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In or Out? By Marla Paul
Someone is feeling left out of the “in” crowd. For example, Pat Moore, a school secretary, sits alone at her desk eating a salad she brought from home. Often, when she glances out the window after the lunch bell rings, she sees her colleagues heading toward the parking lot on their way to a restaurant. Although she has worked with the same people for more than a decade, Moore isn’t included in such outings. Sometimes, tears fill her eyes as she watches the group leave. “People can work with you all day long and you interact with them, but comes lunch time, you hear the office doors close, people disappear, and you’re not invited to go. “I think middle-aged women’s cliques are crueler than teenagers’,” says Moore, 54. “I’m disgusted by it.” She doesn’t understand why she’s left out. She tells herself that there are always “in” people and “out” people and she is destined to be the latter, just as she was when she was a teenager, growing up “on the wrong side of the tracks” in a small town. Female cliques — and the power they wield to trample feelings — are not just an unpleasant memory from middle and high school. These groups that are aloof to outsiders thrive in the grown-up world, too. In some ways they’re different from girls’ cliques, which help youngsters work out the social issues of late childhood and early adolescence, experts say. Still, adult women find themselves bumping into the glass bubbles of these exclusive circles in the office, parent organizations, at their kids’ schools and even at a church or synagogue. “Cliques are a part of women’s and girls’ intense desire to connect in a close way,” says Judith V. Jordan, a clinical psychologist who researches women’s relationships at the Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies at Wellesley College. “In and of themselves, groupings of women joining together with a strong sense of bonding and mutual support are not bad. “They get toxic when the focus is on the exclusion of others, which often arises when there is anxiety within the group about how loved or cared about they are.” Women usually have more skills and understanding than adolescents to cope with being left out. Still, that chilly experience hurts. “Some women take this very much to heart and believe it says something about them personally,” says Cheryl Dellasega, a professor in the humanities department in the College of Medicine at Penn State University. “It penetrates and makes them feel something negative.” Dellasega has written a book, “Mean Girls Grown Up: Adult Women Who Are Still Queen Bees, Middle Bees, and Afraid to Bees,” that will be published later this year. “We all have a great yearning to belong,” says Jordan, co-author of “Women’s Growth In Connection.” “So to be excluded creates enormous suffering.” That’s no exaggeration. A 2003 study at UCLA showed that social exclusion activates the same area of the brain that registers the distress of physical pain. When the subjects felt rejected while playing a ball-tossing game on the computer, blood flow increased to the region that relates to pain. So, hurt feelings apparently do hurt. This response may have evolved because of the importance of social bonds to human survival, says Naomi Eisenberger, a doctoral student in social psychology who was lead researcher in the study. She speculates that women are more affected by social snubs, possibly because they are more sensitive to it. Or they might just be more honest about their feelings. Eisenberger was inspired to create the study because of her own fear of rejection. She recalls telling a friend about how afraid she was of being rejected in an encounter with another woman in a position of power. The friend chided her, “It’s not like you’re going to die or anything,” Eisenberger recalls. “But I remember thinking it really did feel that way.” The belonging that women crave can have tremendous benefits. Pam Schur has belonged to a circle of four close friends for eight years. “We work out together, we celebrate birthdays together, we carpool together, we go to lunch,” says Schur, 41, a freelance writer. “If we’re going to do something, that’s the group we’re going to do it with. You know no matter what, you will be included. You can rely on that everyday contact.” Schur has other close friends from college and high school, but she feels a special connection to the members of her new crowd, whose 6th-grade daughters are friends as well. Schur is aware that cliques have a negative connotation and prefers to call her friends “a close-knit group of girls.” “We’re not into being exclusionary or snobby about it,” she says. When Schur and her friends are together at their kids’ soccer banquet, for example, they make an effort to sit with and get to know the other moms. But even when women try to be inclusive, others may perceive slights. Marjorie Wright, a former graphic designer, always invited women in the art department to join her group of three for lunch. “One of us would stand up and say, ‘Hey, it’s lunch time. Anybody want to go?’” says Wright, 41. Because the others usually declined, she stopped asking. So she was flabbergasted when a woman snidely called Wright’s lunch group “The Three Musketeers” and accused her of snubbing co-workers. Wright also learned that the woman and four other co-workers had exchanged nasty e-mails about her and believed that the group was going out to gossip about those who stayed behind. “We would go out and talk about our kids; the other group of ladies would go out and complain about us going out to lunch without them,” she says. Gloria Hodul, 50, doesn’t pine for friendships with her neighbors. “As a teenager it meant more to belong to a group, but as an adult I’m not interested in trying to be included,” she says. One of the benefits of her age, she says, is that fitting in is no longer a priority. At soccer games, when many of the parents are clustered and chatting in the stands, Hodul seeks out the other “quiet mother” sitting alone and joins her. Pat Moore, the school secretary, copes by keeping the office clique in perspective. “It’s not life and death,” she says. “You can’t say, ‘Woe is me’ and ask, ‘Why did this happen?’ Go forward.” |
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It’s happening on school dodge-ball courts all over the Triangle. It’s also happening in downtown offices.