How do you create a web of friendships who will cushion you?

Here is your life right now.  You live in a building or a villa community with about 60 other homes. You know your neighbours in the Hi-Hello kind of way. It’s been fine so far. You are busy at work. You get together for dinner or beer with friends all over town. But now, you’ve realized — maybe after a minor heart scare or a soul-crushing breakup that you need real friends. Not the kind who “like” your Instagram story but a ‘soul-tribe’ who will show up when your life explodes or implodes. You need companions in the oldest Latin sense of the word: someone to break bread with on a regular basis.  Com means with and Panis means bread.  What do you do? Well, start with bread, or chai or (my preference), samosas. Start with live meetings rather than texting.

How do you make friends in your fifties? How do you convert acquaintances into friends? Do you need to?

The third question in my opinion is the most crucial. It is what I hope to convince you about. Do you need friends? For some of us, the answer will be No.  For my Dad, his wife and kids were enough. Being an introvert, he didn’t know or care to make friends. When he got old, he rented an apartment in the building where my brother and I live. We became his daily companions and it was enough. 

This is true for many of us. Our spouse is our BFF and our kids become our lifelines. We have many acquaintances: people we can call upon for business deals and connections. We have friends of course: from school and college, but they live all over the world, and we have sort of lost touch. Making new friends? Where’s the time, yaar? With traffic jams, who can make the effort to meet regularly? As for sharing, why would you wash your dirty linen in public? What if it gets misconstrued, misrepresented, and worst of all shared with the world? Better to hold it together and hold it in.

Today, we present a bright and cheerful front for the world. We post glamorous photographs of our perfect life on social media. But when life hurts us as it always does, we are not sure who to call or how to cope. Changing this requires two things: being open to sharing your vulnerabilities with trusted friends and the willingness to give and take help. 

It also requires humility in that you need to internalize that how you think is not the only way; and that your values are not definitive.  This, I have found, is the hardest to do because most of us normalize our approach to life and dismiss every other approach as so boring or so weird or not my kind of people. To make friends, you need to rethink this self-centric view of the world. “Everything is not about you, Ma,” say my kids. Everything is not about my way either.  

India, as a culture, is remarkably open to sharing. The web of society is still strong here, and so everyone knows your business, and according to my kids, everyone is in your business. While I used to hate this as a young girl, the older I get, the more tolerant I have become. In fact, I see its virtues. I live in a tight-knit Tamilian neighbourhood in Bangalore. It is full of small homes nestled next to each other. There are no secrets here. News travels fast and if there is a death in one home, everybody shows up.

Okay, now that I have (hopefully) convinced you that you need to find and make friends, if possible within your city and ideally within your neighbourhood, what can you do?

Have tea together: Begin with an invitation to chai and samosas. Invite your neighbour(s) over. These are people who live nearby; the ones you barely know.  Ask them if they want to grab a coffee or invite them home. Mostly you want to find out if these people you’ve lived beside for 15 years are folks that you can trust and befriend. Are they emotionally available or caught up in their own crisis? Can you have a conversation with them? If at the end of the evening, you both feel bemused by this new connection but are able to say, “Let’s do this again,” that’s a great start.

Send out a feeler: The second date is harder. This is when you open emotional topics. Women are better at this than men, who can go an entire lifetime talking to friends about cricket scores and stock prices. But as you get old, philosophy, feelings and spirituality matter, so let out a feeler. Maybe you say, “I feel so lonely now that my kids have left home.” If your neighbour says, “Yes, me too.  Sometimes I feel that my life has no purpose,” then you are making progress.  If they laugh nervously and talk about how the newspaper delivery man isn’t showing up on time, then maybe you need to find another soul-tribe member.

Stop pretending: The third meeting is when you need to ditch the cool act. You know the version that you post on LinkedIn with humble-brag statements like, “Blessed to have been invited to join the board of this wonderful bank.” Well, retire her. What you are after is acceptance – of the unfiltered you. In order for that to happen, you have to reveal the real You. 

Create a cadence: In my building, a motley group of us women went out for lunch. We went around the table and said two things about each other. What emerged was revealing. Some of us were stock traders masquerading as housewives. Some taught mathematics. Some were fantastic dancers. Creating a cadence around meetings is the only way because friendship is irrigated by two things and two things only: time and effort. You cannot shortcut this. Have a monthly book club in your building. Do yoga together once a week: sharing activities is a great way to initiate or deepen a friendship. Regularity is key.

Figure out responses: Closeness comes from paying attention to what they want. Most of the time, we are so busy with what we have to say that we stop listening. Nowadays, friends are remarking at how quiet I have become. I think it is because I am processing how to become a new Me. One that is doing stuff that I have never done before.

Show up: My neighbour’s father went to the ICU for a lung issue. My Mom told me this as we walked around the building. I said I would text my friend. She said, certain things require that you show up. I didn’t visit the hospital but I called my friend, and spoke to his Dad. It was the better way. Being reliable reassures people. And this makes them open up.

You may have 500 contacts on your phone but you need five friends. These are folks who will quite literally bail you out from the police station if they have to; who will show up when you need them, and who can sense when you need them. The only way to have such friendships is to do something together and open up: sharing vulnerabilities.

Because no matter how strong you are, when things fall apart, you do need folks to say, “We’ve got you.”

Sure, you have only one life to live, but no matter what you think, you cannot live it alone. All of us are interdependent creatures who have somehow come together on this beautiful planet called Earth.