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Sylvia Miller walked through the heavy wooden doors of the dining room at her new retirement home and looked around eagerly.

Light streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the faces of people greeting friends across their tables, catching up on the latest gossip. Servers busily set out bowls of soup and plates of bread, and the room buzzed with chatter and laughter.

She wound her way between the clumps of parked walkers to her assigned seat. The four women at her table were all about the same age and single just like her, so she hoped they would have a lot in common.

But being the new girl is never easy.

“Nobody at the table talked to me,” Mrs. Miller, now 89, recalls. “They talked all around me.”

That was two years ago, and the memory still stings.

She tried chatting about the weather, the food, anything, but her lunch companions just looked right through her, she says. She never learned why they decided to freeze her out – she was new, and she supposes that was enough to earn their scorn. She remembers keeping a smile plastered on her face through every silent meal. But inside, she fought with a growing sense of dread.

“You sit there like an idiot and nobody talks to you,” she says.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?'”

It would be nice if age smoothed the rough edges of human nature, erasing all traces of cattiness and pettiness. No such luck. As Mrs. Miller says philosophically, “People are people, and women are certainly women.”

As Canada ages, the retirement home industry is preparing for a massive influx of seniors who are looking for more support than they get living on their own, but more independence than they would have in a nursing home. Currently, about one in 10 Canadians is 65 or older; by 2031, one in four Canadians will be a senior.

The retirement home industry is preparing for this demographic high tide with a nationwide building boom.

Much as the suburbs expanded to house the baby-boom generation in its childhood after the Second World War, retirement homes are proliferating now in anticipation of the boomers' senescence.

But future retirement home residents may be in for a surprise. Rather than the dull, anaesthetized places many assume them to be, retirement homes are fraught with the same jealousies and bad behaviour as any close social environment. And cliques abound.

There are geographic and linguistic cliques at the Terraces of Baycrest, an 11-storey retirement home in north Toronto: the Montrealers, the Hungarians, the Romanians.

There are the cliques everyone respects, such as the Holocaust survivors who gather to share stories every Friday night after Shabbat dinner.

And there are the cliques that stir envy, and maybe even resentment. Jean Goldstein, 86, and her husband, Milton, 87, share a lunch table with two other couples. All of them are in relatively good health (the key word being “relatively” – Mr. Goldstein has survived a stroke, heart attack and cancer). The male halves of all three couples can still drive, which is a huge deal. Much like in high school, a driver's licence is a membership card to the cool kids' club, conferring freedom at a time when it's in short supply. And in a world of widows, having a live husband who drives is the equivalent of dating the varsity quarterback with a sweet Mustang.

“They probably hate us,” Mrs. Goldstein says.

Not that she and her lunch friends are snobby: Mrs. Goldstein participates in a dozen different clubs, and another couple at her table play host to movie nights every week. But their efforts may reek of noblesse oblige to those who are less blessed with health and companionship.

And just like in a John Hughes movie, everyone knows who's from the wrong side of the tracks. Some Terraces residents have their rent, which starts at $3,264 a month for a bachelor apartment, subsidized by the government, while most pay out of their own funds. Of course, nobody officially knows who's who, but even with failing eyesight residents can tell a Coach handbag from a Wal-Mart knockoff.

“Some of the wealthy ones, they're cliquey. They stick together,” says Rebecca Hoch, a 96-year-old Scotswoman. “Not all, but some.”

Cliques are such a problem that some long-term care facilities have hired outside consultants to work with residents on busting up the exclusive groups.

Maureen Osis offers clique-dismantling services as part of her Calgary long-term care consulting company, ElderWise. At one facility where she worked, long-time residents were snubbing newcomers, especially those with physical disabilities. Ms. Osis started a newcomers' club and gave the newbies a pep talk on standing up for themselves: Do you think, she asked them, that wheelchair athlete Rick Hansen would allow anyone to treat him like a second-class citizen?

“Hell, no,” one man responded.

Then Ms. Osis met with the old guard and told them to knock it off, though she couched the lecture in terms of human dignity and respect.

Often, staff use more subtle means to bridge social gaps. At one retirement home, Ms. Osis says, a new resident loved cribbage, but the established crib-playing groups all told him they didn't have room for one more.

“He was feeling left out,” she says. So a social worker set up a round-robin cribbage tournament in which everybody could play – including the new kid.

“That broke the pattern,” she says.

Most retirement homes look like a bland sea of grey-hairs to the outside eye. But that appearance masks very real differences in life experiences, taste in music, language, sense of humour, class and education.

“It's a very diverse community,” Terraces social worker Shawn Fremeth explains. “One of the things everyone has in common is they're in the older end of the age spectrum, but that doesn't really tell you much.”

