Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

The Other Significant Others

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You know how I know Rhaina Cohen’s The Other Significant Others is SQUARELY in the Culture Study wheelhouse? At least a dozen readers have emailed me to tell me about it. Luckily Rhaina also knew that it was in the Culture Study wheelhouse, and not just because I cited some of her early research in this very popular piece on living near friends. She asked me. ifI’d blurb, and as soon as I saw her bio on the back on the book — “She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, friends, and her friends' children” — I was sold.

Honestly it was hard waiting all these months to do this interview — I wanted us talking about these ideas now. But it also feels deeply appropriate to run this piece today, as we think of all the ways that society has centered romantic love, often at the expense of equally vital relationships in our lives. I think you’ll find Cohen’s thinking as exhilarating and challenging as I do — and if this piqued your interest, you’re absolutely going to love the book.

You can find more about Rhaina Cohen here and buy The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at Its Center here.

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Let’s start simple. How did it become controversial, radical, subversive, [INSERT ADJECTIVE HERE WITH VAGUELY NEGATIVE CONNOTATION] to live life with friendship at the center? How much of it is just straight-up hetero-patriarchy, and when and how do we start internalizing this idea? 

Friendship used to be seen as one of the most important parts of life. Going back to the sixth century, there were official church ceremonies to turn friends into sworn brothers, who might go on to be buried together instead of with their wives. In letters between same-sex friends in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, friends were utterly effusive about each other.

This kind of centering of friendship happened in periods of history when marriage was not the premier emotional relationship in a person’s life. The classics scholar Craig Williams writes that Romans didn’t use terms like “just friends” or “more than friends” to refer to spouses because “the implicit devaluation of friendly as opposed to romantic or married love would have struck most Romans as perverse.” At that time, he asks, “what could be more than friendship?”

People in the U.S. and Western Europe started internalizing the idea that friendship is a peripheral relationship when two historical trends converged around the turn of the 20^th century: same-sex intimacy became suspect, and marriage started to consume people’s emotional lives. Once the identity category of homosexuality emerged—along with a stigma attached to it—it was no longer innocent for same-sex friends to swoon over each other. And around the same time, expectations for marriage ballooned. 

I picture marriage as a man on the subway spreading his legs wider and wider as time passes, leaving little room for anyone else. If friendships wanted to fit, they needed to shrink.

I’m fascinated by the idea that part of rejection of this sort of friendship has to do with changing conceptions of marriage — namely, that the person you marry should also be *your best friend.* How does this particularly modern conception of romance affect friendship in general? 

A couple years ago, I’d attended a string of weddings and noticed that, again and again, the spouses-to-be referred to each other as best friends. Even the officiants would refer to the spouses as each other’s best friends. That might seem unremarkable—it’s so common today for romantic partners to refer to each other this (see the Obamas). But there was something striking about hearing people use that term at their weddings, when there was a maid of honor or best man standing right next to the couple. I felt like I was watching best friends get publicly demoted. If you have a spouse, they’re already assumed to be the most important person in your life, so I was curious about why many people feel compelled to have a spouse grab the top title in the friendship category, too.  

As I alluded to in response to your first question, people have not always thought their spouse would also be the person they’re most emotionally connected to. Before the late 18th century, American and Western European marriages were pragmatic unions that brought together families and finances. Love was possible within marriage, but it definitely wasn’t a requirement. Marriage was also not between equals — wives were their husband’s property. It’s kind of hard to feel that someone you own or who owns you is your best friend. So it’s not much of a surprise that people found a great deal of intimacy from their same-sex friendships. 

By the late 19th century, love was widely seen as a necessity to marry. In recent decades Americans have ratcheted up their expectations of marriage even further. We now demand not only love and companionship but also, we want a spouse to fulfill all of our deepest psychological needs. The consequence of all these expectations is that couples cocoon in their relationships and invest less in other areas of life and relationships, compared to those who are unmarried. Sociologists describe marriage as a “greedy institution” — it saps up people’s time and energy. Friendship loses out and is treated as a nice-to-have but not a need-to-have. 

I think a lot of people assume that the sort of intense, deeply-bonded platonic partnership you profile is the result of friendships that start in childhood or, at the very least, during college. How has your own friendship and your experience reporting this book challenged that line of thinking? 

There’s good reason to think that these sorts of friendships must be a product of childhood. There are specific conditions that foster close relationships, and they’re pretty much effortless to get in kids’ friendships. These conditions, or three “magic ingredients,” as Lisa Diamond, who’s a psychology professor at the University of Utah, calls it, are: time, togetherness, and touch. As a kid, I spent whole days at my friends’ houses for sleepovers and in camp, would braid my friends’ hair or we’d sit on benches in a line to form a massage train. (Boys, I realize, don’t generally have the latitude to be so touchy, other than maybe rough-housing.) In college, my friends and I would shoot the shit in the grubby common space in our dorms. 

