Friendship Matters: How to Transform Your Life Through the Power of Friendship

By Karen Riddell

Transform Your Life Through the Power of Friendship

We live in a world where loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions, and millions of women are suffering. The good news? There is a proven antidote.

In Friendship Matters, Karen Riddell presents a wealth of data unequivocally showing the power of friendship to dramatically improve the quality of every aspect of your life. While many women find making friends daunting, Friendships Matters is brimming with simple, specific steps and practical tools that will guide you to find, build, and maintain genuine friendships.

Friendship Matters offers:

—Five Steps to Preparing Mentally
—Fifteen Surefire Places to Find Friends
—Eight Techniques to Make the Most of Relationships
—A Workbook to Create Your Personalized Plan

Using her life lessons and interviews with thousands of women who shared their authentic experiences, Karen Riddell demonstrates just how easy it can be to positively transform your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664147812

Karen Riddell

Karen Riddell is a certified positive psychology life coach, motivational speaker, lawyer, community volunteer, and writer with a passion for friendship.

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Copyright © 2021 by Karen Riddell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 12/15/2020

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

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To my beloved husband, Steve,

and my precious daughters—Maggie, Ashley, and Annie.

They are the four chambers of my heart.

This day and every day, our family will be my shelter,

and your hearts and arms will be my home.

And for my mother, Mary Ann, whose life

gives meaning to these pages.

CONTENTS

Preface

PART 1:   THE BIOLOGY OF FEMALE FRIENDSHIP

Chapter 1:     The Magical Friendship Molecule

Chapter 2:     Living Longer and Stronger

Chapter 3:     Mental Health and Happiness

PART 2:   AMAZING RIPPLE EFFECTS

Chapter 4:     Fueled Love Connections

Chapter 5:     Increased Parenting Power

Chapter 6:     Supercharged Careers

PART 3:   PREPARING MENTALLY

Chapter 7:     Acknowledging the Hard Stuff

Chapter 8:     Actively Pursuing Happiness

Chapter 9:     Believe and You Shall Receive

Chapter 10:   Stay Positive and Be Proactive

Chapter 11:   Attract Success

PART 4:   FINDING NEW FRIENDSHIPS

Chapter 12:   Match Your Actions to Your Attitude

Chapter 13:   The Beauty of Groups

Chapter 14:   Fifteen Surefire Places to Find Friends

Chapter 15:   Creating a Crew

PART 5   MAKING THE MOST OF RELATIONSHIPS

Chapter 16:   Connect, Cheer, and Commit

Chapter 17:   Converse, Coordinate, and Celebrate

Chapter 18:   Collect the Details

Chapter 19:   Prioritize

Conclusion

PREFACE

I have a passion for friendship. It all started on a neighborhood playground in Atlanta. It isn’t what you might think. I wasn’t a little girl who formed close friendships while climbing on the jungle gym with other little girls. In fact, it was the opposite.

It was 1991, and I was a thirty-year-old woman who, until recently, had enjoyed a challenging law practice. As a young litigator, I had been learning the ropes from veteran trial attorneys. Writing briefs, taking depositions, and sitting second chair on trials kept my mind fully engaged and intellectually pumping. I was married to a fellow litigator, and we were working hard and, frankly, loving it. Life just got better as we welcomed our first child, a precious baby girl.

Over the next couple of years, however, my world got much more complicated. I felt overwhelmed as I juggled the pressure-filled life of a trial attorney with motherhood and a second pregnancy. I felt battered as I weathered several major family health emergencies and my father’s sudden death at age 56. I grew increasingly frustrated because I wasn’t doing anything as well as I wanted to. I tried working part-time at the law firm, but that didn’t significantly improve the situation: my hours were still long, but I made significantly less money. I found myself crying in the car every day on the way home from work.

Then my second daughter was born in May 1991, and all the stress I had experienced seemed to magically melt away during my maternity leave. It felt like I had entered an enchanted land with two cherubic baby faces looking up at me and no catastrophes plaguing us. I decided to stay in that sacred space, quit the job I loved, and brave the life of a full-time mom.

