The Comparison That Keeps Women Apart

What the Research Actually Shows

Somewhere between forty and fifty-five, most women notice the same thing and assume it is only happening to them. The friendships did not end in a fight. Nobody was cruel. The texts simply got slower, the lunches were postponed twice and then not rescheduled, and one day you realise you have not had a conversation that went below the surface in perhaps two years. Because there was no rupture to point to, the only available explanation seems to be that something is wrong with you.

The data disagree, and they disagree in a specific way. In 2024, Frank Infurna, Denis Gerstorf and Margie Lachman published a study in American Psychologist comparing midlife loneliness across the United States and thirteen European nations, using harmonized data from nationally representative longitudinal panels. Two findings stand out. First, American midlife loneliness runs consistently higher than in any European comparison, by a margin of 0.3 to 0.8 standard deviations. Second, middle-aged adults in the US today report more loneliness than earlier-born cohorts did at the same age. Something changed, and it changed around you, not inside you.

The shrinking circle itself is even less personal. In 2016, Kunal Bhattacharya, Robin Dunbar and colleagues analysed a large mobile-phone dataset in Royal Society Open Science and traced how many people we actually keep in contact with across the life course. The number falls with age. It falls for everyone. The wide, loose, effortless network of your thirties — school gates, office, neighbours — was structurally propped up by shared logistics, and when the logistics dissolve, so does the network. You did not lose your friends. You lost the scaffolding that made seeing them automatic.

None of which would matter much if this were merely a social inconvenience. It is not. The 2010 meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues in PLoS Medicine pooled 148 studies and 308,849 participants and found that people with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival over the study periods — an effect size the authors placed alongside established mortality risks such as smoking. Friendship in midlife is not a luxury item on the self-care list. It sits closer to blood pressure.

What Perukua Says About Why Women Cannot Get Close

Perukua is an Australian singer and facilitator who has led women’s voice and body practices in 63 countries over more than twenty-five years. She is not a psychologist and does not present herself as one. But she spent years inside an arrangement almost nobody in her audience has survived: as one of seven wives in a shaman’s household in the high desert of New Mexico, sharing daily life with women who were, by any ordinary measure, her direct rivals.

She is candid about how badly she began. She had a very healthy ego, she says of her arrival — she had been a successful jazz singer, the only woman on stage surrounded by admiring musicians. She walked into a house where two women were heavily pregnant, wearing skinny jeans and heels, quietly certain she was number one. So was everybody else.

This is the part most midlife friendship advice never touches. The obstacle between two grown women is rarely the calendar. It is the quiet arithmetic running underneath: she is thinner, her marriage looks easier, her children turned out better, her career did not stall. Perukua’s word for this is virus, and the word is well chosen. Comparison is transmissible, it replicates quietly, and it makes intimacy feel dangerous — because you cannot let a woman close while you are busy scoring yourself against her.

What broke it, in her account, was not a conversation. It was shared work. The household ran on a principle she describes plainly: every woman is a mother to every child. When a sister gave birth, you became a mother too, because you cared for the same child. Perukua, twenty-four and celebrated for her voice, found herself sitting up at night singing lullabies to other women’s babies while their exhausted mothers slept. She reports having to pass through a great deal of humility — “I am here to support you” — and then describes the outcome with no drama at all: “Slowly, slowly, slowly, trust began to build.”

Her later work grew directly out of that house. Her life’s practice, she reports, became the psychology of women — “how we live and grow together, our capacity to support and inspire one another, not in a therapist’s office but in the ordinary environment of shared living.” It is worth being clear about what she is and is not claiming. Perukua is an artist and a facilitator, not a clinician; this is lived experience, not a treatment protocol. But as a description of how trust between women is actually rebuilt, it is more useful than most of what is written on the subject.

Why Talking Is Not How Closeness Gets Built

The standard midlife friendship advice is to reach out. Send the message. Book the coffee. Be vulnerable. For a woman who is already tired, already comparing, already braced for the other person to be doing better, this advice fails at the first step — because it asks for the most exposed thing (self-disclosure to someone you feel behind) before any safety exists to hold it.

There is an alternative route, and it is better evidenced than it sounds. In 2015, Eiluned Pearce, Jacques Launay and Robin Dunbar followed newly formed adult education classes over seven months in Royal Society Open Science. Some classes sang. Others did crafts or creative writing. Everyone rated how close they felt to their group. By the end of seven months, all the groups had bonded — nothing magical there. But the singers got there dramatically faster: at the first measurement, closeness in the singing classes had already jumped, while the other groups were still politely circling each other. The authors named it the ice-breaker effect.

The mechanism is not mystical. Singing is a synchronised activity done side by side, with nobody required to perform intimacy, explain themselves or disclose anything. Your bodies do something together in time before your biographies are exchanged. Notice that this is precisely the structure of Perukua’s New Mexico household: trust arrived through shared physical care — the night feeds, the lullabies, the plain daily labour of holding another woman’s child — long before anyone made a speech about their feelings.

Which suggests the midlife friendship problem is not a deficit of willingness. It is a deficit of structure. Women do not need to be told to open up. They need somewhere to stand shoulder to shoulder and do something, repeatedly, until closeness becomes a side effect rather than the assignment.

The Practice: Build It Sideways, Not Face to Face

This is a four-week exercise, and it is deliberately unromantic. It does not require you to find your tribe, and it does not begin with a heart-to-heart.

One. Name the comparison, on paper. Take the two or three women you have quietly drifted from and write one honest sentence about what you envy or resent in each. Her marriage. Her money. Her ease. This is not a moral failing; it is Perukua’s virus, and it works best undetected. Written down, it almost always looks smaller than it felt.

Two. Choose the recurring thing, not the reunion. Do not organise a long-overdue dinner where the whole friendship has to be resurrected in one evening. Choose something that repeats and requires no performance: a weekly walk on the same day, a choir, a class, a standing Sunday errand you do together. Same time, same shape, low emotional cost. The repetition is the active ingredient — the Pearce study measured closeness over months, not evenings.

Three. If there is singing available, take it. A community choir, a group class, a women’s circle where voices are used. You do not need to be able to sing; the evidence concerns singing together, not singing well. If nothing like that exists near you, the private version takes ninety seconds: sit, breathe out slowly, and hum on the exhale — low, easy, six or eight breaths. It will not manufacture a friend. It does reliably settle the nervous system enough that reaching out stops feeling like a risk.

Four. In week four, send one plain sentence to one woman. Not “we should catch up sometime,” but something true: “This year has been harder than I have let on.” Not before week four. The honesty lands only once the structure is there to hold it.

In Closing

The lie inside midlife loneliness is that it is a verdict — that if the friendships thinned out, it must be because you were not worth keeping. The research says something duller and far kinder: the structures went away, the numbers fall for everyone, and the United States in particular has become an unusually lonely place in which to be middle-aged.

And the way back is not the way most women are told. It is not more openness, more vulnerability, more attempts to talk closeness into existence. Perukua learned it in a house where she had every reason to compete and no option but to cooperate: trust is built sideways, through shared doing, slowly, slowly, slowly. Sing beside her. Walk beside her. Carry something together.

The conversation you are waiting to have will arrive on its own, once there is somewhere safe for it to land.

References & Quote Sources

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