Understanding the critical role of friendship through the lens of queerness.
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Shah Rukh Khan really screwed me over when he said “pyaar dosti hai” (love is friendship).
The sentence, left alone by itself, is majestic, even revolutionary.
But the rest of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai reduces the idea of friendship to what popular culture more or less imagines what ‘romantic or sexual love’ is — highly gendered relationships.
For much of my life, I went about looking for romantic intimacy as fulfilment, and hoping, as per my beloved SRK-ism, that my partner would also become my best friend. Unsurprising to anyone who has committed to therapy in their adulthood, this ended in disappointment and her favourite cousin, trauma.
It was only when I hit my 30s, that I realised that friendship is neither a stepping stone nor a consequence of romance. Friendship taught me to de-pedestalise romantic intimacy as a form of fulfilment. It also taught me to ignore the rest of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and focus on the accidental truth it stumbled upon—that love and companionship, with or without its damning sexual lens, very much is friendship.
But growing into becoming and accepting the pansexual chaos I am today helped me see queerness for how it informs and maintains authenticity in relationships, and how it radicalises friendships.
Queer friendships sit at the distinct axis of personal and social change. On Well+Good, feminist writer Sohel Sarkar defined queer friendships as: When I talk about queer friendships, I do not just mean friendships between queer-identifying people—although that is a big part of it. For me, queer friendships are essentially about connections and intimacies that refuse to conform to normative ideas of what relationships should look like.
It is in this nonconformity that friendships and queerness share common ground and inform each other. Situating friendships, not marriage or sexual partnerships, at the centre of life confronts social structures.
For example, the rules of a brahminical patriarchal system mandate marrying within caste systems, adhering to caste-specific gender roles, upholding the patriarchy, and bearing children to advance the system.
Even as queerness in practice and in concept challenges such social systems—by questioning who we choose to love, for instance—queer movements in India navigate a complex relationship with marriage. In October 2023, the Supreme Court declined to legalise queer marriage in India. The queer motivation for marriage legalisation isn’t a demonstration of conformism. Among other things, it can be a bid for safety for some queer people seeking protection from hostile families and police harassment.
While I protest the absence of legal rights afforded to many around me, I am disillusioned by the promises of marriage. I once told my mother how painful, bizarre, and sudden it was to lose (heterosexual) friends to the altar of their marriages. My mother, in turn, warned me that I cannot count on friendships. That she had to let go of her college friends because “everyone’s priorities changed.”
I’m unsure how I will feel about her words when I am 50 or 60 years old, but at 32, I wonder if she spoke not from wisdom, but scarcity; with the sadness of having lost these friends (and they losing her) to their marriages. I hold space for her words less as caution, more lament.
Queering your friendships challenges this theft of choice.
Being queer and placing friendships at the centre of our emotional fabric is often the strongest challenge to brahminical patriarchal systems, where the gender binary dictates how we choose the people in our lives.
In Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx, researcher and writer Shilpa Phadke wrote: The scripts of heteronormativity predispose us to see only the possibility of romance when women and men connect with each other. This is as much a comment on the segregation of women and men from each other as human beings and the imposition of the gender binary; as it is a comment on the privileging of heterosexual romance grounded in sexual attraction over friendship which is, in contrast, firmly located as non-sexual.
In gendered social environments, queer friendships offer a sanctuary with the potential to flip the narrative.
A close non-binary friend’s early queer crisis lay in navigating the rules of masculine-dominant or feminine-dominant friendship spaces. They said, “Gender does play a role in how people bond with each other. Sometimes, I can be a bro just to access masculinity. Being non-binary has helped me switch between spaces in friendship when I feel femme or masc.”
“The great gift of queer forms is their potential to teach us how to receive, negotiate, and meaningfully respond to the world’s fundamental diversity,” Ramzi Fawaz, author, queer culture critic, and a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, wrote on Lithub.
In what sometimes feels like an emotional hustle culture economy (i.e. must know all the answers), to me, the promise of friendship affords the luxury to pause, examine, and rearrange how I express parts of myself with existing systems—companionships, gender or otherwise.
Shah Rukh Khan really screwed me over when he said “pyaar dosti hai” (love is friendship).
The sentence, left alone by itself, is majestic, even revolutionary.
But the rest of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai reduces the idea of friendship to what popular culture more or less imagines what ‘romantic or sexual love’ is — highly gendered relationships.
