Friendship at forty

The Humor Lens
Nov 2 · 4 min read

I’m sure you saw this recent picture posted by Jennifer Aniston on her Instagram page.

The unforgettable Friends stars

This image somehow ended up creating a sense of longing in me and as I looked at it, I was thinking about my own past friends and wondered, where are they?

I started making a mental list of my school, college, and work friends. I have never been part of a gang like this, it’s mostly been 1:1 relationships, but really special at that point of time.

Most of these friends have drifted away, some of them physically and some of them, much more than that. Today, it’s difficult to have the kind of long conversations we used to have then. We are not able to get beyond a few sentences. Life has changed, events have occurred, and people have changed.

Today, these relationships are like those illusory images in our dreams that you want to desperately hold on to, but they dissolve into nothingness when you wake up.

A few years back, this realization that friends, whom you were so attached to, that you could hardly go a day without talking to and who knew and understood you more than your own family, have now become some distant memory, used to create a sense of melancholy within me.

But, now, I know better than that.

I understand that this is normal. I understand that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I understand that these friendships have served their time, for I can hardly imagine how I’d have survived those years without them.

Today, the value of these friendships is in the nostalgia. The value lies in the stories that I can tell my child. The value lies in the way they have contributed to something in your life, in the way you think or behave. It doesn’t even have to be that profound like building your character. It could be as mundane as teaching you how to do shopping and how to match your accessories with your clothes.

And therefore, I’ve decided to stop tarnishing those memories, calculating their unrealized potential and wondering about what they are not today, and instead think about the hope and promise that they carried, one day, not so long ago.


It’s also time to make new friends, I realize. But this is hardly an easy project. At school, we were sixty of us in one class. College hostels forced us to interact with each other, live with each other every day, and see our ugly side. There was nowhere to hide our other persona. After a few months, we realized we had made friends without even trying much. Although the workplace was a more formal environment and the likelihood of finding friends went down, I still managed to scrape a couple.

But, now, as a freelancer, working from home every day, the probability of meeting another human has become abysmal. The only people with whom I have conversations are my plumber and the cleaning lady. And, my online friends.

Inching towards forty, I also realize painfully that I have gotten much more choosey. The chance of finding someone with common interests and a similar wavelength is like finding a road with no pothole on the Bangalore roads. You’re also quite unsure whether you are intruding on the other person’s space or they want to take it to the next step. (God, this has started to sound like dating!)

How would it be if I can just put out an advertisement, I wonder? There would be no ambiguity, right?


This is how my ad would look:

Looking for a friend. If you satisfy the following criteria, swipe right.

  • Age no bar but girlfriends, please.
  • Should be able to laugh even at my terrible jokes.
  • Have to read my writing drafts every time. And be able to gush about it, always.
  • Be able to switch between profound and nonsensical talks.
  • On a similar note as the one before, switch between watching documentaries and prom-themed movies.
  • You know that I’m your 2 am friend but you never call me at 2 am because you know how much I value my sleep (probably, over food…and even the child)
  • Okay to feel jealous of each other, once in a while. Good jealous, not bad jealous.
  • Listen to me bitching about family, but never ever tell them.
  • Be able to appreciate the contentment that gossip provides, and not be one of those people who are too good to gossip.
  • Should not keep track of who called whom last and such useless trivia. Just pick up the phone and start talking, don’t even have to say hello.

As I make this impossible list, it dawns on me, finally. I’m meant to stick to nostalgia, swooning over F.R.I.E.N.D.S., and writing about finding a friend at forty, rather than actually finding one.

I give up, officially.

The Humor Lens

Written by

Looking at life through the lens of humor.

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