Some elderly people hesitate to invest too much in new relationships, because friends constantly get sick and move away or die. Others say their new friends feel more like acquaintances, a paler version of the bonds they formed with their old friends over years of work and child-rearing.

But almost everyone wants friends, and research has proven that lacking a social network can be hazardous to your health. A teenage outcast can at least anticipate a life beyond the narrow world of high school. But if you can't make friends in a retirement home, you don't have much to look forward to.

Terraces social worker Heather Lisner-Kerbel remembers an elderly woman who came to her in tears one day.

“She asked, ‘Why won't people come over to tea? Heather, what's wrong with me?'”

A down-to-earth woman with curly red hair, Ms. Lisner-Kerbel wasn't sure how honest she should be – should she tell the woman that people avoided her because she was prone to scary mood swings? The psychiatrist at the Terraces advised her to tread cautiously, as the woman was emotionally fragile and unprepared to hear the harsh truth.

So Ms. Lisner-Kerbel introduced the woman to a single man at the Terraces, also lonely, who happened to have some cognitive impairment. The woman's temper tantrums rolled off his back, and his memory problems meant he didn't hold grudges.

For her part, the woman enjoyed helping her new friend get to programs and remember things: Their friendship made her feel useful again, which meant fewer bad moods.

“We're trying to build up their confidence,” Ms. Lisner-Kerbel says, and friendship “makes a vast difference.”

The Terrace's team of three social workers perform these minor miracles all the time. They help newcomers adjust to retirement home living, negotiate truces among bickering family members, lead activities such as discussion groups and a drama club, comfort residents who are grieving lost loved ones, and referee disputes over who's hogging the laundry machines.

Deciding where new residents should sit in the dining room is one of their most sensitive responsibilities. Social workers huddle to determine which table a newcomer should be assigned: It's sort of like planning a wedding reception crossed with a professional sports draft. Diagrams are involved.

When the matchmaking works, it's magic. Mrs. Hoch lights up when she talks about the women at her lunch table, which she insists is the best in the dining room.

“Other tables think we're the crazy table,” she says, what with all the giggling and the chatter. “I love that table.”

But sometimes, the social workers' best efforts fall flat. When Mrs. Miller got the Mean Girls treatment at her table, she didn't complain. A native of Hamilton, she didn't know anyone in Toronto except her two sons. She adores them, of course, but they have jobs and families of their own. As Terraces program director Sheila Smyth says, “Kids do not a social life make.”

Mrs. Miller busied herself with decorating her new apartment, filling it with elegant white furniture. She's not one to mope.

“You learn that sitting in your room crying is not going to help you,” Mrs. Miller says. “We've all done that in our day.”

Rescue from social Siberia came one day when another woman heard Mrs. Miller's name and realized that their husbands had worked together. Though they hadn't met before, the woman introduced herself and they started talking.

“I was really ready for a good friend. She had me moved to her table,” Mrs. Miller says. That led to more introductions and an invitation to play bridge with a group of women who have become her confidantes.

At last, she felt she'd found her place.

“Then,” she says, “life became very easy.”

Rx: Friendship

Researchers have recently discovered that social connections affect our health much more than previously thought. Friendships have been shown to extend life spans, speed healing from heart attacks and protect against the common cold.

The benefits are particularly noticeable toward the end of life, when a strong social network can help make the difference between happy, healthy golden years and a lonely, ailing decline.

Some friendship-related health findings:

An Australian study of more than 1,500 people older than 70 found that those who ranked in the top third in terms of having strong friendships were 22 per cent less likely to die over the decade than people in the lowest third. (Close family relationships didn't show the same longevity benefits.)

A U.S. study of patients hospitalized for heart attacks found that 38 per cent of those without a social support network died in hospital, compared with only 11 per cent of those who had good social support.

A study of nearly 3,000 Dutch people aged 55 to 85, found that high and even moderate amounts of emotional support can halve the risk of dying.

In 1997, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh asked 276 people about their social lives, then exposed them all to a cold virus. People with fewer social ties were four times more likely to come down with a cold than people with many friends, family members and acquaintances.

In helping a relative build a new social network, experts say to keep your expectations in check. One or two good friends is enough: A reserved senior is not going to become a social butterfly overnight.

"Understand their pace," says Sheila Smyth, program director for the Terraces of Baycrest. "They might not want to be at all the activities."

If you want to help, offer to attend some programs or meals with your elderly relative. Grandchildren are a great icebreaker as well. But remember, as Ms. Smyth says, "Kids do not a social life make."

Rebecca Dube