Female Friendship: The 40s Made Me Rethink Midlife & Misogyny
Female friendship is flattened by patriarchy’s demands. Post 40, I’m finding other women seeking mindful connection & the ability to moderate.
Early on, I gravitated towards friendship with boys and men. The male gender epitomised the living; the female gender presented only in shackles and worries. There were a hundred permissions to be sought, a thousand rituals to be followed for friendship with a female person. These negotiations were always subject to being discarded for other relationships.
There are no benefits for a woman to choose a female friend. The pati, parmeshwar, family and society, in general, are bottomless pits of demand. Name one tale of female friendship from either mythology or popular culture in India that passes the Bechdel test. Q.E.D.
Warzone Etiquette: The Cost Of Being Her Friend
Raju Tai’s newsletter edition is titled ‘OMG Same! and other problems with female friendship’. It gave me a jarring but definite direction to think in. How do two people who have been decimated into dependency build their own selves up while accepting collaboration and without exploitation? Female friendships invariably become mutual trauma swapping, taking turns to dump the endless pain that we are forced to swallow. We need an intervention. It seems to be taking midlife for us to realise we need to make the time and space to shape the nature of friendship with other women. It can’t be the bathroom drain for our survival woes.
Last week I was targetted in what nobody is willing to acknowledge was a gendered attack. I call it that because it started with mansplaining and ended with multiple people telling me to stop calling it out while excusing the perpetrators.
A female friend asked me why I was being egoistic and couldn’t just say sorry. Why, I asked her, should I apologise? “Because it’s better for your mental health.” was her answer. She believes it. She was harassed by the same perpetrators because of her proximity to me. So in addition to surviving the attacks, now I must choose between being true to myself or being her friend.
Facing 40 alongside a pandemic made me have to face some big insights. I realised that I haven’t liked many of the women who occupied the position of ‘friend’ in my life. I doubt most of them had true affection for me. There’s a reason the term ‘frenemy’ calls to mind two women breaking each other and also patching each other up.
There is no room in this singular limited definition of female friendship for someone like me who prefers to heal alone. It confused the saviour complexes of women who didn’t know they carried them. They felt denied of something they’d had to scrabble for while the men ate heartily of it – power. And so they started to tear down a woman they couldn’t fathom to say it, say it, say it – you need me to heal you.
I find men very confused when women hurt each other. Most of them live life in such binaries as friend and enemy. “Why would she do that?” they wonder. Because I say, that is how women are with each other. We are in a warzone, carrying mere teeth & nails while being surrounded by tear gas and militancy. Friendly fire is a given.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
Distilling Friendship Through People’s Barriers: Duck When The Kindness Runs Out
I recently met an old college classmate who has gone on to live a life of steady respectability that was not my journey – husband, kids etc. She admitted that she was feeling a lot of rage these days. How long am I supposed to take everyone’s shit and stay the calm, serene one? she asked. Good for you, I thought, it’s about time the real you starts to express herself.
But when the talk turned to my life, she was cruel, judgemental and dismissive. I saw the derision in her face when I talked about my mental health and love life challenges.
“If I were your therapist, I would tell you to become more spiritual.”
she said. It stung. It was an unpleasant flashback to another girlfriend’s spitefulness when we were in our 20s. That one held her male admirer count and eventually marital status above my head like it made her superior to me.
Yet, this friend is not that one. This one’s rage rises from pain that is real (not some adolescent pettiness). Her midlife crisis is realising that our gender got handed a horrible deal. It has to be difficult for her to witness me, who started fighting it early on and am still having to fight. I absorbed the pain of that earlier younger friend, letting it poison me and us both. I know better now. It allows me to go beyond her words & understand her.
I wish this friend hadn’t been cruel. But now I can see that cruelty is weakness. And this weakness I have empathy for, that’s what it means for me to be her friend. I will not meet her for sometime to give her time to make her peace with her realisations of the world and gender. To be her friend, I must also be a friend to myself. This means not exposing myself unduly to those who are cruel to me, regardless of what they are facing. It also means taking the time that I need to feel safe around her again.