Now back to that playground. I have vivid memories of this time because I spent lots of it stationed behind two swings of a very large swing set in our neighborhood park. Right-hand push. Yes, two girls. Left-hand push. Oh yes, close together—just seventeen months apart. Right-hand push. Yours? The conversation inevitably progressed over the same well-worn ground: our children’s names, where we lived, how they slept, their pacifier habits, and how I managed to get the oldest to keep a bow in her hair. After a while, it felt like my brain was turning into the mush I was feeding my babies.

The real problem, however, was that I was lonely. Every friend I had in town was a lawyer, and all of them were still wearing their suits and carrying their briefcases. I had flown out of their orbit. They were drafting complicated provisions in hundred-page corporate merger documents, and I was laser-focused on the relative efficacies of various diaper rash creams. The only thing we still had in common was a frightening reliance on copious amounts of caffeine.

I felt certain that the other women I was running into at the park were multifaceted, vitally interesting women, but I could not seem to meaningfully connect with them. All our conversations seemed to center on baby sleep schedules and behaviors. As time passed, I realized that I had to do something. I was lonely. I needed new friends badly.

So I summoned my courage and took a step. For months I had been noticing pictures in the neighborhood newspaper of smiling groups of women doing volunteer activities for our local children’s hospital. I care about children’s health, and I wanted to be part of one of those grinning groups. There was a number. I called. A kind voice told me that indeed there was a group of volunteers in my neighborhood and she would have one of them call me.

Before I knew it, a petite brunette named Michelle was picking me up in a red Volvo station wagon for an evening meeting at a nearby Mexican restaurant. When I returned home three hours later, exhausted and exhilarated, my husband asked hopefully, How did it go? I replied, Well, I am not sure exactly what the organization does—lots of neighborhood fundraising and hospital service projects—but Michelle and I really hit it off, and we are going to chair the group next year!

I had made just one phone call, and now I had a new friend, a group of women whose company I enjoyed, and a regular date to do something that was important to me. And so it began. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am a person who lives by the philosophy that if a little is good, then a lot must be incredible. In short order, I found a weekly playgroup, a monthly supper club, and a cooking co-op with four other women from the neighborhood. Within a year, I wasn’t lonely anymore. I didn’t realize it then, but I was becoming a serial joiner, and boy, was I reaping the benefits.

And it continued. Over the next thirty years, I joined an investment club, two garden clubs, two book clubs, several Bible studies, a writers’ group, a series of bridge groups, a giving circle, and a veggie co-op. Although I was hardly an athlete while growing up, I have been in a running group, a circuit-training group, several walking groups, and on numerous tennis teams. For a while, some friends and I even spent a couple of hours each week rowing skinny little shells on the Chattahoochee River and being periodically yelled at by a bare-chested, six-foot-five Bulgarian trainer in spandex shorts named Chavdar.

From preschool through college, my children’s schools provided fertile earth for joining groups of women. I have been on umpteen school committees and boards—from room mom to parents’ association president and every job in between. Suffice it to say that my children were never surprised to glimpse me working on something with other mothers in the halls, front office, snack bar, some conference room, or even the maintenance shed at their schools. Over the years, I have been actively involved in the community, volunteering with lots of nonprofits heavily populated by women, and I even ran a clothing business with a girlfriend. No matter what I was doing, I was building relationships with wonderful women.

About ten years ago, as my three daughters began heading off on their own adventures in college and beyond, I started to contemplate what I would do with the next phase of my life. I began by thinking about the things I had done since I stopped practicing law. First, I focused on the activities and organizations I had been devoted to, but then I began to focus on the relationships. While I love my husband dearly, I realized there are significant things that I draw uniquely from my friendships.

Soon, like a newly pregnant woman who begins noticing pregnant women everywhere, I started noticing articles about friendship, hearing women talk about their enduring friendships, and watching the impacts those relationships had in the lives of the women around me. With three teenage daughters, I had daily opportunities to see the beauties—and the beasts—of female friendship.

