For decades, pop culture has insisted that adulthood revolves around romance. The narrative arc is familiar: friendships dominate your twenties, then gradually recede as careers, marriage, and children take centre stage. The message is subtle but unmistakable: friendship is the prelude, romance is the destination.
But Shrinking, the Apple TV series starring Jason Segel and Harrison Ford, flips that script. The show follows Jimmy Laird (Segel), a therapist trying to rebuild his life after the sudden death of his wife. Grief loosens his professional boundaries; his life is chaotic and occasionally reckless. Yet the real emotional centre of the show lies elsewhere—in the dense network that surrounds him.
Colleagues wander into each other’s homes without knocking. Jimmy’s neighbour helps raise his daughter. Friends arrive as plus-ones to dinners, emotional breakdowns, hospital waiting rooms, and a last-minute garden wedding. Someone always has a spare key. Someone always shows up.
Which is to say, Shrinking proposes another way of structuring adulthood—one where friends, neighbours, and colleagues gradually become the people you build a life around. Across three seasons (new episodes of season three drop every Wednesday), proximity becomes its own form of care. Romantic relationships exist, but they are not the centre of gravity here. What holds everything together is community.
The logic of proximity is shaping lives offscreen too. A couple of years ago, screenwriter and game designer Tarana Reddy received an unexpected invitation. Her closest friend was moving to Goa with her husband. Did she want to come with them? At the time, Reddy and her friend were co-writing films, while he produced the projects they developed together. To anyone else, the arrangement might have sounded unconventional. For Reddy, the decision felt straightforward; by then their lives were already tightly braided—creatively, professionally, and emotionally.
“I wish I could say it was a deeply strategic life choice with spreadsheets and five-year projections,” Reddy says. “But the honest answer is that it was the kind of decision you make when the people you love are suddenly leaving a room and you realise you actually don’t want to stay in it alone.”
Look closely and a similar rhythm appears across cities and social circles. There are friends pooling finances, trading childcare, buying apartments in the same building, even moving cities to live within walking distance of one another. Late-twenties millennials are living arm-in-arm with older neighbours who become confidantes, emergency contacts, and eventually chosen family—not unlike the world of Shrinking itself. Increasingly, these bonds are being described as platonic partnerships: friendships that carry the seriousness, commitment, and everyday interdependence once reserved only for romantic partners or marriage.
For queer people, friendships have long functioned as chosen infrastructure. “In our Indian ecosystem, we hide who we truly are from our families in a way that we would not with our friends,” says comedian Navin Noronha.
Noronha lives with his partner now, but much of the everyday mechanics of his life still run through his friendships. They cat-sit when he travels, help him navigate financial uncertainty, and act as creative sounding boards for jokes that aren’t quite ready for the stage. What he values most is that the care doesn’t feel obligatory—it emerges naturally from affection rather than duty. “When you have ride-or-die kind of friends, nobody is counting how many favours we owe each other,” adds Noronha. “It’s more about liking someone enough that you want to integrate parts of your life with theirs.”
For Mitali Bhasin, that instinct plays out through a multigenerational neighbourhood. A remote worker living in Mumbai, she has built much of her life around neighbours whose ages range from 22 to 81. Their bond runs on small rituals: evening walks, shared cups of tea, lingering in each other’s homes after work, stepping in to watch a friend’s baby so the parents can steal a date night.
“In a world shaped by capitalism that runs on isolation and burnout, having people nearby changes the structure of life,” Bhasin says. “You can return from a 10-hour workday and already have people in your home cooking, waiting to eat with you.” In such arrangements, commitment begins to look different—less about merging lives into one unit and more about creating rituals that keep people returning to each other.
If Bhasin’s friendships run on rituals, graphic designer Malikia Crowell’s run on exchange. A single mother raising an eight-year-old son, Crowell has kept experimenting with communal living. During her marriage, she and her husband lived with a friend who didn’t pay rent but contributed to groceries and childcare instead.
After moving to Goa following her divorce, similar systems began to emerge again. One friend watches her son when she needs a weekend break; another cooks meals while, in return, Crowell handles the administrative tasks she dislikes. “Subscribing to an informal system of care is a lot about recognising what each person has to offer.” The difficulty, she adds, is that not everyone treats these arrangements as permanent. When Crowell tried to build similar setups with other single mothers, she realised many saw them as temporary—a plan B until a romantic partner eventually entered the picture.
Part of the challenge, perhaps, is that relationships organised around friendship still fall outside the scripts most people know how to read. In her essay What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was the Centre of Your Life, writer Rhaina Cohen observes that these relationships can be difficult for others to interpret. “Many of those who place a friendship at the centre of their life find that their most significant relationship is incomprehensible to others,” she writes. “But these friendships can be models for how we, as a society, might expand our conceptions of intimacy and care.”
If the nuclear family once anchored adulthood, many lives today look more like a constellation—friends, neighbours, collaborators, and partners distributing care across many relationships rather than concentrating it in one. That structure, of course, comes with its own uncertainties.
The two friends for whom Reddy moved to Goa have since relocated to Berlin, a shift that briefly forced her to confront the absence of the structural guarantees that marriage or family often promise.
But what replaced that fear was a different kind of certainty: the knowledge that their commitment to each other is lifelong. The three remain in constant conversation, still collaborating on projects and orbiting each other’s lives across continents.
If anything, their movements continue to bend around that bond. Reddy now finds herself planning longer stretches in Europe simply because they are there. They have even begun talking about one day investing in property together. For now, her house in Goa has become their landing pad when they visit, just as their home in Berlin will become hers.
“People underestimate how rational it is to organise your life around the relationships that actually sustain you,” Reddy says. “We accept people moving for jobs all the time. Moving for love is romantic. Moving for friends somehow gets coded as impulsive. But for me, it is about recognising where my real infrastructure of care exists.”
