Friendship has No Gender

“Friendship has no age or gender barrier. The only one barrier is of matching mentality.”

Friendship, and for that matter any relationship, is essentially based on trust between two people, and trust is not just limited to one gender. A true friend is someone to whom we can share our feelings without the fear of getting judged. Some relations are not chosen by us, they are made at the time of our birth but our friends are chosen by us.

Most of us may have heard the famous saying that “you are the average of the five people you spend your most time with.” The quote tells us to choose our company judiciously, and it doesn’t matter whether the people around us belong to the same gender, it just depends on the personality of the human. We can’t ignore a person’s character in the name of gender, which is not even the result of their deeds. Gender can’t define us and neither can it define relationships like friendships, since human-made relations should focus more on the nature of the individual or simply put, the characters which can be controlled by them and not on the ones which are out of their control. Just as wrong it is to judge a bride by her skin color, similarly it’s incorrect to judge a friendship on the basis of gender.

The topic reminds me of an anecdote. I am an introvert, and can’t make friends easily. I was in grade 6th, a shy, studious girl who always used to sit on the first bench. Our class teacher decided to make pairs of a girl and a boy for the seating arrangement. The boy next to me was very jolly and always knew all the ways to comfort me, we had similar interests and used to enjoy each other’s company. Gradually, we could mostly be spotted together. My classmates started to tease us by taking our names together and cracking different kinds of jokes. I boldly confronted all of them by saying that all the boys of my class are my “boyfriends”, i.e. male friends. I didn’t even realize my stupidity, I was very naive. Well, the boy got so embarrassed that he started staying away from me and our friendship got ruined.

From childhood, we have been raised with the mindset that boys and girls can’t be friends and this mentality even refers to the other genders. Many Bollywood movies like “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” strengthen this perception by depicting the romantic feelings between two opposite-sex friends and ends with their marriage. While best friends may be good life partners, it is not a generalization. Different relationships fulfill distinct desires of humans, and hence every relation is crucial to a person. The body doesn’t entirely define our relations but our motive does. We can clearly communicate our expectations from the relation to avoid any misunderstandings.

Yes, two people having different genders can be friends. Sometimes just because of a single difference, we tend to forget the commonalities. Yes, they can be friends because they are humans, they belong to the same Homo sapiens species, they all have the same number of autosomes and whatnot. Just because of the difference in one chromosome, we tend to forget that we are humans, above all. We all would have played Girls vs Boys at some point in our lives, but do we ever think about the hyper importance that society has given to gender. Does gender really have the power to overshadow the personality of a human?

-Kamayani

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