When friends no longer see each other all day in school or live next door to each other but instead slot each other into little GCal openings, it’s hard to get time and togetherness. And whatever touch kids enjoyed in friendship, it tends to get channeled almost exclusively into romantic relationships. (I write about this shift as we age in a piece published last year for The Atlantic. It’s about what adults can learn from kids’ friendships.) 

But I was not a kid or a college student when I formed the friendship that inspired me to write my book. I was in my mid-20s, a relative newcomer to Washington DC. I think my friend and I were able to form such a close bond because we were able to get these “magic ingredients” without much effort. Time and togetherness were easy to come by because we lived a 5-minute walk from each other. That meant we didn’t need to plan far in advance to see each other and could spend agenda-less time together. And because we were each still early in the process of building our social worlds in DC, we had an abundance of free time. We lived life alongside each other—I’d stop by my friend’s house on the way to the metro on weekday mornings just to have oatmeal and chat. My friend and I are both uninhibited when it comes to physical affection. All that oxytocin surely brought us closer.

I talked to plenty of people who fell into this intensity later in life, including empty-nesters. One thing they have in common is an eagerness to be in each other’s space — a lot. They ignore the messages that only a romantic partner is an appropriate plus-one or the person to do errands with or be your ride from surgery. They do life together anyway. 

It’s difficult to describe how much joy and possibility I felt reading each of the stories profiled in the book, but I want to give readers here a glimpse of it. Can you tell us about one or two of the partnerships that have really stuck with you? What makes their commitment and connection so special? 

I’m so happy to hear that these friends’ stories made you feel that way. A colleague of mine says he strives to report on people who are “extraordinary but anonymous,” and I feel that’s a perfect description of the people in my book. Which makes it hard to just share one partnership, but I’ll do it.

One pair whose story I find particularly powerful is that of Natasha Bakht and Lynda Collins. Natasha decided to have a child on her own in her mid-30s because she wasn’t partnered; she didn’t want to miss out on the chance to have a baby by waiting to find a romantic partner. Her coworker and friend Lynda volunteered to be her birth coach, even though they weren’t super close. When the child, Elaan, was born, Lynda immediately bonded with him and got involved in caring for him. She had nearly mystical powers when it came to soothing Elaan. The women soon discovered that Elaan has complex disabilities and needed a lot of support, so Lynda’s presence was more than welcome. Lynda went on to sell her house to buy a condo in the same building as Natasha. That way, she could be part of the daily routines of caring for Elaan.

After years of functioning as a co-parent, it occurred to Lynda that she should seek legal rights as his mother. Which she managed to secure, after some legal obstacles. I get into this in the book, but the gist is, family law is built around marriage, so it can be tricky for someone like Lynda, who isn’t married to the biological parent, to be legally recognized as a parent. 

Natasha, Elaan, and Lynda — photo credit Laura Pederson; shared with permission from the family

Natasha and Lynda’s story challenges an assumption that I hadn’t really seen questioned before: that two people have to be in love with each other to decide to raise a kid together. I think unbundling romance and parenting is liberating for a lot of people who might want to have a family but have never been presented with the option of raising a kid with anyone other than a romantic partner — or going it alone. I’m acutely aware of the pressure people who want kids can feel because I’m at an age where a lot of my friends (especially women) are trying to figure out if and how they can form families if they’re not in a longstanding romantic relationship. A friend could very well be an answer. 

There’s another twist in Natasha and Lynda’s story, which I’ll leave readers in suspense about. It complicates the idea that a romantic partner should be your everything and the notion that the ideal family is a two-parent family. 

You manage to do something really delicate when it comes to historical “Boston Marriages” and, as you put it, “the risk of overcorrection.” Can you talk a bit about how you think about these sorts of historical relationships and their importance? 

It certainly felt delicate! I spent so much time writing and rewriting a single footnote in this section.

To give some background, Boston marriages are a kind of relationship between women that came about in the late 19th century. These women would live together and support each other, and in doing so, were freed from marriage to a man. I write in the book about one of these pairs: Lucy Diggs Slowe, the dean of women at Howard University, and Mary Burrill, a teacher and playwright. The women lived together for 15 years. Slowe’s friends would write letters to her with a mention to send their “love to Ms. Burrill.” After Slowe’s death in 1937, Howard’s registrar directed an obituary writer to Burrill, noting that she “has been a lifetime friend and companion of Miss Slowe and I am sure that there is no one who knows her life better than she.”

Here's where the delicate part comes in: did women in Boston marriages like Slowe and Burrill have sex? There’s no doubt that some women in Boston marriages did. Scholars have found evidence of sexual relationships between some same-sex pairs. We should absolutely acknowledge these cases, especially because, for a long time, mentions of sex between people of the same gender were deliberately erased from the historical record. (As a bi person who would have benefited from seeing anyone like me in history textbooks while I was growing up, I’m particularly motivated to make sure we don’t straight-wash history.)

