Love exists in multiple forms. There is the love that makes your stomach flutter. There is the love that keeps you awake at night. But the most profound love I have found is the one that lets me put my guard down and lets me fall asleep on its shoulder. I was lucky enough to find this love. It didn’t ever exist in any romantic relationships that I sought after. I found it, in all its grandiose, within my queer friends.

I moved to Mumbai for college in 2021. I carried with me a fascination for the city and a suitcase full of clothes. However, my clothes hardly made it to the closet because my sexuality was already taking up all the space.

Before moving, I lived in a really small town in Maharashtra. In that town, queerness existed only in the shadows. There were no words for what I was. There was no guide for the way my heart moved. There was no language, no vocabulary that could describe the love that lived inside me.

I grew up hearing about marriage and duty, about the proper shape a life should take, and all the acceptable ways to love and be loved. I grew up watching the women in my family move through their days with resignation. I watched the men move with quiet authority. Even then, despite the patriarchy, I knew that I didn’t fit into these molds of what they called love. I understood that the life being prepared for the women around me was not a life I could actually live.

What I didn’t understand, however, was myself. I knew I was bisexual, but I never really accepted it. How could I, when the only words I had to describe how I felt were borrowed from shame? How could I, when the only stories I knew about people like me ended in silence, or worse, ridicule? Acceptance was not something I was capable of, not then, not yet.

I always say that my “life,” as it were, started when I moved out of home. In Mumbai, I was at liberty to choose my friends, the people I would connect with, the people who – without knowing – would soon become family. In finding them, I gradually found acceptance.

I instantly became friends with a few other queer people in college as if we had known each other all along. Together, we started our college’s first queer club. The club grew from ten people to several more. Students, young and old, came to us and said we had created a new family for them. Little did I know that the people I created this family with would become the people I call home.

Through them, I discovered that family does not have to be about blood. Home does not have to be a place you return to; it will always be a place you build. They taught me to not be intimidated by myself, that my queerness did not belong in the shadows. They taught me to accept myself, fully and beautifully.

Most importantly, my queer friends taught me the power of platonic love. The bond I share with them is powerful because unlike straight friendships, it was not forged by common interests or shared spaces alone. What brings us together is a shared experience of exclusion.

There is so much relief in knowing that you are not alone. There are others like you, who love the same way you do, who have been through what you have, who are also excluded from the world and yet, they choose to carry that love every day. That is the power of queer camaraderie.

In a world that tells us the only true love is the love between two (often straight) people who share a bed and a life and a future, and puts romantic love above all else, the love of a chosen family is often dismissed as secondary. It is something that will do until the real thing comes along.

But those of us who have built our homes out of friendships know differently. We know that the love of a chosen family is not a placeholder. It is a radical act of survival and joy. These are the kinds of bonds that deserve to be written about, celebrated, recognised for the transformative power they hold.

Queer friendships are not just about having someone to go out with on a Saturday night. They are about having someone who understands what it means to exist in a world that does not always want you. They are about having someone who will remind you, again and again, that you are worthy of love, that you are deserving of joy, that you are not alone.


They say that home is where the heart is. For me that means my home is scattered across India, existing wherever my friends are. This is the story of how I found my people, and how they found me. It belongs to every queer person who has ever felt alone and found solace in friendship, to every person who has built their own home out of the love of the people they chose. And I am so grateful to be living it.