Girls Just Wanna Have Friends! Story 1

Welcome to Girls Just Wanna Have Friends! This is a series of real life stories of good, bad, ugly, nasty, and beautiful Female Friendships that are crowdsourced. The contributors are anonymous. I am Nupur Saraswat, and collector and narrator of these stories.

Scene: It is 2012.

Scene: It is a house party in a bunglow in Bangalore.

Scene: All my friends are there, with their husbands.

Scene: I went out to the garden to get a smoke by myself.

Scene: He followed me there.

This has never happened before. I don’t know if it was the alcohol. But I don’t want to distract you but he touched me.

I was distraught because at the time I was flooded with thoughts of having been violated but also knowing that he was her husband.

And this was her house.

It took me a good hour to bee-line my way to her. Ask her for privacy. And between sobs, tell her that her husband had molested me. I think a part of me didn’t expect her to believe me.

After all there were no witnesses.

But she did. She believed me. I don’t mean to distract you with my surprise, but I was surprised she stood up for me.

I stayed over at her house that night and left the next morning.

Scene: They’re still together.

Scene: But we’re also still friends.

They go for marriage counselling often
She meets me on the side as often — or as often as life permits.

She made space for me then, she makes space for me now. She makes sure we never meet when they’re together, because things are complicated like that.

And I respect her for that because she found a way to hold a complexity like that.

This story is inspiring to me because it not only shows a friend being a friend but a friend believing a survivor. We know that the wife in this story has a tough decision to make. And the expected outcome for many of us is to believe that either the friendship will survive or the marriage will. But the fact is that within each of us lives a multiplicity. Love is not just the romantic kind and neither is it the only one that nourishes us and grows us. One love doesn’t have to be compromised for the other. The story simply says — there is a multiplicity in you, let it live.

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