During the question and answer period at a library “Meet the Author” event, Army spouse Shequita Gatlin stood up and asked Kathie, “How do you make friends when you are new — other than knocking on doors and looking weird?"

Her question prompted us to add this chapter to the second edition of our book. Research shows that “positive social relationships”— friendships — are a key ingredient to human happiness. In short, we need to know how to make friends. And, as military spouses, we can’t just do that once. In our mobile lifestyle, even more than for most people, we have to do what our old Girl Scout song taught us, “to make new friends and keep the old.”

The fact is that military spouses who are isolated by circumstances or who choose to isolate themselves will have difficulty with this lifestyle. And the reality is that some military spouses are isolated because they are introverts and don’t know how to make friends. Friends are important for our happiness and they affect our ability to deal with stress.

Friendships during stressful times might be even more important for women. A landmark UCLA study (Taylor, Klein, et al., 2000) suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals, an increase in oxytocin. The study showed that the hormone oxytocin buffers the “fight or flight” stress response we’ve always heard of and encourages women to tend to their children and gather with other women instead. These “tend and befriend” activities counter stress and produce a calming effect. This doesn’t occur for men because their higher levels of testosterone counter the effect of oxytocin in their systems. Men tend instead to respond to stress in true “fight or flight” behavior — by becoming aggressive or withdrawing.

So what does that mean to military wives? Hanging out with your girlfriends is not a luxury in times of stress. It’s a necessity. It’s a scientific fact. So if you’ve been putting friendships on the back burner while you focus all your time and energy on everyday demands of life, think again.

Our friends are important parts of our lives. As Marla Paul, author of The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making, and Keeping Friends When You’re Not a Kid Anymore, says: “Friends assuage our guilt, ease our stress, make us laugh, recharge our energy, carry our grief and celebrate our successes.”

Here’s another thing to consider. Dr. Pamela Peeke, author of Fight Fat Over 40, has led groundbreaking work on the link between chronic stress and weight gain. She found that women under stress often have another response: “Stew and chew.” We expect this applies to isolated military spouses.  If you hold all your stress in, worry about everything, and eat to deal with that stress, you end up still stressed — and heavier, which for most of us just adds more stress. Hanging out with positive friends is a much better option.

Making friends really is a skill you can learn — and as a military spouse, you get a lot of opportunity to practice doing so. Let’s look at some ways.

Each month over the next several months we’ll explore ways to make friends and keep friends. We interviewed hundreds of military spouses to find out what works for them along with reading many books on this crucial skill. Plus we both had to learn this skill ourselves. Kathie especially is an introvert by nature so had to learn how to step outside herself to connect with others. We hope the skills you learn here will help you to step outside yourself to meet other like-minded people. We know from our own experience how important our friendships are to make this challenging military life work.

Excerpted with permission from Help! I’m a Military Spouse — I Get a Life Too! How to Craft a Life for You as You Move with the Military (2d Edition released April 2007 from Potomac Books, Inc.)  by Kathie Hightower & Holly Scherer.