Flattening the ‘friendship curve’

Midlife Blues

In the many mellow moments of my midlife, I have often contemplated the fact that I don’t have a Best Friend. You know, the proverbial 3 AM friend that you fervently speed-dial, sniffling pitifully to explain very little but still be fully understood; the kind that, when all your ducks are not in a row in your mind, all your dots are connected in theirs. I do not even have the streaming gallery of Best Friend Forever’s my tween daughter has, each of whom must be solemnly ‘accessorised’ with one half of a heart on a locket. Moreover, everyone else my age seems to have flauntingly found their One Best Friend, many, a long time ago, and some, even before they learned to spell.

Some years ago, I fancied I had found my Best Friend—a woman, a little bit more into her midlife than I, similar backgrounds, different circumstances, with a seemingly large capacity to hold all my cat-walking contradictions, as I hoped to hold hers. Our initial chemistry was like love at first sight on a blind date; she even recorded a midnight-special poem on my 45th. But as they say, for anything good to last, it must take its time to happen, except if it’s bad, like a pandemic or a heart attack. Sure enough, after the initial delirious delight of many ‘you too’s’, and the breathless disclosures of both old and new memories to quickly build a base cache of confidences over coffee dates, the fizz in this Best Friendship fizzled out as suddenly as it had bubbled up. Poof. All the right ingredients were there, in generous quantities too, and the best intentions, and the effort. We even lived just a short drive away from each other. Naturally, I wondered what had happened, or not, for such a spectacular fail.

Since this small saga occurred sometime before the pandemic, I chinned up to treat these forays into new friendships like start-ups do bad business ideas—fail fast, get up and go, and keep experimenting with more. But who knew the tsunami of Covid-19 was coming at us all, and that it would change our relationship with all our relationships—with work, our co-workers, our spouses, partners, children, siblings, parents, our homes, with ourselves. The ship is wrecked, and with it, also our friendships, even the fastest of them. In their flexibility was also their fragility, those Lockdown One cocktails on Zoom notwithstanding.

In hindsight, it seems that we may have mistaken our ability to be available in our full, unmasked physicality as acts of friendship. How else do I explain the numerous Friday evenings that I have dressed up to mark my presence at gatherings that left me hungover, with excessive wine and endless whining, both of which we had indulged in before a thousand times? And all those Saturday evenings I have dressed up my home to receive ‘friends’ who have then fiddled with their phones taking away with them very little but a few photographs of false bonhomie and over-familiarity for Facebook? Maybe the only fellow who called it right was the security guard at my condominium’s gate when he announced these friends as merely ‘Visitors’.

But my fascination with this aspect of our increasingly fickle lives continues, and as it is now safe to assume that we are unsafe for the foreseeable future, where do we go from here? Do we now have to go for broke alone? I think not. I hope not, please, God of Pandemics, no. Can we again do just as the start-ups do, look at the colossal collapse of our former lives as a cashable opportunity?

The answer to finding abiding friendships may lie in those Zoom calls after all, but those we do for work: in their precision, starting with the correct selection of invitees. Some, for whom our lives were just an amble in an amusement park, must now be classified as optional. The pandemic even offers us a chance to deny these ‘visitors’ re-admittance into our worlds. And some carefully chosen others we can now welcome back in with open arms, no hugs though, because they never left the party till the dishes were done?

The Covid-19 curve will continue to be like a yo-yo, but the friendship curve has flattened. It is now up to us to find the upsides.

(Indu Anand gives melancholic one-star reviews to marriage, motherhood, most men, and midlife)