Maintaining and growing friendships has become increasingly important to me as I age. In fact, VibrantNation.com, a social networking website dedicated exclusively to women 50+, has recently released a study that reveals that we are of the first generation of women in history whose personal networks at midlife and beyond are actually growing over time. The stereotypes of shrinking connectedness and increasing isolation belong to the women of generations past, clearly not the women of my own Boomer cohort.

In fact, I am often pleasantly surprised by the spontaneous level of intimacy with which women 50+ interact upon chance encounter. For instance, by the time we’ve stood together in line at the women’s room at a concert, we may know each others’ marital status, number and issues with various grown children/grandchildren, health problems and solutions, and so on. Similar exchanges are taking place online everyday at Vibrant Nation as well as on other social networking sites such as Facebook, where women 55+ are the fastest-growing segment.

That said, developing on-going relationships is a new skill for many of us–one I am attempting to learn, the way women newly divorced return to the dating world on shaky legs. This is in part because when I was my daughter’s age, I was too busy liberating workplaces to make maintaining and growing personal friendships a priority. In fact, back then, a good friend was considered to be someone who understood when you had to cancel a social lunch for a business meeting.

Ironically, the inspiring interest in friendships amongst our daughters’ generations can be considered an unintended (but happy) consequence of Women’s Lib. Having earned our older Gen X offspring the nickname “The latchkey generation” is not the part of my generation’s legacy of which I’m proudest. Given how often we were still at work when they came home from school, they turned to one another and the notion of social peer packs was born.

Gen Y, their younger siblings, have taken this even further. They showed us the way to integrate friendship fully into their lives, mostly through the gift of technology, which keeps them connected all the time. Now the friendship equation is reversed: social friends help each other figure out how to make money. For example, my daughter is laying plans to rep her friends’ artistic abilities to ad agencies–a win/win scenario for a generation who, by and large, value their friendships above traditional workplace ambition.

Happily, it is not too late for the women of my generation. committed to making up for lost time, to reach out to others for non-business reasons. We can take a page from our grown daughters to use social networking to keep us connected–and when we do, to remember to put friendships first, professional advancement second.

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