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By Root 590 0

different kinds of friends. My friends have values, passions, and even early traumas in common, but they’re not all alike. With a few I can talk about face-lifts and curtains. A few are immeasurably intense and make me feel downright sluggish in comparison, but they inspire me to expand my horizons and my heart. Three of my friends have rich spiritual lives. One is a Zen priest, one a reverend and a sexologist (a useful combination to have in a friend!). Paula Weinstein is my film-producing friend of more than thirty years who always housed me when I was single and in Los Angeles. Whenever anything is physically wrong with me, she will do the research to find the right doctor and actually go with me to the appointment to make sure I ask the right questions. I’m her daughter’s godmother; she’s a surrogate mom to my two offspring, the one they can go to for an unending supply of advice and a wise referee when the family needs one. She’s the one who made me cut my hair and get Vera Wang to design a special dress for my reappearance as a presenter at the 2000 Academy Awards when I was under a bushel from the Ted separation, too down to think about hair and ready to wear an old number from ten years before. Many moons can pass without my seeing Paula, but when we do reconnect, right off the bat we drill down to an intense, subterranean level, as though no time has elapsed. Actually, that is true of all my women friends. I’ve had this with a few men, and I know it’s possible because two of my friends say they have emotionally intimate friendships with men. It’s far rarer, though.

With pal Wanda Sykes at the opening of Monster-in-Law.

KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES

With Pat Kingsley on the set of Georgia Rule.

For intimacy, men tend to rely on their significant other, which is why married men seem to do better and live longer, healthier lives than their unmarried counterparts. Because women form broader networks of friends, they do better following divorce or widowhood than men do.

The late Dr. Robert Butler, founding director of the International Longevity Center, told me, “We may have the old boys’ network that helps us get jobs, but we don’t have the same capacity for intimacy, for dealing with grief or dealing with the kinds of issues women are much more gifted at dealing with.”

Gloria Steinem visiting me backstage at 33 Variations in Los Angeles in 2011.

All people come into the world as relational beings, but from early on, many if not most men are conditioned to split off from their feelings and find their identity in dominance and independence rather than nurturing and community. I read somewhere that “men especially fear that becoming ‘we’ will erase his ‘I,’ his sense of self.” For most women, their “I” has always been a little porous, whereas women’s “we” has been their saving grace.

What psychologists have discovered since the 1970s is that love and nurturing relationships are at the core of human development. In Toward a New Psychology of Women, Dr. Jean Baker Miller writes: “All of living and all of development takes place only within relationships.”2 The psychologist Carol Gilligan has said that relationships are the “oxygen of the psyche.” Babies die in the absence of attachment. Adults cannot remain stable without outside human contact. All the longitudinal studies on aging show that a key ingredient to doing it successfully is the mutually meaningful giving and receiving of care and nurturing.

In his book Love and Survival, Dean Ornish reports that people without loving family, friends, or community are three to five times more likely to die prematurely. Dr. Gene Cohen writes, “Loneliness … is associated with a range of adverse health effects, including slower recovery from coronary artery bypass surgery, more office visits to physicians, poorer dental health, and a greater likelihood of nursing home admission. Thus the positive impact of social networks on the health of the mind, body, and brain in late life can be profound.”3 A University of Michigan study reports that feeling close to someone increases