Before a relationship becomes official, it enters a sacred place—the group chat

Once your relationship enters the group chat with your besties, that’s when the ‘Tall Hinge Guy’, ‘Broke Noida Dude’, and ‘Mr Red Shoes’ finally get promoted to being mentioned by their actual names.

Illustration: Shruti Naithani | ThePrint

Before a relationship gets soft-launched
on Instagram, it enters a rather sacred place—the group chat with close
friends. That’s where the ‘Tall Hinge Guy’, ‘Broke Noida Dude’, and ‘Mr Red Shoes’ get promoted to being mentioned by their actual names. And that’s where he
is investigated like a crime scene by a team that misses nothing, from his
pre-glow-up Facebook pictures to current LinkedIn mentions. The friend-launch
is a
rite of passage.  

You don’t have to be sure about the guy to talk about him. If you’re not
debriefing with your friends after a good, boring, or downright creepy date,
are you even dating? Our trainwrecks of love lives are completely useless if
they don’t at least entertain our best buddies. A responsible Gen Z live
tweets on dates. Sonakshi Sinha gets it. Even though she kept her now
husband a super secret for seven years, she was still posting selfies with
him on her close friends list on Instagram. 

The fastest way a
dating app conversation makes it to
WhatsApp is in the form of multiple, carefully cropped screenshots. No
matter how straightforward those texts are, sometimes it takes a village to
dissect what they really mean.   

Women like me, who can’t trust their judgment, make it everyone’s
business—from childhood buddies to workmates—to analyse their
situationships. None of my group chats will pass the Bechdel test, which is
perfectly normal. I am so sincere in sharing everything about my flings that I end up talking
about the guy I was supposed to block months ago. “How did he reach you then?” my homies ask. “He called from a new number,”
I lie. I have given so many fake new numbers to the supposedly blocked guy
that one might think he’s running some sort of cartel. 

Validation or a tight slap

When juggling multiple nameless prospects, stories can get confusing but
real friends keep up with the lore. And you’re not fully immersed in it if
you have to ask “which one?” every time a new incident is reported about any
of them. 

Even with all the online love calculators and perfectly agreeable tarot
card readings, the wisdom of besties is unmatched. They know your dating
history by heart and the exact shade of red flag you always end up falling
for. Whether it’s validation or a tight slap, feedback from
friends—especially the ones in stable romantic relationships—is too
important to ignore. 

My childhood best friend learned her lesson every time she neglected my
words of caution. The guy I told her was problematically possessive did turn
out to be that. And that one ex-boyfriend who swore off water for the fear
of bloating was actually a nutcase—exactly as I predicted. She trusted the
genius in me so she avoided introducing any of the losers who came next. And
when it was time for me to meet her fiance, the stakes were understandably
high. The three of us sat in a nail salon where I studied his informed taste
in acrylics and faith in manicures. If he didn’t have my approval then, he
sealed it with a bun maska and a kulhad wali chai later in the evening. Now, that’s the catch I was training her for. In
return, I will settle for a vote of thanks at her wedding. 

Sadly, we are two peas in a pod. I friend-launch
my insignificant others to invite more brains to support my delusion but it
ends up becoming a reality check about my bad taste in men. Not that it
stops me from sharing fresh material. I literally write columns about
them. 

Views are personal.

This article is part of a
series
of columns on modern dating in India—the good, the bad and the cuddly.

(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)