For much of my life, I went about looking for romantic intimacy as fulfilment, and hoping, as per my beloved SRK-ism, that my partner would also become my best friend. Unsurprising to anyone who has committed to therapy in their adulthood, this ended in disappointment and her favourite cousin, trauma.
It was only when I hit my 30s, that I realised that friendship is neither a stepping stone nor a consequence of romance. Friendship taught me to de-pedestalise romantic intimacy as a form of fulfilment. It also taught me to ignore the rest of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and focus on the accidental truth it stumbled upon—that love and companionship, with or without its damning sexual lens, very much is friendship.
But growing into becoming and accepting the pansexual chaos I am today helped me see queerness for how it informs and maintains authenticity in relationships, and how it radicalises friendships.
Queer friendships sit at the distinct axis of personal and social change. On Well+Good, feminist writer Sohel Sarkar defined queer friendships as: When I talk about queer friendships, I do not just mean friendships between queer-identifying people—although that is a big part of it. For me, queer friendships are essentially about connections and intimacies that refuse to conform to normative ideas of what relationships should look like.
It is in this nonconformity that friendships and queerness share common ground and inform each other. Situating friendships, not marriage or sexual partnerships, at the centre of life confronts social structures.
For example, the rules of a brahminical patriarchal system mandate marrying within caste systems, adhering to caste-specific gender roles, upholding the patriarchy, and bearing children to advance the system.
Even as queerness in practice and in concept challenges such social systems—by questioning who we choose to love, for instance—queer movements in India navigate a complex relationship with marriage. In October 2023, the Supreme Court declined to legalise queer marriage in India. The queer motivation for marriage legalisation isn’t a demonstration of conformism. Among other things, it can be a bid for safety for some queer people seeking protection from hostile families and police harassment.
While I protest the absence of legal rights afforded to many around me, I am disillusioned by the promises of marriage. I once told my mother how painful, bizarre, and sudden it was to lose (heterosexual) friends to the altar of their marriages. My mother, in turn, warned me that I cannot count on friendships. That she had to let go of her college friends because “everyone’s priorities changed.”
I’m unsure how I will feel about her words when I am 50 or 60 years old, but at 32, I wonder if she spoke not from wisdom, but scarcity; with the sadness of having lost these friends (and they losing her) to their marriages. I hold space for her words less as caution, more lament.
Queering your friendships challenges this theft of choice.
Being queer and placing friendships at the centre of our emotional fabric is often the strongest challenge to brahminical patriarchal systems, where the gender binary dictates how we choose the people in our lives.
In Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx, researcher and writer Shilpa Phadke wrote: The scripts of heteronormativity predispose us to see only the possibility of romance when women and men connect with each other. This is as much a comment on the segregation of women and men from each other as human beings and the imposition of the gender binary; as it is a comment on the privileging of heterosexual romance grounded in sexual attraction over friendship which is, in contrast, firmly located as non-sexual.
In gendered social environments, queer friendships offer a sanctuary with the potential to flip the narrative.
A close non-binary friend’s early queer crisis lay in navigating the rules of masculine-dominant or feminine-dominant friendship spaces. They said, “Gender does play a role in how people bond with each other. Sometimes, I can be a bro just to access masculinity. Being non-binary has helped me switch between spaces in friendship when I feel femme or masc.”
“The great gift of queer forms is their potential to teach us how to receive, negotiate, and meaningfully respond to the world’s fundamental diversity,” Ramzi Fawaz, author, queer culture critic, and a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, wrote on Lithub.
In what sometimes feels like an emotional hustle culture economy (i.e. must know all the answers), to me, the promise of friendship affords the luxury to pause, examine, and rearrange how I express parts of myself with existing systems—companionships, gender or otherwise.
In the Netflix show Grace & Frankie, two 70+ year old women go from a I-hate-your-guts to a I-can’t-live-without-you friendship after both their husbands come out as gay, divorce Grace and Frankie, and marry each other. It is the best enemies-to-(not)lovers TV show out there (fight me). Even with two gay ex-husbands, the queerest thing about Grace & Frankie is the friendship between the protagonists (played by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin).
