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Now that I am married, I might have a kid in two years, or three years. So sometimes that scares me, that having a child might make me lose out on my friendships. But I don’t think that is something that can change. But yes, we will try to hold on to each other even after my family expands. (Saloni, 31 years)

Saloni was a participant in my doctoral research on adult friendship among urban middle-class adults across the Indian cities of Jaipur, Pune, Bangalore, Thiruvananthapuram, Chennai, Srinagar and Varanasi, in 2024. As a newly married woman, she articulated anxieties that motherhood might result in her friends drifting away. She saw this as inevitable, yet hoped to hold onto them, alongside an expanding family. On a different occasion, I interviewed Saloni with one of her unmarried friends, Raima (also in her early 30s). This anxiety surfaced again in our conversation, but so did an imagined future that stretched beyond marriage and work. They talked about a third friend who was not always in touch as she was entangled in her marital life. Yet, Saloni shared her imaginations of a future with her two friends:

There was this meme a few days ago, on Instagram, or a reel or something, where these three elderly women were there in a countryside house in some other country. They were roughly 80-90 years old. I think she [Raima] shared it or I shared it. I found it very relatable. We could end up like this, and we would be happy. So even after having the full circle of life, in the end, that vision was really nice. The three of us in a countryside house, just having wine, and chilling, and cribbing about the world.

In Saloni’s imagination, her life with friends will follow marriage, children, a career, and retirement – after she progresses through the “full circle of life”. In the urban Indian contexts I worked in, and more generally across India, marriage remains a compulsory and critical life transition, especially for women. It re-organises not only residence and labour, but also moral priorities with expectations that obligations to the marital family must take precedence over other relationships. It is within this normative framing of marriage as duty, destiny and proof of social adulthood (Chaudhry, 2021), that friendships are placed as secondary.

Writing primarily in the American context, Elizabeth Freeman (2010) conceptualises chrononormativity to describe how timelines prescribe a kind of “normal” pace and sequence for life stages, structured around productivity, respectability and social legitimacy. In my participants’ accounts of marriage and motherhood, friendship loss was narrated as maturity, not as failure or neglect. This does not suggest that friendships weaken uniformly across the life course; rather, my interlocutors’ anxieties clustered around specific life stages, particularly marriage and motherhood.

Institutional structures support and reinforce this creation of meaning. What is evident is that friendship does not fade at specific life-stages because of a lack of care or commitment but because adulthood is organised around institutions that demand the reallocation of time, care, and investment away from friendship towards family and marriage. This marginalisation of friendship, however, is not uniform across adult lives. For instance, as noted in other cultural contexts, for those estranged from family or living outside normative intimacy, such as queer individuals, friendship can become the primary site of care and support (Weston 1991).

Friendship, at times, is seen as youthful excess – acceptable, as Narayan (1986) observes in her work in north India, for young, unmarried women, at a life stage when they are transitioning to marriage. Chitra (55 years), a married woman with teenage children, spoke about how her parents and in-laws would remark disapprovingly at the time she spent with friends:

I’ve seen it in my mother-in-law. They say that they are friends, they are not blood. My parents especially so. There has been a kind of a question mark, ‘who are these people who take so much of her time?’ When I introduced a close friend to my mother and I told her that she’s like my sister (emphasis mine), my mother was taken aback. She actually said, ‘as if they’re born to me?’ So, I said ‘yeah like they are born to you’.

What is being questioned here is the place of friendship itself. Anne Cronin (2015) conceptualises “restricted economy of care” to illustrate the interconnectedness of multiple forms of intimacy, and suggest how intimacy in one sphere affects intimacy in another. Institutional protections affect not only relations like marriage and family that they regulate, but all forms of intimacy, institutionally coded or not. That is, the existence of institutional protections for certain intimate forms influences the contours of all intimate forms. Cronin’s work is based in the UK, but a similar dynamic of zero-sum intimacy also operates in the Indian context through moral and social expectations that family must always come first. Institutional legitimacy is reinforced through social scrutiny and obligation.

Chitra talked about including not only her natal and marital relatives, but also her friends in her will. For her, this was a way of acknowledging the people who had sustained her emotionally across her adult life, even though her family saw them as secondary. The executor of her will is one of her friends, Meher (also in her 50s). During our interview, Meher told me:

There has to be emotional bonding, and the rest would fall in place. I still feel that this whole sexual intimacy thing is too hyped. Companionship is much more important than sexual attraction.

For Meher, friendship not coupledom, is the key to companionship. In the Indian context, the centering of marriage does not imply a centreing of the couple (Chaudhry 2021). But instead, marriage embeds individuals within extended familial obligations, where care, time and labour are expected to be devoted primarily toward one’s kin. Meher believed that friendship offers a different ethic of care: one rooted in companionship that may involve sexual intimacy, but is neither essential nor central. Meher added:

When you start off [as a married couple], you take certain responsibilities for the other, but you’re also not willing to be held at gunpoint for those responsibilities that you have taken. So, that’s where companionship comes in.

Meher’s use of “gunpoint” here is telling. She is critiquing commitments in marriage and familial relationships that are experienced as non-negotiable and obligatory rather than based on choice. For Meher, marriage, like friendship, should be built on companionship that is actively chosen, rather than on obligations that are socially enforced. 

Returning to the opening vignette, Saloni’s hope of “holding on” to her friends may be read not as a rejection of marriage and family but as valuable, if not central, at her current life-stage. Meher attempts to push this further by questioning why intimacy is organised in a way that results in friendships being rendered secondary. Friendships can sustain care and commitment without the need for institutional regulation. While the Indian cultural context prescribes and supports a deprioritisation of friendship, particularly at specific life-course stages, friendships are experienced as providing intimacy and care in ways that are not replaceable. Friendship must be understood not as youthful excess, but as a relational form that remains valuable alongside, and sometimes in tension with other relations.