The Girlfriends Game

They’ve got colleagues, assistants and yes men (and women) at their fingertips. But even women at the top need girlfriends.

By Tiffany Davis

A year ago, when I took on the full-time, girl-about-town job that I’d always longed for, I was a woman on a mission. My explicit job – breaking news on undiscovered trends, artists and dining spots across town – was simple.

The social hurdles I set for myself? Not so much. At parties and elsewhere, I sought out dozens of women with whom I had things in common: professionally, generationally, intellectually. I always, always, made a point of “keeping in touch.”

Then something funny happened. A longtime close girlfriend, someone I’d kept in loose touch with since high school, bought a place a few miles from mine. Going through the usual socio-professional motions, I invited her over. I arranged to have my current beau there, too, and preplanned plenty of interesting things for us to talk about when she showed up.

After we exchanged pleasantries, had dinner and completed my talking points, my boyfriend went out for a smoke. He found us 20 minutes later, bawling and embracing on the floor, our laptop bags primly occupying our empty spots on the couch. Not a martini between us, yet we’d managed to get drunk off of reconnecting.

Lesson learned: I’d been so busy working on work – pursuing the surface-only interaction of “keeping in touch” – that I hadn’t worked much on having actual friendships at all. In fact, I’d forgotten why I needed them so badly.

And that got me thinking: What is it exactly that women get from their friendships that can’t be found anywhere else? How do you know when you’ve found it? And how do women at the top of their game – some who’ve been at this career thing longer, and harder, than I have and have a lot more life to balance – maneuver this whole girlfriend thing?

Fran-Systems Worldwide CEO Karen Spencer has some answers. Two decades into balancing life as a single mom and corporate consultant for franchises like Arby’s, The Original Cookie Co. and Jamba Juice, she’s accumulated a lot of connections –colleagues, clients, competitors, you name it. But she learned to define real friendship after a best friend she’d known since high school called to announce her daughter’s engagement – then followed up with a less-friendly announcement when a preoccupied Spencer proved AWOL.

“She told me, ‘I love you, but you’re a lousy friend,'” Spencer recalls. “‘I don’t care what’s going on with you for once. My daughter’s getting married, and I need you.'”

At the time, Spencer didn’t take it so well, but they laugh about it now. In fact, Spencer says that after years of networking and boardrooming, it was one of the most valuable things anyone has ever told her.

“She was right,” she chuckles. “I needed to hear that. Only a real ally, someone who has nothing to gain or lose but you, would talk to me like that.”

Laurie Tucker, the Memphis-based senior vice president of corporate marketing for FedEx, refers to girlfriends as her “anchors.” “As professional women, we spend so much of our time anticipating the next move, the next issue, the next problem,” Tucker says. “An anchor back to the world beyond work is what keeps you grounded. That’s a friend.”

Though Tucker has managed to maintain one such relationship since age 5, some of her closest girlfriends are co-workers. Describing them, she doesn’t use career clichés or cite motives like “team-building” and “professional growth.” Instead she launches into how they were there for her when she found herself on a business trip with news that her brother had died suddenly.

“By the time I’d gotten back into town, what some people might call my ‘work friends’ and my ‘life friends’ had already connected with each other,” Tucker says. “They knew my family and husband and had already gone to check on them.”

The episode proved to Tucker that close girlfriends – so often our refuge from the daily grind of work – don’t necessarily have to exist outside the office. “It scares me a little that someone would feel they had to look outside of that world,” she says. “I mean, it’s so enriching. We can coach, mentor, support and advise all at the same time.”

Joanne Smith and Jamie Jewell – vice president of marketing and senior vice president, in-flight service and global product development, respectively, for Delta Air Lines – share just such a bond that spans work and life. Any chance meeting at the office can spur a rapid-fire conversation that takes for granted details about siblings, children and husbands. They can exchange smirks with one another during stuffed-shirt business trip dinners, or even gush over Jon Bon Jovi (more like teenagers than executives) after he participated in a recent Delta event.

But there’s something else. They’re genuinely impressed by one another.

“Out of 4,000-plus people who I met within months of transferring to Jamie’s department, I remember thinking how warm a spirit she had,” Smith says. “She seemed like such a cool, easy person to know.” Trustworthy, emotionally open relationships like that are priceless, she adds, no matter where they’re found.

“A real woman first – then an executive,” Jewell says. “That’s how I see Joanne, and I hope that’s how she sees me.”

Nicole Lapin, an East Coast correspondent for CNN Headline News, has spent the better part of her life crossing the country on assignment, but when she sits down to talk about her best friend, L.A.-based designer Alison Muh, she couldn’t agree more with Jewell.

“She’s just as committed to her career as I am,” Lapin says. “Even though we work in different fields, there are so many synergistic ways that having a friendship like that works.”

When no other source of strength will do, check-in phone calls from Muh have steadied Lapin for her investigative reporter ventures into crack houses. They’ve also braced her against shallow news-blog flak about Lapin’s appearance or twentysomething age. “We have a saying: ‘Use your invincible shield,'” Lapin says.

Then, putting it simply: “She makes my job – and my life – just better.”

Girlfriends Guide

Data from PINK Conferences indicates that spending time with girlfriends is the No. 1 way powerful women relieve stress. Are you getting the good medicine? Linda Burzynski, president and CEO of girlfriend haven Liberty Fitness, lays out some strategies for developing deep friendships of your own.

The Basics. It sounds silly, but intimidation is a big reason women don’t speak up when they spot potential friendships. Says Burzynski: “My aha moment came when I realized that every other woman was thinking the same thing about me that I was thinking about them.”

The Rules. Think of friendships as investments. The returns equal what you’ve put in. “Choose new friends carefully and be willing to spend time getting to know them.”

The Litmus Test. Hold friends to a higher standard that you would even your best professional or social acquaintance. “Ask yourself: If I lost everything tomorrow and was on the street, who would pick me up and not just take me to a shelter but would take me home, believe in me and not let me give up on myself? That’s a real friend.”

The Perks. Friendship comes with priceless rewards. “Lots of people can say, ‘I know her from going to this synagogue or church.’ But the fact that I’ve always wanted to drive a yellow ’70s Porsche? That I love crunching down on a caramel apple at Estes Park? Only girlfriends know good stuff like that.”

This article originally appeared in the August.September 2007 issue of PINK Magazine.