They defy every expectation of how a friendship, especially given their age, “should” be. As women in their 70s, they are infantilized after their husbands leave them. They worry how they would spend their senior years without a romantic partner. Grace and Frankie began as women who openly disliked each other. But in their shared sorrow, their diametrically opposite personalities found a kindred spirit and a friendship for the ages.
They leave romantic partnerships that don't allow room for their friendship to grow, break each other out of nursing homes their kids tricked them into living in, imagine a death in which they’re together in the afterlife, and to the shock of their families—create and sell vibrators designed for arthritic and senior women. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen in pop culture akin to a queerplatonic (where two queer-identifying persons have a platonic, primary companionship with each other) relationship.
Among the show’s many highlights is how they practise caregiving with each other. As old women who lean on each other quite literally (there’s an entire episode where they struggle to get off the floor; it’s a riot), the show helps question the politics of care and caregiving.
Grace & Frankie invites us to examine what ‘settling down’ could look like. Could you possibly settle down with a friend? And what does it really mean to ‘settle’?
A prized selling point in the auction of “settling down” is the promise that someone will be around to care for you. I admit: as someone who struggled with ill-health all through her late 20s I come very close to considering all the chops a conventional relationship style claims to offer when I fall sick. I’ve often had the privilege of being cared for in my partnerships. It is the dandiest thing in a domestic partnership to be handed Vicks Vapour Rub or be drawn a bath or woken up with soup when your lungs are on strike. So, this essay is far from a tirade against typical partnerships. But there is merit in questioning whether the promise of care is really met in those relationships. If it does, is the benefit equitable? A 1994 study conducted on 253 heterosexual married persons suffering from cancer showed that ‘wives provided approximately twice the hours of care that husbands provided’. 30 years later, in January 2024, IndiaSpend reported that Indian women, married and working, devote about 44 hours weekly to unpaid domestic and caregiving duties, compared to men's five hours.
An Economic Policies for Women-Led Development (EPWD) analysis of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data in May 2024 concluded that Indian women dedicate an astonishing 5.86 hours per day to unpaid care work. This is significantly higher than the 4.39-hour daily average in 30 OECD countries.
So, who really gets to be cared for? In queer friendships, the blurring of the gender binary leaves room to democratise care. Queerness can also teach us to question the nature and scale of care we might expect from sexual relationships, particularly through the lens of aromanticism and asexuality. For example: why does one expect almost parent-like care from romantic partners?
Ameya Nagarajan, writer and co-host of the podcast Fat. So? wrote in Yaari: I did not have a partner, but I had several—one to cook dinner with, one to go to karaoke with, one to run through chores with, many to throw a party with—and also all the alone time I needed. Look, I told myself, and anyone who would listen, I don’t need a boyfriend! I have companionship!
As in health, so in sickness, queer friendships serve different roles of caregiving and support.
In 2022, urban researcher, writer and queer rights activist Gautam Bhan wrote on X how friendships held him through grief: Death is bracing. It unmakes us. But take it from someone who has seen a fair share of it recently: some answers are to be found in friendship. Today in Delhi, last week in Bangalore, through all the pain, friendship held, cradled, nursed, and grieved with me.
When we grieve our loved one within existing systems of care, the unit of family is expected to rush in to carry each other through the beast of grief—as it should. But as many queer persons navigate queer loneliness and being misgendered within existing familial systems, the friends who see and love them for who they are can become a refuge, a space to be authentic even as they fall apart.
But as we grow older, we experience other everyday griefs. Vijayta Lalwani reported for queerbeat how growing old as a queer person is often lonely and burdensome. Many older queers struggle to find medical support, insurance, and physical spaces of care.
My attempt to de-romanticise existing systems of love and care also extends this lens to friendships. For friendship, too, can be complex and messy and growing older with friends may not be the fix-all I have sometimes hoped for it to be. Rhaina Cohen stated in her brilliant book The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center: Caregiving among friends doesn’t resolve the deeper structural problems that older adults tend to face toward the end of their life, including the exorbitant costs of long-term care as well as ageism that can leave them feeling invisible.
But Cohen also argued that while friendship may not completely solve these deeper issues, it is beginning to “fill the gap.” She cited studies from the U.S that show how the percentage of friends who provide care for each other, especially among queer and/or chronically ill persons, is slowly rising.
