Adult friendships are so hard, yaar. Pinky swear!

On my second day at university in London, I sat alone at my desk, eating leftover orange peel. The astringent flavour with bits of stringy white fibre could have been a metaphor for my mental state after I had waited for one of my fellow students, even the one who seemed to have toothpaste all over his scarf, to suggest having lunch together during our break.Moving to an alien city, easing into a new job, or, in my case, returning to university is logistically challenging, but no one warns you about how difficult it is to make new friends as an adult.Medium108412876 This realization was further forced on me when, after a week of walking along university corridors to the soundtrack of my solitary footsteps, I asked my daughter how she was adjusting to her new school. With a wide grin, she said she spent all her breaks with a bunch of girls playing tag. I was also informed that tag is a great game, especially when you have a gassy stomach, as you can run far and fart, and that she had received this information from one of her new friends. When it comes to friendships, children seem to boisterously dive in and splash away, but we hold onto the pool ladder, submerging ourselves one step at a time while constantly checking the temperature.Thrilled at her great start while dismayed at my own, I decided that I would need some proven strategies if I wanted to be on the winning side of this friendship game. There was enough research to show that unlike children, we carry the weight of our past bad experiences when encountering new people. As we get older, this baggage is so large that if it were tangible, we would have to check it in at the oversize bag drop. There is also the prevalent belief that friendships should form organically.Psychologist Marisa Franco, who has written a book on friendship, suggests that people must actively pursue friends. Though this sounds more like you are trying to catch a fugitive rather than make a friend, it is further corroborated by a study published in the Journal of Personal and Social Relationships which states that people who rely on chance to form friendships tend to be lonelier.While I had been staying away from making the first move because it made me feel like Betaal trying to clamber onto the backs of varied Vikrams, this information was reassuring, and I began my pursuit of warm friendships, putting aside the real Betaal who had been sitting on my back all this time, the fear of rejection.Medium108412877 I began by chatting with my Irish neighbour while collecting our mail from the foyer table. One of the first things Finn said was, ‘Oh, you are from India! I have also recently moved from Dublin, and you know what, during this period, Boris Johnson got toppled, the Queen died, and now my old friends are asking what I will do to King Charles next.’ Amused by his joke about the uneasiness between the British and the Irish, I suggested the adult, sedentary version of tag, coffee.After multiple coffees and weeks later, when a man from the upstairs flat made a ruckus loud enough for us to peer out from our doorways, Finn asked me, ‘Do you know who that is? He was engaged to a famous actress; she was in that Princess Bride movie. He pulled off a big scam and went to prison for a few years.’‘Finn, let’s go meet him,’ I said, ‘who knows, I could get an interview for the paper or even a great short story out of it!’We devised methods of engineering an encounter with the former criminal till Finn confessed, ‘This reminds me of when I helped a journalist with information about some Russians running a visa scam. He got a great story; they cut off his little finger, but I suppose it was worth it.’While my pinky is a rather useless appendage, I have become fond of it over the years, so I hurriedly called off this particular mission.At university, before I could take the initiative, one of my classmates suggested that we spend our break reviewing our next joint presentation. I followed up by making other plans, and soon, I was part of a group of four like-minded women whom I could pester with questions about citations while chomping on soggy sandwiches in the cafeteria.Stumbling upon a study that suggested it took spending 50 hours with someone before you could consider them a friend and almost 200 hours to become best mates, I found that along with not taking rejections personally, it helped if you planned an activity that was repetitive by nature. You could join a book club or, even a cult with weekly meetings if wearing white bedsheets with cut-out eye holes appealed to you, as long as it provided multiple opportunities for engagement. Having the same courses meant that I saw my Uni group regularly, and with others, I fixed slots for walking together in the park once a week or seeing new exhibits.After the first six months, my daughter had cards with scribbled hearts where she was referred to as ‘My best friend’ by two of her classmates, and I had made a few good friends, but I had to concede that making friends as an adult is similar to being asked to play scrabble with only consonants. You have to make an effort till you get into the rhythm (which is a vowel-free word in case you do need to play this version).Meanwhile, though my friendship with Finn had been based on us behaving like we were starring in an episode of ‘Murders in the Building’, and he was perhaps disappointed that I had chosen the safety of my pinky over a story, we continued our coffee meetings even after I moved out of the building. I still remain committed to pursuing worthy friendships. After all, there is no point in having a stand-up act with the best lines in town if you have a row of empty seats facing you.