Unwritten love story of female friendships

Buried in my phone live WhatsApp groups called Sole Sisters and Bag Ladies and half a dozen others with delightfully cringey, punny names. Cumulatively, these groups are roughly 500 women deep. I've met, at best, maybe a dozen of them.

And, yet, I can tell you with a fair degree of accuracy, who among these familiar-but-faceless women is struggling with caregiving responsibilities for a narcissistic mother who just won't let up. Which one is burnt out by an ADHD child. How many have fallen out of love with their husbands. And who all uninstalled their dating apps for the 36th week in a row after their 228th run-in with a married man tediously quoting Rumi and sermonising about marriage being a social construct. The women in these groups have helped each other crack interviews, start SIPs, rehome shoe/pet/plant babies, build apps and appetisers and, on occasion, even fed and clothed each other.

In my 20s, I mythologised romantic love, built my entire emotional architecture around the idea that it is the main event. The meet-cute, the discovering of each other's eccentricities and peccadilloes (and problematic exes that give you pause), the soft and hard launches, the nail-biting will-they-won't-they (and by that I obviously mean both sets of vaguely disappointed parents who think their simple-minded spawn deserves better than what they've chosen for themselves), the invariable separation (because every good love story needs a cliffhanger), the ring and, finally, the choking declarations of finally finding the person who "completes" you and is your "everything".


But the thing about trying to complete someone and being their everything is that it's a fantasy. And it is profoundly draining. Love requires equal partnership. Parenting needs you to be a bottomless container. Work asks you to be efficient. Friendship is possibly the only relationship that welcomes the slightly unhinged, unfinished version of the person lurking beneath the competent-adult exterior.

Our True Better Halves

Which is why, now, in my 30s, I have far more appreciation for the people who have been doing the actual heavy lifting. The ones who watch us go through more personality changes in a decade than Ranbir Kapoor has managed in his entire filmography (so far), who are our cheerleaders through three career pivots, who saw us at our most diminished- sedated with grief or humiliated by failure -and still chose to stay. They're really the ones we should be introducing as our "other half" to the world.

The friend who, at 18, smoked beedis with me outside the principal's room as a form of silent protest for something that seemed like a good hill to die on for two rebels without a cause during a college trip, is still, at 38, the one who determinedly floods her phone book with my fledgling business's catalogue while waiting for her mammogram.

Another one has flown across continents on little notice because "something felt very off" when I suddenly stopped responding to texts for a fortnight. No judgement, no leapfrogging to bitchy interpretations, just a gut that said, "that's not normal", which ultimately resulted in "I'm here" at 2 am with five ice creams and the kind of hug that glues something-you don't yet know what-back together.

Council Of Women

One of the most delightful things about getting older is that if you do it right, you end up with a small council of scarily competent, gossipy-but-not-judgy women who will organise themselves around your crises, combat-ready, wielding Tupperwares and enough packets of Electral because obviously you need to be reminded to eat and drink and at least brush your teeth and hair, if you can't be bothered to shower, because you're not a heathen. There's more romance in their no-nonsense presence than the collective poetic oeuvre of all the men I've encountered in the dating world.

Men do all of this, too, but while studiously pretending they're doing nothing at all. An ex and his best friend maintained their own two-decade-old friendship built almost entirely on cricket statistics, aggressive mockery and a shared refusal to ever say the words "I love you, man" without immediately following it with an insult. Unlike my WhatsApp groups with long, verbose paragraphs providing context for the life event currently being dissected and equally sturdy walls of texts dedicated to the pursuit of ferreting out subtexts and undercurrents, his have subsisted almost entirely on memes, cricket/football arguments and the occasional four-word check-ins. For 11 years!

Women narrate their closeness. Men, pressured into emotional impermeability early in their lives, often build intimacy through the shared absurdity (and comfort) of doing something pointless together for decades. Both, I've come to appreciate, are expressions of love. One just comes bearing better voice notes.

Romantic love, for all its theatre, exists largely to convince you that you were chosen-that one person looked at the field and picked you over everyone else. And, of course, it feels good to be chosen.

But friendship never bothered with the audition. It just kept showing up, on its own schedule-mammogram texts, 2 am ice cream, four-word check-ins-sometimes after years of near-total silence, refusing, rather rudely, to make a big deal of itself. Maybe that's the real reason it never got its own love story. We didn't bother to write it down because it was never trying to be literature. It was just trying to get us to Saturday.

Sonali Kokra is a Mumbai-based writer