In India, the question of who gets to be cared for (even within queer circles) is, at its heart, a question of caste. Caste permeates queerness and determines who we form friendships with, and who we keep out. Writer Rajeev Anand Kushwah wrote in Mavelinadu Collective that as a queer, non-binary Bahujan individual they’ve been influenced by the “notion of a shared anti-caste consciousness, as caste mediates caring within friendships.”
They propose the idea of ‘care ethics’ that “emphasises the relationship and power dynamics between the two people caring for each other in a given space.”
They write: Many DBA [Dalit Bahujan Adivasi] queers advocate for models of partnership based on friendship rather than the brahmanical institution of caste because “caste pre-constitutes desire, curtailing its radical potential for self and societal transformation” (Ponniah and Tamalapakula, 2020).
This dynamic was reflected in Geeli Puchi in the Netflix anthology movie Ajeeb Daastaans, Aditi Rao Hydari’s character Priya Sharma chooses to uphold her upper caste status over following her heart with Konkona Sen Sharma’s Bharti Mandal.
Caste does not let you choose who you want to love. Any attempt to end any marginalisation in India is an attempt to end caste. Within existing systems that dictate who and how we love, friendship may offer space to subvert this because it is in dialogue with friends that we often cultivate room to learn and unlearn.
To quote Ramzi Fawaz again: The question for social justice movements today is how to maximize the possibilities for this kind of free exchange in the manner of friendship.
Building a life with the foundation of friendship is not a rejection of romantic or sexual companionship. It is simply the act of flattening out the relationship hierarchy.
It’s not easy privileging friendships or arranging ourselves with our friendships at the centre. But “Love is a skillset,” said Raju Behara, a genderqueer, panromantic, and neurodivergent greysexual, writer.
All through my teens and 20s, I walked around with the belief that I am incapable of healthy intimacies. But as I allowed myself to be challenged and loved by budding friendships through my late 20s, I found that I did foster health in my intimacies; the intimacy just needn’t be implicitly sexual in nature.
Socially too, people are rearranging physical intimacies. For example, friends are living together out of choice, not necessity. In November 2023, journalist Neerja Deodhar reported for Mid-Day how young urban folks are actively investing in cohabiting together, almost as the first step to growing old together. This deliberation is often seen in queer spaces.
Queer friendships allow us to explore the idea that friends have an active stake in your life decisions. They’re not just sahelis at weddings, braiding hair (although that’s fun too). You can depend on them, and seek active participation. Nagarajan wrote that when she was moving away from Delhi, a close friend told her “don’t move, stay for me.” And she stayed.
All of this makes friendship breakups excruciating. There’s already enough literature on it. According to author Harry Blatterer in the book Everyday Friendships, the freedom of friendship lies in its position between private and public spheres, where friends can challenge both public norms and private secrets—as we often historically see in the private and public lives women occupy together. The loss of this intimacy can be devastating.
In queer friendships, this loss, I think, is even more pronounced. To completely misquote Spiderman—with a great attempt at reframing intimacy comes great pain. As misfits trying to patch together a sense of self in heteronormative cultures, losing a queer friend evicts more than comfort. It displaces safety. On some days, to me, it feels like walking through the world without skin.
But home is where the heartbreak is. Sridevi, in her heartwarming, climactic speech at the end of English Vinglish tells a married couple, “In this big world, [build] your own small world.”
What if this small world is the queering of relationships with a bunch of misfits? What if friendship is the retirement plan?
To quote from Bhan’s X thread again: Queerness, to me, is friendship - ethically, politically, legally, emotionally. Finding friends isn't easy partly because really believing in friendship - and building a life around it- isn't easy. Our collective fight must be to make it easier, imaginable, even ordinary.
The part of me that holds all Shah Rukh words as gospel still pendulum swings towards being a romance-bro every now and then, but with queerness, I’ve since inverted his life-changing dialogue to—
Dosti hi pyaar hai.
Friendship is love.
Shruti Sunderraman (she/her) is a journalist, writer, editor and strategist who splits her time between Bombay and Bangalore. She’s worked in culture, health, gender and science across publications over the last 10 years.
Jose (she/they) is a non-binary illustrator from Kerala whose work highlights personal stories marked by gender, body experiences and their south-Indian heritage. While not lost in their sketchbook, they can be found devouring all things camp and horror.
Visvak (he/him) is a writer, editor, and teacher based in Goa.
Ankur Paliwal (he/they) is a queer journalist, and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.
