EDITOR’S NOTE: Also featuring special guest, Joni Evans, CEO of wowOwow

JONI: Let’s talk about friendship. I’m talking about long-term old friends, and what happens with those. And how important are they to us? What happens when one disappoints us or when we’ve outgrown an old friend? Do we feel guilt? Do we feel obligation? And who were our friends? Who made differences in our lives? One thing I feel is that when one loses one’s parents as I have, I find my friends become my family – my family of my own choosing. So I take friends much more seriously than I ever did and I am hurt by them when things don’t go right. And I suffer a lot of guilt when I know I should move on from one of them. And I just wonder if anyone else has that.

LIZ: Well, we are living in a very sort of rarefied urban culture. But the way I grew up, families didn’t have friends. They just had relatives. And I lived my whole life growing up with relatives, except for whatever little friends I made in school. My cousins and aunts and poor relations were who we socialized with. I find that really sort of tragic in the end. People need to go out of their families and make friends and have this experience that you’re talking about which, of course, I now have in spades because there are only a few nieces and nephews left that I am related to any more. So my friends are really important to me. In Texas I have two girlfriends that are exactly my age. I went to college with one of them and started kindergarten with the other.

JONI: Lesley, you were going to say something?

LESLEY: Some of you have heard me say this before, but I think that, for women, our girlfriends become just what Joni said – family. Liz, you find that when you leave your parents, you need to recreate a family. You need that. As we need food, love and shelter, we need to have connections with other women. We all need to feel we can talk to someone and share happiness and sadness and communicate in a really deep way with women. It goes back to caveman times when women stayed home while the men went out and hunted, and we stayed together in a circle. I think it’s a deep, absolute necessity for our lives, our happiness and health.

MARY: Except for my daughters, most of my friends in my life have been people I’ve been working with, one place or another, because we have so much in common and we share so much. And I found that men have been extremely satisfying as friends. Whenever a man became my friend and trusted me he would tell me everything.

LIZ: I agree. Men are great talkers, great gossips and very engaging.

MARY: Women are much more communicative than men are normally. And women become like your sisters right away, sort of. But when a man trusts you and becomes your friend he tells you more than even women do. They just lay down on the floor and tell you everything.

LIZ: I agree with Mary. One of the greatest things that happened to me, as I grew older and got out of the romance rat race, was that I began making friends with men. And men are not afraid to be friends with you. They know you’ll not try to marry them or get their money or something. And I’ve had really incredible experiences in the last 10 years with men, becoming friends with men. And it’s wonderful. It’s a real gift. Lesley, it’s how I feel about your Aaron. I feel he’s really my friend, as well as I feel you are. And I could see Aaron – go to him with a problem or ask him to help me or something like that. And that’s very dear to me.