I'd lived in New York City for two years when it hit me: The love of my family and a view of the Chrysler Building weren't enough. I was happy to be continuing my career as a life coach, speaker, and author in a new town -- one I'd come to love almost as much as my native Kansas City. But despite these opportunities, something was still missing. I needed some friends. 

Back home, my life had been shored up by scores of casual friends and a coterie of close ones: the half-dozen remarkable women and one fabulous gay man who had seen me through widowhood and single parenthood, dating and remarriage, and the agony and ecstasy of writing for a living. In my new locale, I had a slew of "networking contacts" but only a couple of genuine friends. In an affirmation that was part prayer, part resolution, I told myself, "This time next year, I'll have a circle of friends like the one I left behind." 

A few days later, a mass e-mail came through announcing that peace discussion groups were forming in homes around the country. I clicked on the New York City link and wrote to a stranger: "What part of the city do you live in?" A woman named Linda replied. She lived across the street; I could look out my front window and see the light in hers. She was no longer hosting peace meetings, but we made a date for coffee. Now we're friends -- the count-on-and-confide-in kind. Whenever one of us tells someone, "We met through a miracle: a geographic coincidence with odds of 8 million to one," it makes me think that every friendship is a miracle, with odds beyond our comprehension. 

What's in It for Us
Research has long suggested that having friends benefits both sexes. One study found that men and women with the most friends (as compared with other study subjects) had a 60 percent reduced likelihood of dying over the course of nine years. But for women, who manage stress differently than men, the benefits of friendship extend even further. A landmark study conducted at UCLA in 2000 challenged "fight or flight" as the only stress response for both genders. Researchers Shelley E. Taylor, Ph.D., and Laura Cousino Klein, Ph.D., discovered that females had an additional reaction they labeled "tend and befriend" -- making friendship of paramount importance to women as they cope with stress. 

Taylor and Klein noted that when women are under stress, our bodies release the hormone oxytocin (the "mother-love hormone" that plays a role in childbirth and nursing), which encourages us to gather children close and band with other women for protection and support. Tending and befriending encourages the release of even more oxytocin, bringing about further calming. Men release oxytocin, too, but the additional testosterone they produce under stress decreases its effects. This may explain why, when things go wrong, your male companions may want to watch the game or take a walk by themselves (thus dealing with the emotion internally, "fleeing" to solitude), while you want to call everyone you know and "talk about it" from every possible angle. 

Whether due to their role in stress reduction or another factor yet to be discovered, friends do make us healthier. According to research from the Harvard Nurses' Health Study (a comprehensive research initiative that identified and studied risk factors for chronic disease in 122,000 women), having close friends actually contributes to better overall physical functioning. The researchers found that the absence of a close confidante is a health risk comparable in magnitude to smoking or a high body-mass index. 

Curiously, for a miracle, friendship doesn't get very high billing. The allure of romance gets celebrated in novels and songs, but when it comes down to it, our female friendships sustain us in deeper, lyric-defying ways. We can tell our good friends anything and not feel judged or in need of fixing. Our friends understand how it feels to live in a complex body that can make milk and a baby, and that cycles with the moon. Together we can conduct a conversation that shifts from kids to careers, from global warming to lipstick shades, all over a single pot of tea. 

Despite the persistent myth that friendship functions merely as an accessory in our lives, our relationships with other women are far from tangential. "We need to get together; we need our rituals," says Pam Grout, author of "Girlfriend Getaways: You Go Girl! And I'll Go, Too." "Girlfriends are mirrors into ourselves. Sure, sometimes we hang out with our women friends just for fun. But getting together also gives us a break from the daily grind so we can talk about big ideas and explore possibilities." 

Friendship can be important to men, of course, and contrary to the famous line in "When Harry Met Sally" ("No man can be friends with a woman he finds attractive"), men and women can sometimes be great friends and keep sex out of it. Still, the friends we hang on to from childhood, the ones we visit even if it requires a prop plane and a four-wheel-drive vehicle, the ones we call first when something goes slightly -- or tragically -- wrong, are almost invariably other females. "Women tend to self-disclose more with their women friends than they do with their male partners," say Jane Adams, Ph.D., author of "Boundary Issues: Using Boundary Intelligence to Get the Intimacy You Want and the Independence You Need in Life, Love, and Work." This level of trust elevates friendship to something more than just companionship: It creates a much-needed emotional outlet. In these types of friendships, we know we can come as we are, speak our minds, and bare our souls.