Friends Forever
How Girls and Women Forge Lasting Relationships
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
Through thick and thin and everything along the way, it's through friendships that we understand our lives. In this book, authors Suzanne Degges-White and Christine Borzumato-Gainey not only explore the roles friendships play for girls and women over the course of a life, but offer a guide to finding new friends and enhancing current relationships. Using interviews with hundreds of women, spanning the ages of 4 to 94, Friends Forever provides readers with a contemporary perspective on female friendship. These personal stories, informed by the latest research on friendship, offer a rich and colorful picture that combines a life stage chronology of friendship with a guide for becoming the friend you would like to have while building strong friendships along the way. Readers will learn how to design and sustain their ideal friendscape, the dynamic and often misunderstood realm in which such bonds flourish. The authors thoughtfully examine the biological and cultural drive towards social connections among women and provide self-reflection and self-exploration opportunities that encourage readers to better understand their own roles in relationships and the roles that others in their social landscapes play.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Best friends forever," or "BFF," a phrase said often by many a young girl, may prove, as she grows into a woman and responsibilities leave less time for friends, easier said than done. Gleaning from their own experiences with friends, families, and responsibilities, and supported by hundreds of interviews, Degges-White and Borzumato-Gainey attempt to make sense of female relationships, from why we need them to how to make them. Highlighting the murky differences between female and male friendships, this work is clearly written by women for women. The book tracks and analyzes female friendships from early childhood to late life, tackling milestones like coupling, marriage, and childbirth. Parallel features of female friendships arise at every age, from the obvious (forming friendships based on common interest) to more crucial elements of trust, honesty, and reciprocity. Relatable tales and easy-to-implement recommendations will equip female readers with the confidence to form new, lasting friendships and the language with which to discuss their current ones. In the end, making friends for women of any age, at any stage in life, will seem less daunting and more inviting than ever.
