We Should All Be More Like Jane Fonda
Jane Fonda was trending on Twitter the other day and it turns out that, for once, trending on Twitter was a good thing. She’s on a press tour for her new movie, 80 for Brady, about four 80-year-old women who set off to see their hero, Tom Brady, play in the Super Bowl.
The mere existence of a movie starring women who were in their prime in the 1960s and 1970s is inspiring enough, but Fonda’s impromptu speech on female friendship was what went viral. She started riffing on the beauty of female friendships and how they’re crucial to our health and overall well-being. She said her “favorite ex-husband,” Ted Turner, insisted people stopped making friends once they hit 60, but Fonda scoffed at that.
“I think he’s really wrong, but I think you have to be really intentional,” she told CBS Sunday Morning. “You have to pursue people you want to be friends with. And you have to say ‘I’m intentionally wanting to be your friend.’ And it works. And people stick around and you develop new friendships.”
But they don’t always come easy, as Fonda noted about having to pursue friendships with her co-stars, Sally Field and Lily Tomlin — both of whom confessed to being reclusive. Nevertheless, Fonda was relentless, so, like it or not, they became her friends.
If we’re really lucky, we each have a Jane Fonda in our lives, someone who makes it their business to become our friend and to bring people together. Because, particularly as we get older, it can be ridiculously easy to go into recluse mode, as Sally Field and Lily Tomlin say they’ve done.
After I watched that video, I immediately texted a friend I’ve known since middle school to thank her for being the Jane Fonda to my (occasional) Sally Field.
This friend has been relentless about staying in touch, both with me as well as many other friends I’ve long since lost contact with. She’s essentially a human Facebook. There was a time when I was so immersed in parenting and working that, I confess, I didn’t always appreciate her attempts to stay in touch. But I’ve grown to treasure her presence in my life, and I like to think I’ve been as good a friend to her in recent years as she was to me over the last several decades.
Even better, she’s inspired me to be a better friend to others in my circle. I now find that I invest far more time and energy into friendships than I did when I was younger. Turns out, that has been a wise investment of my time.
As study after study shows, relationships are the Chemical X of happy lives and healthy aging. While it’s wonderful to have a romantic partner to grow old with, most of us will be single at some point — whether because of death, divorce, or any number of reasons.
Friendships, however, are just as valuable, perhaps even more valuable, than romantic partnerships, if only because it’s easier to have multiple friends than it is to have multiple romantic partners.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned something that I wish I had known when I was much younger: everybody wants friends, so making them is just a matter of being a friend. Granted, that means putting yourself out there by inviting a friend or three to lunch or dinner, organizing a trip or an outing, or planning a party.
And, yes, that means you might occasionally be rejected. It happens. But you get over it.
I suspect that the willingness to be vulnerable and risk rejection is why women are much likelier than men to have a strong circle of close friends. And it’s one of many reasons researchers believe women outlive men by about five years.
For those reasons and many more, we should all try to be a little more like Jane Fonda from now on.
Thank you, Jane, for bringing more joy into your friends’ lives.
#OnlyJoy