Divine Sisterhood

From Joanna Bounds @ Yahoo Lifestyle:

If you're lucky enough to have a best friend, you'll know they're worth their weight in Tim Tams. She's been there through break-ups and breakdowns, celebrated your successes, and held your hair back when you puked. She knows secrets even your husband doesn't (she'll take them to her grave). And now there's scientific research to back the fact that hanging with her makes you feel good - female friendships lower women's stress levels, and are one of the reasons we live longer than men.

But new research shows that, compared to our mums, there's been a huge drop in the number of friends 30-something women can rely on during a crisis. Twenty years ago, women reported having two very close friends. In 2005, that number fell to one. "That's a 50 per cent drop, which makes for a public health crisis," says the man who conducted the research, Dr Paul Dobransky, psychiatrist and author of The Power of Female Friendship. "It's not completely clear why, but it's likely related to the [fact that] people are spending more time on their careers." But in these times of uncertainty, we need mates more than ever.

From Penpals to Facebook

From the Las Vegas Review Journal:

Longtime pen pals Tracey Sharpe and JoAnne Snyder, who began communicating through old-fashioned snail mail 29 years ago, met for the first time on the Strip last weekend.

Sharpe, then 16 and growing up in New Zealand, and Snyder, 14, a California girl, began their correspondence after finding a pen-pal service in the back of magazines.

Paired by chance, they quickly became the best of friends, each willing to expose secrets to the other they wouldn't tell their friends back home.

After nearly 20 years of steady letter-writing and rare international phone calls, they fell out of touch for 10 years after Snyder moved to Chandler, Ariz., in 1999.

After learning that another friend had just reunited with a pen pal through Facebook, Sharpe, now 45, signed up -- and there was Snyder, now age 43!