I am just as sensitive to hurt as I was at 20 but the years have brought me lessons in boundary and nuance. The biggest gift has been choice. The choice to choose what I treat as lesson and what I discard as poison. And if I evolve as a person with age, perhaps I become a better friend also.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
The Friendship That Grows With Me: The Things I Won’t Ask
Over an annual ‘just us girls’ dinner, a girlfriend told me that she had been offered a promotion and that she would have to move to Singapore. If we had been in a more spacious place, I would have leaped up and hugged her. My first thought was to not be selfish about having to say bye to her when she moved to a new country but to celebrate this with her. And I told her so, ending with, “I’m going to miss you but this is really great. You were starting to feel stuck a bit, weren’t you?” To my surprise, she misted up. Then after a deep breath she said,
“Ramya, thank you so much for not asking me how my husband was going to cope!”
That had not even occurred to me. Her husband doesn’t feature in my mental landscape aside from being well, her husband. When I paused to consider what she was saying, I concluded that I still didn’t have that question. Her husband is nearly 50, occupies a senior management position in a prestigious multinational company. Why would her career be something that he had to ‘cope’ with?
She told me that the question had been every single person’s reaction, including from her very progressive and educated Bengali family. This couple has children. These kids have two parents. Would anybody have asked how she was going to cope if he had moved for career reasons?
I’ve sometimes wondered what has kept us friends for nearly two decades despite having conflicting dynamics with other people. This is why. We see each other the way we want to be seen. We are not appendages to other people. At the same time, our relationships are treated as important factors in our lives to talk about and listen about. I am friends with her, not with the roles she plays as wife, mother, senior professional. And she’s friends with me, the person, not the blogger, writer, single woman etc. But I guess that needs a solid knowledge of who one is and the unwillingness to make that someone else’s job. Some friendships are easy and that’s a good realisation too to have in my 40s.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
We’re Not Sisters & That’s The Point
Some time ago, a friend leapt into my messages with a cry of help. She said she was facing domestic violence. In the ensuing weeks, I offered support by checking in on her and listening as she spilled years worth of pain. With these complex emotions tumbled out lingering resentments against family, former friendships as well as her partner. I began to find her demands on my time and attention very draining. She would call at any time of the day or night. She’d hang up abruptly, an action I’ve never been able to condone in people. There would be alarm messages that she wouldn’t follow up on or respond to for days. There were contradictions in what she had said as well as erasure of my problems.
I tried telling her about my struggles with anxiety, asking her to be more mindful about how she asked for my support. She’d always apologise then repeat the pattern. I realised that this is what happens when someone confuses my friendship with automatic familial obligation.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
I’m reading Coco Meller’s Blue Sisters which opens with the following diatribe. This viciously dismissive line put me off the book for months. But it contains a kernel of truth in it. Friendship, unlike siblinghood, is a conscious choice. It has a getting-to-know the other period. It is also a social contract that does not allow you to take the other for granted in the same way that blood bonds do. Because there is no ‘exiting from the same birth canal’ or ‘sharing a DNA’ or other such nature-based bonds, friendship is a relationship that needs constant and conscious nurturing and renewal.
“A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? You don’t choose each other, and there’s no furtive period of getting to know the other.”
‘Blue sisters’, coco mellors
In my last post about friendship, I talk about how Indian men are not taught how to make friends. But I think the larger issue is that friendship does not exist as valid and important in the hyperconnected, collectivist Indian culture. We try to fit more modern equations into traditional narrative frameworks. A mentor is not a guru. It bothers me when people frame all male-female bonds as either bhaiyya or saiyyan. And I’m realising that I don’t want to be a sister to other women. I’m a friend and that is quite different.
The hard part of this is realising how many times I myself have blundered over these boundaries. Even as an only child, I’m still a product of the same enmeshed social structure. I don’t have narratives for female friendship. And younger women are demanding that I model this in ways that are convenient for the ways they navigate patriarchy.
