Three types of friends you need in your adulting

I called Raj, my friend from grad school, to get information for a work project I did this week. She works for an international nongovernmental organisation, which is a repository for the data my team and I needed.

By the way, a big part of what graduate school does is give you good professional networks. Depending on the school you attend, you will be in class with captains of industry from different countries, you will share classes with experienced businesspeople, and your classmates will also be senior people in large corporations in the country.

We had a long chat with Raj – catching up on all the executive courses that have taken her abroad, how we are both clarifying our professional passions, and so on.

As we wound up our chat on the phone and later on WhatsApp, with a plan for a coffee date, I remembered how Raj and I became friends. And that takes us to the three types of friends you will need on your way to becoming an adult.

The unlikely friend

Even before I met Raj, I had decided we could not be friends. This was grad school, second semester. We shared a class with several students from an earlier cohort. And Raj was in that earlier cohort.

Just stepping into that class, I could already tell that ‘battle lines had been drawn’ between the older cohort who, in the seminar-style classroom, had arrived earlier and settled on one side of the classroom, and us, the new cohort that had to sit across.

This cold war went on for most of the semester. I am sure you are reading this and wondering – “you guys were behaving like that at the master’s level?” Here is some news: Students are just students, the level matters very little.

Well, Raj was the bigger person. She offered to help with something my group was struggling with, for a class assignment. We started talking and we never stopped. Today, besides being a friend, she is a critical professional network.

The friends you will lose

Until this very day, I can’t tell you how Lynn and I became close friends. We were the opposite of each other. In character, in action, in interests… Few people who knew of our friendship understood how we even became friends because, on the surface, we didn’t seem to have any similarities.

However, beyond that veneer, many things that connected us deeply lay – our love for reading and the draw towards intellectual thought.

Lynn taught me boundaries, by respecting my own boundaries. She taught me courage by boldly doing the things that mattered to her, even when those around her thought it was too dangerous.

She was my real-life illustration of the saying: “There are many paths in life, but the only one that matters is the one with your heart on it.” This month, I mark a little over three years since Lynn passed away. She was one of the first best friends I made as a young adult.

I know this is morbid. But if you lose a friend to death, or if you have already lost one, I find that cherishing their lives in the little things they left behind hastens the healing.

The forever cheerleader

Even though there are compelling reasons why Sheila should be absent from my life, she is always there, silently cheering me on. We have been close friends since high school. We spent four years in the same university but hardly saw each other because we were in different colleges…but she was present at my graduation.

Sheila somehow remembers important days in my life, and each time we manage to meet (which is not often), we make memories that keep us together. She reminds me of my deep passions, the yearnings of the child in me, and why I cannot abandon them.

She is the friend who smiles when she sees me acting all chilled and mature because she knows just how silly I can get. She is also the friend who knows I cannot install the long eyelashes even if I watch YouTube tutorials from Friday evening to Monday morning, but she will still get me a box full as a birthday present and laugh each time I tell her I poked my eyes trying to instal a pair.

What I am saying is, do not worry too much about losing your friends as you get older and busy. Things may not be the same as before, when you get to see every day, however, as the saying goes, true friends can grow separately without growing apart.

The writer is the research & impact editor, NMG ([email protected]).