Pal Power

By MEGAN RUTHERFORD

Lotte Prager owes her life, and much of the happiness she has enjoyed during her 81 years, to friends. It was friends who helped her escape Nazi Germany in 1937 by paying her first year's tuition at a British teaching college. Then friends at the college helped her get her relatives, including her parents, out of Germany. Following her move to the U.S., Prager met her husband-to-be at a party given by other friends, and after her husband died and her children had grown up, yet another friend helped her find an apartment in New York City. Retired from her career as a social worker, Prager now relies on friends for companionship and the comfort of knowing, as she says simply, that "they will do for me and I will do for them."

Prager's saga may be dramatic, but there is a growing body of evidence that a rich social network may play a life-enhancing, even lifesaving role, particularly as we age. In study after study, researchers have found that people who have strong social relationships live longer--and happier--lives. In a recent study of 2,800 people 65 and older in New Haven, Conn., for example, Carlos Mendes de Leon, at the Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, found that those who had more friends were less likely to become disabled and more likely to recover if they did suffer a period of disability. In an earlier study of 11,000 people 65 and older, Teresa Seeman, now at the UCLA School of Medicine, found that, over a five-year period, those with no ties to others were two to three times as likely to die as those with bonds to spouses, friends, relatives, churches and other organizations. Other studies have found that people with narrower social networks are more likely to have a heart attack--and to die afterward--while people with more social contacts are less likely to suffer cognitive decline.

Why are good relationships so good for our health? Seeman suggests two mechanisms. The first is behavioral: family and friends encourage loved ones to eat better, consume less alcohol, curb tobacco use, exercise and seek medical care. Second, good relationships appear to enhance actual physical well-being. In experiments, the presence of a friend decreased physiological stress responses in subjects performing difficult mental tasks, whereas unsupportive social situations increased them.

Though friends and family are frequently lumped together in research measuring the link between health and social support, they are distinct and separate in real life. The chief difference? "You choose your friends, but you're stuck with your family" is how an adolescent might put it. That's good news and bad news for friendship. "Friends don't make the demands that family members do. Friends generally won't be asked to give money or nursing care," says sociologist Jan Yager, author of Friendshifts. "They are probably going to mainly have fun together." On the other hand, she notes, "because it's optional, friendship can be withdrawn more easily than family relationships."

Paradoxically, the optional nature of friendship, which makes it more fragile than family ties, may increase its value. "Friendship contributes more to people's happiness in old age than their family relationships do," says Rebecca Adams, sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "If we don't like our friends, we terminate the relationships or let them fade, so the ones we're left with are often fairly positive compared with family relationships, which we can't terminate." Furthermore, we tend to feel more gratitude for a friend's kindness than for a relative's. "If a family member comes over to help us when we're sick, we feel they did what they were supposed to do," says Adams. "But if a friend does the same thing, we consider it above and beyond the call of duty."

While families are finite, friends are a renewable resource, which is fortunate given the odds against sustaining a friendship. The career-building years can entail repeated moves that result in separations from friends. In midlife, the competing claims of work and child rearing can force friendship onto the back burner. Then there's divorce, which divides spouses not only from each other but often from the friends they once held in common. When we retire, the migration to the Sunbelt takes a toll both on those who leave and those who remain behind. Finally, as we age, our social networks can be further eroded by disabilities--our own and those of our friends-- and, saddest of all, by death.

Though the number of friends may dwindle as we age, it seems our pleasure in them grows. Reason: "People become more selective and get better at knowing the kind of people they like and don't like," says Stanford psychology professor Laura Carstensen. "And they steer away from those they don't care for."

Women tend to have more close friends than men do. "In order to be close to someone, you have to admit your weaknesses," explains Adams. "That's more difficult for men to do, because they tend to be very competitive." Women may need more friends, since they are more likely than men to be single in old age. That's partly because they have a longer life expectancy and tend to marry men older than themselves. Indeed, among people 85 and older, women outnumber men 5 to 2. For Anne Anderson, 72, a single, childless New Yorker, friends fill in for the family she lacks. "Friends help you through the bad times and make good times better," she says.

Both men and women need friendship but approach it differently. Women tend to engage in "face-to-face" interactions, in which they meet specifically to talk, often about personal concerns. Men tend to favor "side-by-side" relationships, in which conversation, which may be casual, occurs in the course of participating in a common activity. James R. Erlenbaugh, 65, a truck driver in suburban Chicago, is typical in that regard. He chats with his three best buddies as they fish, ride motorcycles and attend sports events together. It's the togetherness that matters. "I don't know what I'd do without my friends," he says. "It'd be a doggone lonely world without them."