I have been a boss and a mentor and found myself slotted into the role of older sister. It wears me down extra hard to admit to failure, defeat, confusion and even less fewer achievements that some of these women.
On the other side, I see some of them trying to keep this fragile bond alive the way they would with men. By pandering to my ego, by trying to subsume themselves. And that hurts because I never want another person (let alone another woman) to reduce herself to make me happy. We need new stories for how friendship between women happens, instead of mirroring our relationships with men or fitting it into familial bonds.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
Female Solidarity, Not Quite Friendship
Two my specialist doctors are women. They are both of my generation. I see the difference in how they interact with me versus the other professionals that I pay for their services. I have asked each of them if it would be appropriate and if they would be comfortable if I thought of them as a friend. Their answers are complex because of course that question is not a simple one.
There’s a special kind of medical professional who doesn’t just treat you like an organ to be treated but as a human being going through a journey. It makes a world of a difference when the person who talks to you about birth control or anxiety medication also holds your hand through testing a scary lump or the impact that the Kolkata doctor rape case had on us all. I credit my journey through mental health issues to their medical knowledge but also the compassion and female solidarity that these women have shown me.
Solidarity does not have to be friendship and it’s something unquantiafiable so transcends transaction. We, as women need it. Maybe we don’t need to seek it out in the same places we look for companionship or security or validation.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
Gathering Women Who Laugh Like Banshees
Clubhouse showed me the joy of mature female friendships. I became friends with women with whom I wouldn’t usually have crossed paths. One that grew up in a city and culture so like mine but because she’s Pakistani, we may never meet in real life. Another was a skirt-wearing basketball player in the 90s in a small Hindu pilgrimage town in North India and lives a quiet, complex life as a political wife now. Yet another pushed back against the patriarchy and hate politics of her land and has had to move away from her profession and home for safety; she talks poetry with a curious laugh in her voice.
These conversations were only possible after we had each endured the predations of our teen years, the false promises of our 20s, the heartbreaking compromises of our 30s and have another exhausting few decades to look ahead to. We talked about poetry and books and childhood laughter and adolescent longing and adult compromises. Our conversations spanned Mumbai, Lucknow, Karachi, Montreal, Istanbul, Chicago, Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai. We traversed Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Punjabi, Bengali and English. These women see me as I crave being seen and we have never met in real life.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
Of late, I’ve been at the receiving end of offers of such meaningful friendships from other women. Oh joy, joy, joy, what a joy it is to finally not be the only one. Women who are seeking meaningful connections beyond their familial and community structures. Women who want conversations that pass the Bechdel test. Women who want to laugh raucously and not prettily. Who want to rage with froth in the mouth and laugh like banshees afterwards even as we cry at the fact that there is no real solution. And who will equally see these as moments of their lives well-spent and beloved.
A longtime friend told me about another woman that she had formed a friendship with through work. She ‘matched us up’ over drinks because we were all in our 40s, in various stages of relationships and with a shared interest in living, laughing and loving. Another friend forwarded a request from his friend who had been reading my blog for a long time and finally asked him to connect us. Yet others approach me tentatively after events.
I have began seeding sweeping statements and touching confessions alike at book events (which are my social activities now that have some balance of the genders). And now I write with renewed unapologetic fervour, even telling my AI writing assistant to stop asking me to tone it down for fear of alienating ‘certain readers’. I know my words will inflame the ever-present hatred of the men in the room. But they will also reach the eyes and ears of women, many of whom will never interact with me. But some of them will find their way to others like themselves. And a small handful will watch my Stories and send ❤️s nobody else sees or ask a common friend to introduce us after months of silently reading my posts. They are worth braving the ugly misogynists.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
This is part 2 of a two-part series that examines friendship after 40.
Part 1 is titled ‘A Post-40 Primer On Friendship With Men: Hope & Betrayal’.