Creating space for real conversation matters more than ever.
There is an interesting contradiction in women’s lives today. We have never been more connected, yet many women I meet tell me they are craving genuine connection.
Our phones are filled with contacts. Our calendars are full. We have colleagues, professional networks, social media communities, family commitments and countless opportunities to interact with other people. Yet somewhere between building careers, raising families, caring for parents, managing households and simply keeping up with life, something can quietly disappear: friendship.
Not acquaintances. Not networking. Not the person you exchange pleasantries with at an event.
Real friendship.
The kind where you can arrive without having to be impressive. Where the conversation moves beyond what you do and into how you are actually doing. Where someone knows enough of your story to recognize when the answer “I’m fine” probably means something else.
When we are young, friendship is often built into the structure of our lives. We go to school together, play sports together, live in residence, start our careers alongside one another. We spend enormous amounts of unstructured time together, and friendship develops almost accidentally. Adulthood changes that.
Time becomes one of our most valuable commodities as our careers become more demanding, and we start spending more time with partners, children and aging parents. People relocate. Relationships change. Some women become entrepreneurs or executives and discover that leadership itself can be isolating. Others experience divorce, retirement, children leaving home or a career transition and suddenly realize that some of the relationships surrounding a particular chapter of their lives did not transition with them.
And women can become remarkably good at putting themselves last. We make the appointment, remember the birthday, and organize the family gathering. We check on the friend who is struggling, mentor the younger colleague, or volunteer, lead, and support them. But maintaining meaningful friendships requires something many women have very little of: extra time and space.
Being Surrounded is Not the Same as Belonging
One of the things I have become increasingly interested in is the difference between connection and belonging.
You can have an extraordinary professional network and still feel lonely. You can walk into a room where everyone knows your name and still feel as though very few people actually know you, and there is research behind that distinction. A systematic review of 38 studies examining adult friendship and wellbeing found that the quality of our friendships, the support we receive from friends, the effort we make to maintain those relationships and the time we spend socializing with friends are all associated with our wellbeing.¹
In other words, being surrounded by people isn’t necessarily the same as being meaningfully connected to them.
For women in leadership, there can be another layer. The more responsibility we carry, the more accustomed we can become to being the person others rely upon. Vulnerability can begin to feel uncomfortable. We may hesitate to admit that we don’t know something, that we’re struggling, that we’re questioning a decision, or that life feels overwhelming.
Yet those are often the conversations from which our strongest relationships emerge.
Friendship is not built through perfection. It is built through trust. And trust requires us to occasionally remove the armour. This is something I have witnessed while building aspiHer Women’s Business Club.
We initially set out to create a place where women could connect, learn, grow their businesses and support one another. But I have come to appreciate that the physical space itself plays a much larger role than I initially understood.
There is something different about sitting across from another woman at a table. Conversations linger. Someone asks a second question.
A business discussion becomes a conversation about confidence. A conversation about leadership becomes one about aging parents. A discussion about entrepreneurship turns into an admission that someone is exhausted, uncertain, or considering an entirely different chapter of her life. Those moments cannot always be programmed. You can create the conditions for them, but you cannot put “meaningful connection from 4:15 to 4:45” on an agenda.
Women need places where they are allowed to stay long enough for the conversation to move deeper.
Research into women’s social relationships helps explain why those conversations can be so powerful. Studies have found that women’s friendships tend to involve greater self-disclosure and that women frequently rely on those relationships for social support, connections associated with both psychological and physical benefits.²
Perhaps what we sometimes dismiss as “just talking” is doing far more for us than we realize.
Friendship Requires Courage
Creating space is only part of the equation. We also need to remember how to have conversations that create connection. That often starts with asking better questions. Instead of “What do you do?” perhaps we ask, “What are you excited about right now?”
Instead of “How’s work?” we might ask, “What’s taking most of your energy these days?” And when someone answers, resist the temptation to immediately tell our own story. We listen. We ask another question. There is tremendous generosity in giving another person our undivided attention.
In a world where we are constantly interrupted by notifications, schedules and competing demands, being fully present with another human being has almost become an act of generosity.
There is another uncomfortable truth about adult friendship: sometimes we have to be the one who goes first. We have to be the one who sends the message, or invites someone for coffee. Say, “I really enjoyed talking with you.” Or admit, “I’d love to get to know you better.”
That can feel strangely vulnerable as an adult. We somehow expect friendship to happen organically, and when it doesn’t, we assume everyone else already has their circle. Often, they don’t. The woman sitting beside you may be hoping for exactly the same thing.
Creating meaningful friendships in adulthood therefore requires intentionality. We have to treat connection as something worthy of our time rather than something we will get to once everything else is finished…because everything else is never finished.
We sometimes treat friendship as the optional part of adulthood, the thing we make time for after work, family and responsibilities have been handled. I think we have that backwards.
Meaningful relationships are part of what allows us to carry all those other responsibilities. They give us perspective when ours has narrowed. They remind us who we are outside of our titles and obligations. They give us people with whom we can celebrate without explanation and struggle without performance. And perhaps most importantly, they remind us that we are not navigating life alone.
That matters to our wellbeing.
We talk a great deal about resilience, particularly for women. We encourage women to become stronger, more confident and more capable of navigating adversity. But resilience does not have to mean becoming better at carrying everything ourselves. Sometimes resilience is knowing who you can call. Sometimes it is having a table where you can sit down and say what you are really thinking.
Sometimes it is having someone notice that you aren’t quite yourself before you have found the words to explain why.
We Have to Make Room for One Another
Perhaps the challenge of adult friendship isn’t that women have forgotten how to connect. It is that our lives have become so full that connection is too often left to chance.
We schedule the board meeting, the client call, the children’s activities, the workout and the dentist appointment. Yet we hesitate to put two hours with a friend on the calendar because friendship somehow feels as though it should happen spontaneously. Maybe it is time to be just as intentional about the relationships that sustain us as we are about the responsibilities that consume us.
Create the space. Make the invitation. Stay for the second cup of coffee. Ask the second question.
And when another woman gives you an honest answer, resist the urge to fix it. Sometimes the greatest gift we can give another person is simply the feeling of being heard and understood. The older I get, and the more women I meet through my work, the more convinced I become that meaningful connection is not something extra we add to an already full life.
It is part of what makes a full life meaningful.
Perhaps that is why creating spaces for women to have real conversations matters so much. Because friendship rarely begins with a grand gesture. More often, it begins with two people, enough time, a little vulnerability, and one person willing to ask:
“How are you…really?”
Desirée Bombenon – Impact EntrepreneurFounder & CEO aspiHer Women’s Business Club
Sources and Further Reading
- Pezirkianidis, C., Galanaki, E., Raftopoulou, G., Moraitou, D. & Stalikas, A. (2023). Adult friendship and wellbeing: A systematic review with practical implications. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1059057.
- Bedrov, A. & Gable, S. L. (2023). Thriving together: The benefits of women’s social ties for physical, psychological and relationship health. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378.
