I Moved to a New City for a Relationship and It Ended in Six Months

I want to tell this story with the honesty it requires, which means starting with what I told myself at the time and then describing what I understood later. At 25 I told myself I was moving to Bengaluru for multiple reasons - professional opportunity, the city itself, personal growth, a change of environment.

Rohan was the primary reason and I had dressed it in the other reasons because moving for a person felt too vulnerable to state plainly. The job I had lined up in Bengaluru was real. The opportunity was genuine.

Rohan was the reason I had looked for a job there rather than somewhere else, which is a distinction that mattered more than I acknowledged. The relationship ended at six months.

The ending was nobody's fault in any dramatic sense - it was the specific ending that occurs when two people who cared about each other discover that caring about each other is not sufficient to sustain a relationship across the specific daily texture of shared life.

I was 26 in a city I had moved to for a person who was no longer in my life, surrounded by colleagues but not yet friends, in an apartment that had been chosen for proximity to his neighbourhood rather than for my own reasons.

The three months that followed the breakup were the most alone I have ever felt as an adult. Not catastrophically - I functioned, the work went reasonably well, I talked to my friends in Indore regularly.

But the loneliness of being in a place that had been chosen for reasons that no longer existed was its own specific thing. What came after was something I had not expected: Bengaluru became mine.

Not quickly and not easily but through the specific process of building a life in a city without the person who had been the reason for it. I found my own neighbourhoods, my own people, my own relationship with the city.

At 28, I was more rooted in Bengaluru than I had ever been in Indore, and the rootedness was more genuinely mine for having been built alone. I am glad I moved. I am also clear, now, about what I was actually doing when I moved.