, to start my second year at university,’ says Caroline, 45, a bilingual virtual assistant.
‘I got into a taxi, but the driver was clueless about how to get to where my house-share was. Eventually he just chucked me out in the street.
‘I just burst into tears and sat on one of my cases in the pouring rain. Then I heard this voice in a strong North London accent asking me if I was OK. It was Andy.
‘She helped me drag my bags to my house and as soon as I looked at her, it was as if we’d known each other in a previous life! We felt instantly at ease.’
Andy, 45, a teacher, from NorthWest London, says: ‘I saw her face and her anguish and had so much empathy for her and wanted to make things better.
‘We had this sort of telepathic friendship from that moment that continues.’
BOTH say their husbands don’t feel threatened by their friendship — though, admits Caroline, ‘when we get together, they don’t get much of a look in’.
‘And yes, there are some things I tell Andy that I don’t feel comfortable talking about with other friends,’ she says.
‘She won’t judge me, but will tell me straight how things are. She is the only person, other than family, who has seen me at my worst.’
And that, says Robin Dunbar, is the point.
‘In our lifetime, we have a category of best-best friends. These are an inner core of five people to whom you can unburden your soul at all times of emotional need,’ he says.
‘These friends are like family and the chemistry between you is often ground into your friendship from day one.’
Or, as these women would insist, from the first second the lightning bolt of friendship strikes.