It's important to recognize that living in a lonely world is not an inevitable result of growing older. Indeed, old people are less likely to express loneliness than younger people, according to Carstensen. Therefore, if an elderly person is lonely, the cause is likely to be circumstances rather than age. And circumstances can often be modified.

Prevention is the best medicine for loneliness. "Make sure you grow old surrounded by people who know you and care about you--and that you care about," says Carstensen. That means actively maintaining friendships by frequent contact throughout life (see box).

It can also mean staying put. Postretirement moves can sever even the best of friendships, so seniors and their families are wise to weigh the social costs of relocating against the advantages of living near relatives. Thus far, Bill Boergerhoff, 78, a retired meatcutter in Villa Park, Ill., has resisted his daughter's pleas that he move to California to be closer to her. "I don't know anybody out there," he says. "Here, when I walk into the grocery store, at least 10 people say, 'Hi.'" Then there are his friends at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post, with whom he gathers every day to drink coffee and joke around. "What's going to replace all that in California?" he asks.

When friends are separated, staying in touch by phone or mail is an important stopgap, but to keep a friendship vibrant, there's no substitute for being there, at least from time to time. Says Friendshifts author Yager: "If you watch children and teenagers, you see that we knew what to do when we were younger. You hung out with friends and did stuff together. It's important to share experiences, to create memories, to bond the relationship. You're not going to say in 10 years, 'Remember that great phone conversation we had?' or 'Remember those wonderful e-mails we exchanged?'"

When loneliness sets in, for whatever reason, it's wise to take the initiative in restocking the reservoir of friends. "The best source of new friends is old friends," says Sandy Sheehy, author of Connecting, an examination of female intimacy. High school and college reunions draw people who share a common past--and who may be eager to share a common future. Similarly, looking up old roommates and colleagues can reignite a friendship.

Joining groups that pursue hobbies and interests similar to your own takes some of the self-consciousness out of friend seeking and provides a pool of like-minded people to befriend. When Frances Wong Chan, 78, a divorced retiree, moved from Washington to San Francisco 13 years ago to help care for her daughter's children, she didn't know a soul there outside her family. With no old friends in the city to reconnect with, she took the next best route. She joined the Unitarian Church, a book club, a co-counseling group, an investor's club, a senior center, even a Japanese singles club--though she herself is ethnic Chinese. "I guess I'm a groupie," she says with a laugh. "I look for activities I enjoy and hope I'll meet some kindred spirits."

Our culture ill prepares us for retirement--and the abrupt end of daily interaction with people who share a collective enterprise with us--but there are ways to continue meaningful communal activity. "The media's appeal to the self-interest of older people by saying 'Now's the time to play golf, have good sex, go on a cruise' is demeaning," says Msgr. Charles Fahey, professor of aging studies at Fordham University in New York City. "Friendships occur within the context of doing significant things, pursuing visions and dreams."

Geriatrician Linda Fried, director of the Center on Aging and Health at Johns Hopkins, noticed over the years that some of her retired patients suffered not only from loneliness but also from loss of self-worth. To address those problems, she and her colleagues developed a novel program called Experience Corps, which trains teams of seven to 10 retired adults and places them in elementary schools to provide classroom support to teachers in everything from reading and math to violence prevention. The team approach gives schools a critical mass of input from the volunteers. It also gives the volunteers something priceless: a chance to make friends with other older people engaged in the same worthwhile task. The Baltimore, Md., chapter, now in its second year in six schools, is monitoring the educational benefits for students and the mental, physical and social effects on the volunteers. Reading scores have gone up at participating schools, and retention among the 150 volunteers is 97%, better than the rate for paid school staff in many districts.

Virginia Willis, 72, a widowed, retired Social Security supervisor, saw her social circle shrink over the years as old friends died, and was bored with the aimless window shopping she sometimes fell into. Since signing up with Experience Corps last year, she has found a new sense of purpose in helping the teacher and kids in a first-grade class at Guilford Elementary School in Baltimore. She's also made a couple of close friends among her teammates. "We start out talking about the children in our classroom and end up talking about our families," she says. And as a bonus, walking the long hallway to her classroom has got her in better shape physically. She's lost a few pounds and no longer uses the cane she once needed--yet another testament to the health benefits of social interaction. --With reporting by Adrianne Navon/New York and Maggie Sieger/Chicago

With reporting by Adrianne Navon/New York and Maggie Sieger/Chicago