time

It wasn’t my birthday or any other day celebrated by Hallmark people.  It was just an ordinary rainy day when a small beautifully wrapped packaged appeared in my mailbox to make the day stand out from the rest.

I found inside a pretty ceramic plaque with purple and pink painted letters that read “Best Friends bring sunshine to each day,’” along with a hand-written note. (I thought of hanging it above my desk but my desk is in the middle of the room so I quickly regrouped---finding a proper place over the kitchen sink.}

I’m a friendship author, friendship scholar, and friendship expert but ironically, like too many busy women I know I never seem to have enough time for my own friendships, to be the friend I want to be.

Anyway, good friends have a gift for knowing what to say and what to do at just the right time. Good friends quietly bestow the unexpected without asking---on a rainy day when it is most needed.

One of the nice things about traveling is that every trip offers opportunities to make new friendships or nurture old ones--if you make it a priority and take the time. You could ask an old friend to travel with you or simply engage in conversation with a potential new friend you meet across the aisle on a plane.

You can rekindle an old friendship by making plans to meet someone from your past who lives en route or at your destination (perhaps someone you knew from childhood or college).Or you can take a chance and catch up with someone you only knew virtually.

Every connection starts with one person being brave enough to make a move---to take the initiative and hope the other person will respond in kind. As scary as it might feel at the moment you do it, it usually works.

Last weekend, I was visiting family in Westlake Village, California and took advantage of a serendipitous opportunity to meet Victoria Clayton-Alexander, another writer whom I knew lived just a few blocks away. I invited her to visit me at their home and a few hours later, she arrived with a smile on her face and a box of yummy Italian pastries. We all sat around the kitchen island drinking coffee and the conversation flowed effortlessly. I soon realized that she and I had many more connections than our writing.

High on that experience, a few days later when I got to a meeting in Phoenix, I emailed another writer I had only known virtually before. Jackie Dishner, a fellow member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, responded enthusiastically and was willing to meet at my hotel. We were soon sitting on lawn chairs drinking iced tea in the warm Arizona sun while we exchanged stories about our work and our lives.

Yes, instead of making these connections, I could have visited another museum, spent more time with my husband, gone shopping, or fallen into the trap of staying on top of my email in my hotel room, but these brief interludes turned out to be amongst the most memorable of my trip---and I have every hope that the friendships will be lasting ones.

Do you have any stories of travel and friendship to share? Have friends enhanced your travel or has travel enhanced your friendships?

Childhood friends, school chums, colleagues, neighbors, teammates and virtual friends---women accumulate hundreds, if not thousands, of friends based on where they’ve been and what they’ve done over the years. Friends are the living scrapbooks of our lives.

But every relationship doesn’t stick. In fact, very few of them do. It’s easy for friendships, even very close ones, to slip away--sometimes for no real reason at all. It just happens. A study of the friendship patterns of 10,000 people in the UK found that the average Brit collects 396 friends over a lifetime but winds up staying in touch with only one out of 12 of them.

This week a friend with whom I was once very close was diagnosed with a terminal illness. I hadn’t spoken to her in almost a decade and now I fear there might be time for only a brief reconnection, even though she is special to me and our friendship was an important chapter in my life story. Yes, we live in different states and no longer work in the same office. But why hadn’t I kept up the relationship? Was I really that busy? Maybe there wasn’t time to see her, but the ease of staying in touch via cell phones and e-mail make the excuse of being busy sound lame.

I know I’m not the only woman who is dancing as fast as she can. I once tried to introduce a close friend who moved to Washington DC to another close friend who already lived there. I thought they would enjoy each other as much as I enjoyed each of them. “I don’t even have enough time for my own friends so why would you ever think I would have time for yours,” said the DC native. And I understood.

Recognizing that life is finite (is that a new insight?), many of us have started composing “life lists” to set priorities. People are thinking about where they would like to go and what they would like to do before kicking the bucket. It’s not surprising that the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die became an instant best-seller. The same list-making mania has morphed into websites like www.43things.com. The film The Bucket List, which opened earlier this year, chronicles the story of two men, each with one year to live, who escape from the hospital where they meet to hit the open road and live life as they please.

