Art of friendship

Life changing friendship had a rocky start

The body of a 29-year-old nurse was parceled by post through Japan in a 2-meter-long box marked with the Japanese word for "doll".

She reportedly had more than a dozen stab wounds but no defensive injuries on her hands or arms.

Just before she went missing in March, she posted on Facebook that she was going to meet an old friend whom she had not seen for a decade. Her body was found recently in a storage lock-up in Tokyo, to which the parcel was delivered. The friend, also 29, lived with a woman of about the same age near the lock-up.

The news makes me think about relationships between women. Men tend to simplify female friendships as those that involve shopping together or gossiping about men, just as we women see male bonding as mainly men getting together to get drunk.

But female relationships are much more complicated than that. As schoolgirls, we first tasted jealousy when the best friend got closer to another girl and chose to accept the latter's invitation to do the homework together. It now looks funny, but the feeling back then was genuine, strong and torturous.

A school of thought suggests that every person - man or woman - has to go through a period of homosexuality (spiritually) in the process of growing up to be prepared for interest in the opposite sex. I agree.

Men are fundamentally loners. But women need each other.

A study conducted by the University of California in Los Angeles found that when women are with girlfriends, our bodies emit a "feel-good" hormone that helps reduce everyday stress. We also start to find ourselves more beautiful.

A male rodent runs to his female partner when scientists put him in a stressful situation. Female rodents, when stressed, immediately run to the females they are raised with. Many women would do the same.