THE HUMAN CONDITION BEST FRIENDS : Who We Pick, Why We Stick Together

When Eileen Aleo was told she would need a mastectomy, the first person she thought of was her friend, Ruth Ann White.

“I was at home when the doctor called to tell me,” says Aleo, who lives in Rochester, N.Y. “I was so upset--I think I was in shock.”

She picked up the phone and called White, who lives in Danbury, Conn. “I told her even before I told my husband.”

A few days later, just before her surgery last fall, White called and said, “I’m coming,” recalls Aleo. “I wouldn’t have asked her. She has a 10-year-old at home. But she went ahead and made all the arrangements.” Aleo was elated.

“I had my husband and my children and my family and all our other friends, but for her to come and do this was the best medicine I could have had,” says Aleo, who has been best friends with White since high school.

Aleo and White share a powerful bond that, in some respects, transcends the other relationships in their lives. Yet, friendship remains strangely overlooked by social scientists, who busily examine the dynamics of love and marriage, sexuality, child rearing and sibling rivalry.

“Friendship is the neglected relationship of our time,” maintains San Francisco psychotherapist Lillian B. Rubin.

Rubin, who wrote the 1985 book “Just Friends,” says the topic has been largely ignored by behaviorists. And when it is examined in history and in literature, men’s friendships--from the biblical David and Jonathan to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid--have been held up as the ideal.

Rubin’s findings, however, show that women’s friendships are to be equally regarded--even though the sexes approach it differently from an early age: “Boys seek a band of rebels--collective reinforcement. Girls are more concerned with emotional intimacy. This continues to be the pattern.”

Partly because of the women’s movement, she says, social scientists are starting to reclaim friendship from the behavioral dustbin. And in doing so, they are discovering that adults who are best friends might be enjoying the richest of mutual relationships.

Just what is a best friend?

Some experts suggest that the very lack of formal definition gives friendship its power.

We know what society expects from a partner, parent, child, grandmother or uncle, but friendship writes its own rules, taking shape through personal interaction and creativity. And even if social scientists can’t talk knowledgeably about friendship, friends can.

“It’s the ultimate partnership,” says singer-actress Patricia Morison. “I wish nations could learn it.” She and Isabelle Borchert, the widow of Morison’s vocal coach, have been “fast friends” since the 1960s.

“Isabelle has been a lifesaver on many occasions,” says Morison. “She’s my severest critic and most loyal friend.” They live in the same Los Angeles apartment building and frequently dine together, but “we don’t impinge on each other’s lives,” she adds.

John Richards and Gates Paris graduated from high school and the University of Missouri together, got their MBAs at separate schools, and in 1986 returned to their hometown in southern Missouri, each planning to run the family business.

“I have a series of good friends, but Gates is probably my best friend because we’re had the same type of goals and interests all along,” says Richards, the third generation to run his family’s retail store in West Plains.

“We play golf together and go hunting,” says Richards. “I don’t think your life would be healthy without good friends.”

When Phoenix writer Jana Bommersbach got her first book contract last year, she immediately called her good friend in Boston, whom she tracked down having lunch in a restaurant.

“The whole place heard about it,” recalls Bommersbach. “She was absolutely screaming, ‘Guess what? My best friend just got a book contract with Simon & Schuster! You won’t believe--it’s for six figures!’ She was so happy.”

Bommersbach has a framed caption on her kitchen wall: “A friend is someone who leaves you with your freedom intact.”

“I have three friends that I would trust with my life,” she says. “They know all the bad parts about me and they still like me. I have a lot of acquaintances, but I wouldn’t sit down in the dead of the night and talk about the things I fear, which I can do with my best friends.”

Over the years, two have married and one has moved away, but a lavish amount of “care and feeding,” says Bommersbach, has kept the relationships solid.

“You can’t just use friends for a dumping ground,” she emphasizes. “We can take our families for granted because they are stuck with us, but friends have to be nurtured. They’re our greatest assets.”

Friendships represent an “emotional healing” of what was left incomplete in childhood, says Daphne Rose Kingma, a Santa Barbara therapist who specializes in relationships.

“None of us is adequately parented--that’s the human condition,” she says. “If a teen-age girl is feeling estrangement from her mother--getting disapproval when she wants approval--her friend ‘mothers’ her into adulthood by being supportive, by being accepting.”

Such people, she says, “are tremendously important in our lives. They provide the relationship ballast for us, and we tend to underestimate that value.”

Because friendships are formed when we are emotionally accessible, most adults retain at least one best friend from early teen-age days, even if their lives have taken different paths. After 30 years, Jane Bernard Powers of San Francisco and her friend, Natalie, back in Dearborn, Mich., can still mention “Scouring Pad”--the nickname for their junior high home-economics teacher--and get the adolescent giggles.

Powers treasures the common language of an early friendship: “Both my parents are dead, and Natalie remembers things about my family that I don’t--she was kind of on the edge, watching.”

Powers, a social studies professor at San Francisco State University, has “lots of different kinds of friendships” from different periods in her life. She and Jeannette Hebbert met in the early ‘70s as young teachers at a middle school. “We were both married and we seemed to click. With some people there’s an immediate sense of trust and understanding.”

Hebbert and her husband now live in England, says Powers, but “I’m over there at least once a year--I’ve been quite regular about that--and I have my jeans and tennis shoes and hair curlers there. It’s a little home away from home. Neither of us is a good correspondent, but we call each other five or six times a year.”

To Stuart Watson, a Los Angeles engineer in his mid-50s, a best friend is a person who “provides a level of comfort and trust--you can tell him anything and it’s not going any further.”

His longtime best friend, Dave Schwartz, meets that criterion. They became acquainted when they worked for the same company 30 years ago, “had a lot in common,” and the friendship has stuck.

Says Watson: “He introduced me to Bob Dylan. I’m an amateur sports car racer and Dave wasn’t a car buff, but he agreed to be in my pit crew. That was important. We’re from the generation where the husband worked and the wife stayed home. For the man, that meant your social life was pretty much with your family.”

Although he and Schwartz now live in different towns, they stay in touch. “We talk occasionally (on the phone) and see each other at technical meetings.”

For women, though, long telephone conversations--traditionally trivialized as “gossip”--actually play a big part in weaving the fabric of their friendships, says psychotherapist Rubin. In today’s mobile society, “reach out and touch someone” is no empty phone company promise.

When Leola Johnson and her family moved back to Minneapolis after several years at Penn State University, their long-distance telephone bill dropped dramatically. That’s because Johnson was reunited with her best friend, Colleen Aho, a labor union executive in Minneapolis.

“I was on the phone with her all the time,” says Johnson, a professor of media studies at the University of Minnesota. “I’ve got friends I’ve known since second grade and we see each other at reunions, but Colleen is so special.”

They met in graduate school, where Johnson was studying Third World politics and Aho was involved with Nicaraguan solidarity work. “We first connected with politics, but we grew together,” says Johnson. “We gave each other support for all sorts of transitions in our lives. When I had little kids and was trying to work, she never stopped writing. She knew I didn’t have the time (to write back). . . . It’s the closest thing to unconditional love I have outside my family.”

Johnson emphasizes that the two have worked hard at the relationship.

“For a lot of years, all the white people in my life played a less-than-exemplary role,” says Johnson, who is African-American. “But being political and learning about race, class and gender made it possible for me to have a friend who is white. Colleen didn’t give me a place to escape and didn’t give me easy answers. We were there for each other.

“It’s interesting,” she adds. “My husband doesn’t feel the desire to call his friends up and chat--even his brothers. But Colleen and I will call each other. It’s been a long day and we’re burnt out, so we just call each other.”