Life is short. My suggestion: Make a list of the friends you truly want to keep in your life. To make the goal achievable, you don’t have to list 100 names and you don’t have to actually see those friends (unless you want to). You can just make ten phone calls or send ten e-mails, whenever it’s convenient, to tell your female friends how much they mean to you, before they disappear from your life.

 

This blog post also appears on www.HuffingtonPost.com/Living

Mother's Day celebrates motherhood---as well as children, flowers, candy, and greeting cards. But there's a seedy side to everything---and motherhood is a known friendship-killer. Motherhood challenges female friendships for a variety of reasons:

• You are a mother, and your BFF isn't one and wants to be one. Her fertility problems are making her extremely frustrated, depressed, and angry at you.

• Your BFF is a merry mother of six and you have no desire to even be a mother of one. When you're together, she never stops talking about her brood.

• You and your BFF both have children but they are at different ages or stages (And one of hers is a biter).

• You and your BFF have vastly different views on child-rearing. You're permissive and believe in letting kids be kids. She believes in turning children into little adults.

• Your children and/or spouse don't get along with your BFF's children and/or spouse. When her son punched yours in the nose, her husband said your son provoked him.

• On a practical level, all other things being equal, you have less discretionary time for friendships than high-school or college-age women, married women without children, and older women. With all your responsibilities, you barely have time to shower.

• You are a mother-martyr who places the needs of your children and family above your own social needs.

• You have fewer opportunities to meet new friends than you did when you were younger and more care-free---you only go to noisy, active places with children where it's hard to have heart-to-heart conversations.

At different times of our lives, there are real shifts in the number and nature of our female friendships. Living in a dorm, you may have been surrounded by a circle of close female friends. For one or more of the reasons mentioned above, motherhood is one of those times when you might have more than your share of problems making or maintaining female friendships.

Many of us spend so much time juggling our roles as daughters, wives, workers, caregivers, and mothers that we wake up one morning and suddenly realize we have a serious friendship deficit! We think: If only there was someone we could call---or have coffee with---who could understand the gaping hole it has left.

This Mother's Day, give yourself a little gift that no one else would ever think of. Jot down an appointment on your calendar to have lunch with a friend, or to have a girl's night out. It's the equivalent of putting on your own oxygen mask first.

Taking small steps to build female friendships enhances our own physical and emotional well-being, and makes us better mothers in the long-run.

I hereby proclaim February 29th, 2008 as the first Make Time for Friends Day. There are no commercial aspects to the day that you need to worry about. You don’t have to buy cards, send gifts or spend money. You have received the gift of extra time and are free to use it wisely. Let me suggest how:

At various times in our lives, we have more or less time and need for our female friends. Women who are single, divorced, widowed, or retired tend to have more discretionary time than women who are involved in marriage, child-rearing or heavily invested in their careers. Of course, most research looks at groups and talks about averages rather than individuals so these trends certainly don’t apply to every woman. There are many women who are married, raising their brood, or working---who are wise enough to make female friendships a priority in their lives.

However, looking at the trends, you might easily ask: How will women have any friends when they get divorced, become widowed, or decide to retire, if they don’t make efforts to maintain those friendships beforehand? You are absolutely correct in posing that question because research suggests that single women who forgo marriage are more likely to retain their close friendships over the long haul. In a recent post on her blog on the The Huffington Post, social psychologist Bella DePaulo and author of Singled Out states that based on scientific research on loneliness in later life, “…No group is likely to be less lonely in their senior years than women who have always been single.”

I think I have one answer to reconcile the gap for those at-risk: This year, 2008, is a leap or intercalary year. That means that an extra day has been added to the calendar, Friday the 29th, to synchronize the calendar year with the solar year.

This extra day is a perfect time for Make Time for Friends Day. All you very busy multi-tasking women (me among them), take out your Blackberry, Palm, or conventional paper daybook or calendar and give yourself that extra day, February 29th, to catch up with one or more female friends---old or new--- who you’ve not had time to be with.

Take the leap and do it now! Think about the significance of friendships to your well-being, physical, emotional, and spiritual---and give yourself the gift of time with friends. My suspicion is that you may decide that one day every four years isn’t enough---and that it may become a habit.

