On experiencing friendlessness at 40

I miss how the women I met all the time back in India would let their guards down around me. Representation Pic/iStock

Roughly around ten days from now, I will be commemorating the five-year anniversary of my move to South Tyrol, a region whose existence was unknown to me until 2018, when I was invited to visit as part of an arts residency. The milestone nature of this moment is hard to sidestep. I remember so clearly the sense of urgency with which I was clearing my apartment back in 2020, the space in Kailash Hills that had been my home, my safe space, the site of my best moments as a host.

I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said that since my move here, I have been thriving. Though it was difficult to find avenues for earning an income in the beginning, I was able to rely on my existing networks and find lucrative work. I am now the mother of two lovely children and am perhaps more madly in love with my partner than when we married - six years ago. I have a fabulous job that helps me sustain a decent lifestyle, and I have the opportunity to nurture my passion for teaching and mentoring through my affiliation with the university. I am an even better cook than I was five years ago. The demands of motherhood, coupled with my desire to eat nutritious food, have helped me fine-tune my skills in the kitchen. In a matter of 30 minutes, I can put together a feast.

My successes have come at a huge cost: friendship, more specifically, female friendship. Involuntarily, without quite being aware of it, I have had to sacrifice the intensity of my relationships in order to make a home in this bilingual region. My friends and I belong to a certain sub-generation of millennials who have anxieties around being in touch virtually. Having two kids without a robust support group makes calling my friends out of the blue a challenging experience. Living remotely, in the Alpine part of Italy, makes it difficult for friends to visit, too. I'm lamenting this because this friendship is the one thing that compels many of us to stay put in our lives, especially when we get to our mid-30s or start to make peace with being in our 40s. Most of us tolerate the conditions of our life in big cities because of the precious interactions we have with the people who know us intimately, who would be there for us in a heartbeat, and who constitute our emotional support. When we discuss our reluctance to ‘start over' in a new place, it is because we are aware of how complicated it is to make friends as you grow older, because the circumstances of our lives change, or because we move into settings where cultural differences can become a barrier to intimacy, besides linguistic hurdles.

I moved to South Tyrol exactly a month and a half before I turned 35, in the middle of the pandemic. My stay permit restrictions, as well as the then-ongoing nature of COVID, alienated me from my family and friends back home. I wasn't able to travel fluidly between continents. When the barriers to movement eased, I was starting our family. In retrospect, I realise that I took the notion of female friendship for granted back in India. Because, wherever I want, in whatever setting, whether in a queue at a bank or a house party or a café or a restaurant bathroom, it was always ridiculously easy to meet interesting women. India is full of women who are what I call patakas, trailblazers who are constantly beating the odds, thriving despite the most toxic circumstances and lifting others up, either silently or overtly.

Five years into living in Europe, I can safely say that having such encounters is the exception, not the norm. Living amidst so much privilege, I see how patriarchy is more insidiously present. Most women I meet here are deluded into believing they don't need feminism, or they confuse having rights with being emancipated. I struggle with friendships because I don't know how to transcend the superficial nature of most interactions. I miss how the women I met all the time back in India would let their guards down around me. One meeting was enough for us to share with each other our life's histories. I know I sound naïve when I say that isn't the case over here.

My current state of friendlessness forces me to acknowledge the precious nature of my interactions back home - in Delhi, in Mumbai, in Goa, pretty much wherever I travelled in India. It's a humbling realisation to have at 40. I can count on one hand the ‘friends' I have here, and all of them were the people I knew before my move. This is wild, considering I am a fairly extroverted person. Surprisingly, I don't feel lonely, because my closest friends are a WhatsApp text away, but I dearly miss borrowing their clothes or having them braid my hair or cooking for them… the intimacies that are directly related to being physically present.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.