At that point, I got intellectually interested. I began to discover academic research about the concrete health benefits of friendship—actual physical benefits like improved cardiovascular health and increased chances of surviving cancer. I unearthed study after study by psychologists, neurologists, neuroscientists, endocrinologists, molecular biologists, epidemiologists, and sociologists. Each one led to another, and I soon found myself filling notebooks and bookshelves. Before I knew it, I had fallen down a rabbit hole, utterly entranced.

What I learned was nothing short of amazing. The research showed that friendship can stave off aging, illness, major diseases, and death. It showed that friendship can make you a more engaged romantic partner, a more calm and resourceful parent, and a more connected family member. It showed that friendship can send your career soaring. I soon realized the research showed unequivocally that friendship has the power to positively transform every major facet of a woman’s life.

Excited by my findings, I decided to conduct some research of my own. I wanted to see the glowing faces of women who had experienced the miraculous effects of friendship and hear their lilting voices tell their stories. And so I started interviewing women, talking to them about a desperate time when a friend got them through their bleakest hour or an inspired connection when a friend pushed them to achieve beyond their wildest dreams.

I spoke to my family members, acquaintances, friends, and the relatives of those friends. The women spoke of joy and laughter and playful behavior. They spoke of friendships that brought trust and validation, security and peace, and hope and comfort. They described friendships that were glorious, life-giving, and life-sustaining.

The early interviews soon led to a formal survey. I forwarded it to over a hundred women of all ages and backgrounds and asked them to send it on to a variety of women in their lives. The survey—which probed for detailed information about the number, duration, and quality of their friendships and the roles that friends play in their lives—zipped untold miles through cyberspace, and countless women took the time to share their stories with me.

From nineteen to ninety-one years old, women from all parts of the country and from varied walks of life, races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds told me about how and where they met their friends, what activities they do together, and what their friends mean to them. They told me about the friendship groups they are in. Each told me about times that her friends changed the course of her life.

I was humbled and awed by what I heard and by what I had learned. It was crystal clear that what makes us both healthy and happy is social connection. Honestly, I felt I had no choice but to share this incredible message. I decided to write this book and begin spreading the word any way I could to anyone who would listen. Friendship had become my cause.

But all of that was truthfully only half of the story because my research uncovered something else—something truly tragic: Friendship is in danger. Its nemesis, loneliness, is at an all-time high and rising, reaching what experts are calling epidemic proportions. I found research showing that the number of people who have no one, not a single person, to confide in tripled over the last twenty years to a staggering 25 percent. Roughly 20 percent of our population, more than 60 million people, feel isolated to the point that they consider it to be a major source of unhappiness in their lives. We have a third fewer friends than we did twenty years ago, and as adults, the time we spend with our friends has fallen to less than 10 percent of our free time.

More than 42 million American adults over 45 suffer from chronic loneliness. And as prevalent as the pain of loneliness seems to be for older Americans, the statistics reveal it is even more widespread among young people aged 18 to 22, making them the loneliest generation. One study of millennial women found that 42 percent were more afraid of loneliness than a cancer diagnosis.

And for every academic article delineating how social support can transport us to health, security, contentment, and joy, I was devastated to discover two more detailing how isolation and loneliness lead to searing unhappiness and dire mental and physical illness. Even worse, loneliness is linked to death, and the correlation isn’t tangential or insubstantial—it’s direct and exponential.

Loneliness has a greater impact on health than smoking two packs of cigarettes a day and being obese. Loneliness alters the way our genes express themselves and the way our brains function. It reduces our ability to ward off disease. It leads to strokes, heart attacks, and fast-acting cancers, and then it compromises the immune system’s ability to fight back. It can lead to depression, personality disorders and psychoses, decreased cognitive ability, and suicide. Loneliness increases the risk of death by 50 percent from all causes and the chance of developing dementia by 64 percent.

It quickly became obvious to me that loneliness is a virulent, devastating force crippling our society. I could clearly see that our country was in the midst of a friendship crisis—with a huge portion of our population missing out on the psychological and physical benefits that friendship affords.