But I do think there’s a risk of overcorrection. Today’s ideas about sex and intimacy aren’t easily portable across time. One big assumption now — which people didn’t have in the past — is that if you’re in love with someone, you also must want to have sex with them. To us, in 2024, fervent letters between same-sex pairs or bed sharing seem like obvious evidence of sexual activity. But because there wasn’t an automatic link between sex and affection, it was considered normal and innocent for friends to gush.

If we assume that passion always translates into sexual attraction or consummation, we can fail to see relationships for what they were. The late historian Alan Bray, who wrote books both on homosexuality and on friendship put this eloquently: “The inability to conceive of relationships in other than sexual terms says something of contemporary poverty.” A laser focus on sexuality can also limit the questions we ask. As Bray put it, this focus can “obscure that wider frame” of inquiry.

There’s a lot we can learn from widening the frame beyond sex. It becomes clear that today’s discrete categories and hierarchies aren’t innate or universal.  Marriage doesn’t have to rank above friendship. Love doesn’t automatically involve lust. Romantic and platonic feelings aren’t always easy to distinguish.

I feel like you are probably going through something similar to me in regards to telling people about this book. As in: people hear you’re writing a book (more specifically, people you know kinda well or have just met), they ask you what it’s about, you try as best as you can to tell them about it, and they respond with great enthusiasm: ‘this is so important, I’m so glad you’re writing about this, what an awesome thing, etc. etc.’

I think people are really philosophically on board with the idea of elevating and valuing friendship in this way…..but also feel like they could never make it happen in their own lives, because of blank and blank and blank and blank.

There’s a real narrativization that happens, and I can’t quite get my head around it. Is it just that the gravity of “traditional” (whether hetero or same-sex) partnership is really, really strong? Is it kids and the maxims of intensive parenting? I’d just generally like to hear your thoughts here because obviously mine are not yet sorted. 

Right around New Year’s I spent about two hours puzzling through this exact question with my husband, a close friend, and several people who live at the Oakland co-living community Radish. It’s a big question, so I’ll offer one factor, and that’s aspiration. As in, what do people aspire to in their lives? 

Sure, people may say they care about their friends, but it’s probably not in their model of success to have a life oriented around friendship—where they live right by or even with friends, maybe raise kids with friends and so on. Far more likely, the image of a successful life involves a stable job, living with a partner in privacy, maybe with some West Elm furniture and lush floor plants. 

Kristen Berman and Phil Levin, who started Radish, told me they’ve found it hard to get people to want something different from the one thing they’ve been told to want. To get people to want something different — specifically, living within steps of friends — they’ve had to push harder than feels comfortable to them. They’ll invite people to stay in Radish for a few weeks so that the abstract benefits of living near friends becomes real. (Priya Rose, who built a community of friends in Brooklyn, found her way to the same process.) 

To fight off the gravitational pull of the nuclear family default, it currently takes people like Kristen and Phil and Priya who are willing to pour tons of time and resources into creating another option — and making that option visible and attractive. Not everyone has a friend like them in their life, so they may never realize the possibility of a different path and its benefits. 

On a practical level, it’s more complicated to organize life around friends not only because there are more needs to balance compared to coordinating with one romantic partner but also because our laws and housing stock are designed for nuclear families. In our society, it’s easier to slide into the default and just take the erosion of friendship as a given.

What is your favorite advice for someone who would love to have this sort of partnership in their lives? 

Step one is even knowing that this kind of connection is possible. So if someone is asking themselves this question, that’s already progress!

From there, I’d encourage people to muster the courage to have an open conversation with a friend about the role they want the friendship to play in their lives. Which, admittedly, is hard when there’s no social script for that kind of discussion. 

I’d suggest using cultural depictions of devoted friendships as a jumping off point. Try watching a show like Grace & Frankie or Scrubs or a book about a committed (and complex) friendship like We All Want Impossible Things or The Undoing Project. (Not to be too self-serving, but I do think the stories in my book fit this bill too). With this shared reference point, you don’t have to start from scratch when you’re imagining what your friendship can look like. And it can feel a little less daunting to admit to what you want because you can attach your feelings to the story of other/fictional people, and if you feel safe, extrapolate to your own life. 

Once you’ve had time to take in whatever story you’ve chosen, talk about what resonated with you. Are there any aspects of the friendship that felt familiar? That you craved? That felt unappealing? That you’d want to experiment with in your own life? 

We take for granted that our romantic lives involve vulnerability and rejection. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we need to accept some of those same risks if we want to find the full richness that’s possible in our platonic relationships. As the people I write about in my book show, it can be so, so worth it. 

And as an end note:

A fun, unexpected outgrowth of my book is a song called “Dear Friends,” which a couple of my friends wrote based on material in the book. It’s basically an anthem for friendship—which I think our culture could use! Think about how few songs there are about friendship compared to romantic love and heartache. Maybe sending this song to a friend (on Valentine’s Day, no less) can be a starting point for a conversation about how much the friendship means to you. ●

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You can find more about Rhaina Cohen here and buy The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at Its Center here.

For today’s discussion, I’d love to hear more about how and when you’ve worked to put friendship at the center of your life — or why you’ve struggled to do so.

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