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When a group of twentysomething NBC pages met back in the 1970s, they never imagined that decades later they'd be as close as sisters, toasting birthdays, helping each other with ailing parents, attending family funerals, even officiating at one another's weddings.

"We were schlepping tour groups through buildings in Burbank, Calif., as many as seven or eight a day," says Shelley Herman, now in her 50s and a freelance television writer who lives in Los Angeles. "There was a page lounge area, so when we weren't ushering groups around, we could gather and swap war stories and help each other with the advancement of our careers."

Over the 30-some years since then, the core group of eight women, most of whom still live on the West Coast, have continued to see each other about once every other month. They gather for dinners, getaway weekends, birthdays, Oscar-watching parties.

When one of the friends, Dinah, was married two years ago, one of the others, Emily, obtained her minister's license to do the honors. Another in the group, Roxanne, was matron of honor.

Whether close, one-on-one relationships or with a group, women's friendships are, at their root, biologically driven, says Gail Saltz, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

"Humans are hard-wired to attach in a non-romantic way. There are evolutionary advantages for women to bond: to take care of each other, to provide a community and share responsibilities that increase the likelihood of survival," Saltz says. But friendships also fend off loneliness and depression, she says.

"There are many women in this second half of life who don't necessarily have a partner, or who have a partner who isn't their everything. And you could even question if it's good for a partner to be their everything anyway."

Some women may find comfort deepening the bonds of longtime friends as the years roll by. Louise Woo, 51, of South Pasadena, Calif., met one of her closest friends, Patty, in the fourth grade. They'd hang out listening to Beatles records and Casey Kasem's American Top 40 on the radio, she says. "For reasons that mystify me, we managed not to lose each other."

Good friendships can spring up at any time in life, says clinical psychologist Samantha Litzinger, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y. She says women often form close relationships based on similar experiences or interests later in life, such as parenting, marriage struggles and hobbies.

Some even bond over a shared medical experience. Ellen Brown, 45, who was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago, says a woman she had known in her community became a dear friend when she, too, was diagnosed with breast cancer two weeks after Brown was. Though old friends and family were supportive, she says Jodi "got it."

"We basically went through chemotherapy together. We shaved our heads within two days of each other. We went to the same guy to get our wigs. We could laugh about it all. We could also cry about it together. We both had daughters the same age. We had a lot in common," says Brown, who is now in remission.

Litzinger says women need other women to feel creative, to laugh with and explore life with: "Creating a bond with other women creates a rich space in our lives."

Saltz says there's a certain freedom that can bloom in later-life friendships between women.

"The competitiveness that might have been there earlier may be fading, and that allows for less-threatening friendships," Saltz says. "It's that sense of 'We're in this together.'"

(c) Copyright 2011 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. 

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