If you ask two friends to describe how they became Besties, they usually say “we just clicked.”

That certainly is the case for Sal Henley Kibler and Mari Maseng Will, now both 53 years old, who first met at freshman orientation at the University of South Carolina. They pledged the same sorority and roomed together from their sophomore year on. “Maybe we were drawn to each other because we were the tallest women we had ever met,” jokes Mari. (At 6 feet she is just two inches taller than Sal.)

Turning an instant friendship into a lasting one requires time and effort but Sal and Mari have been able to maintain their relationship over the years by playing the game: golf. “We are God parents for each other’s children and seem to go through life’s twists and turns pretty much at the same time,” says Sal. Despite living states apart, their shared love of golf has helped them stay connected and remain close to one another.

“Our playing ebbs and flows with the time available since we are both trying to work, raise children and spend time with our husbands,” says Mari, who lives in Washington, D.C.

“We started playing golf about five years ago, once our kids got to be tweens and our careers were a little more established,” says Sal. Now the women try to play together at least once every six weeks, although it doesn’t always work out that way.

Like most women, they find it hard to justify time away for themselves. “We are getting better at that, though,” says Mari. “Our common interest erases the miles, and the years,” she says. “We laugh all the way across the course and it feels good. Women need their community of women friends to lean on. Golf provides opportunities to be together and hours of time to talk and laugh – in the outdoors and at beautiful settings. The game is all about the golfer and the course--- at that moment. There’s no room in your head for work pressures, science projects and what you’re going to do about dinner.”

Both women place a high priority on their friendship. They realize that no matter how hard they try---their work, children and families are never going to be perfect---so they might as well have fun. “Our colleagues, our children and our husbands seem to be happier when we are,” says Mari.

Sal Henley Kibler is publisher of momseasychair.com, an online magazine and community for women who also happen to be moms. She has held executive positions at several leading advertising agencies in Atlanta, and ran her own marketing consulting firm. Mari Maseng Will was a speech writer for President Reagan and served as his last communications director. She ran corporate relations for a worldwide consumer products company, and served as press secretary and then communications director in Bob Dole’s Presidential campaigns. Today she runs her own business consulting with major corporations, industry groups and non-profit organizations.

It’s so easy to make resolutions and so hard to keep them. Every year, women resolve to lose weight, reduce stress, work smarter, and improve their relationships with family and friends.

I thought a little more specificity might help clarify my Friendship Resolutions (and yours) and make them more concrete and achievable. Here goes:

1) Get real

Don’t expect all of your friendships to last forever

2) Don’t settle for one BFF

Surround yourself with a number of synergistic relationships

3) Get rid of toxic friendships

If a friendship consistently drains you, brings you down, makes you nervous, or makes you angry, it is not worth keeping.

4) Don’t be a toxic friend

Don’t be too needy. Listen as much as you talk. Don’t expect any one friend to fulfill all your needs.

5) Reach back

There is no substitute for shared history. With the internet and low-cost cell phone calls, there’s no reason to not reconnect with significant friends from your past.

6) Prepare for your future

Continually work at making new friends. As we grow and mature, we need to replenish our stock to keep our friendships fresh and vital.

7) Don’t be threatened by the internet

Virtual friendships on MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn don’t undermine friendships. Rather, they can enhance old friendships and create new ones.

8) Just do it

There is no substitute for setting aside time for your friendships and the payoff is worthwhile. Don’t just talk about getting together. Mark you calendar.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Now we call it “snail mail.” For those of us who were born in the slice of time after telephones and fax machines---and before email, IMs, and text messages---writing a letter was a common way to stay in touch with family and friends across the miles...

Carole* (who prefers to use a pseudonym) is a 40-something career woman who works in the area of information technology. It’s no surprise that the internet has become one of her favorite playgrounds for making friends.

In this candid interview, Carole shares her own experience with online friendships and makes some insightful comparisons between these and offline ones...

 

 

They can be. Here are several possible scenarios that can set the stage for fractured friendships.

• Your best friend is single and sparks are flying between you and a new guy who promises to be a keeper. You used to spend many hours each week doing girl things together with your friend, commiserating over how hard it was to meet someone like him. Now that you found him, your friendship time is more limited...
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