As an eternal optimist (given the nickname Sunshine as a child), I was extremely unsettled by this alarming research. I really wanted to gloss over it and just spread the cheerful message of friendship, like handing out daisies. But then I thought about how my life’s course had been affected by loneliness, and I knew I couldn’t ignore this dismal reality. You see, throughout my life, I have had a secret that has been known only by my family and a handful of close friends.

I described my battle with loneliness as a stay-at-home mom with two young children. Now, I will tell you about my mother’s experience.

My parents grew up on Long Island. They met in high school and fell in love. They went to different colleges but continued dating and got married while my father was getting his PhD. My mother kept a scrapbook of those years, and it is full of happy pictures. Soon, my older brother was born. They had an active group of friends, and they went to lots of dances, sporting events, and parties.

However, after my brother was born, my mother began to notice that she was having an extremely hard time being her usual bubbly and upbeat self. She didn’t understand it, but her whole outlook felt like it had shifted. She looked at her life and wanted to feel joy in her marriage and new motherhood, but she felt like she was shrouded in darkness.

Soon my mother learned she was pregnant with me, and then, after he finished up his doctorate program, my father got a job as an associate professor in a respected chemical engineering department at a large university. The only problem was that the job was in the South, and they had no connections, family, or friends anywhere near their new home.

Although it is clear now that my mother was suffering from postpartum depression, this was a long time ago, and no one really knew what it was or understood it. Sadly, it got increasingly worse after I was born. By now, my mother was living in a new town with an infant and a toddler, and because my dad had taken a research job in another city to tide the family over financially until the fall when his classes would start, she was struggling to manage everything basically all by herself. She felt desperately alone.

Unfortunately, it was more than she could handle. Sadly, while collecting the mail for an out-of-town neighbor, my mother got access to a gun, and she committed suicide—a casualty of mental suffering and loneliness.

As a mom, I cannot imagine how desperate she must have felt to make that choice.

Knowing what I know now, I wonder if something different would have happened if my mother had made friends through the neighborhood the way I did, joined a support group for new mothers, or just made one close friend that she could turn to.

The tragedy of my mother’s death and the knowledge that so many others in our society suffer from loneliness fired my passion to share what I had learned. Work on this book began about ten years ago, and throughout that decade, the state of loneliness has been dismal and worsening. And that was before the coronavirus pandemic.

Now we are in uncharted waters. In the modern world, we have never experienced anything like the current prolonged state of isolation and distancing. In addition to devastating economic effects and concurring social justice upheaval, we are facing a global mental health crisis. At the time of this publication, infections and death tolls are still at an alarming level, and we have no way of knowing when this crisis will be resolved on a widespread basis.

What we do know is that there will be deep scars from this plague, and many of them will be to our mental health and well-being. This time has brought relentless social isolation compounded by fear, anxiety, uncertainty, disappointment, grief, and anger. Constricted spaces and inequitable access to resources have worsened the conditions markedly for many. Being stripped of our usual support systems and thrust into new, unwelcome roles have put additional pressure on all our relationships. If there was ever a time when we needed friendship, the time is now.

So it is with fervent conviction that I tell you that friendship matters. Its transformative powers can change your life and, yes, even save your life. A big claim, I know, but it is the total truth.

There are many reasons you may have chosen to read this book. Everyone’s situation is unique. If you picked it up because you are looking for new friendships, you will find tools and approaches that will fit your personality comfortably, regardless of where you fall on the spectrum from introvert to extrovert, your age, your interests, or your friendship history. Together we will devise a plan that fits your life with clear action steps that will build your social network, replacing any loneliness you are experiencing with health and happiness. Alternatively, if you want to enrich your current relationships, you will find simple yet impactful techniques that you can easily meld into your daily life. These tools will help you develop and maintain authentic, deep connections that will bring long-lasting joy.

Now that you know what this book will do for you, let me clarify its focus. This book is about female friendship. Luckily, we are blessed with lots of other forms of friendship, including friendships with men, friendships with family members, and friendships that are mixed with romance. And for couples, there