Raina Cohen

What a nice intro.

Thanks, Whitney.

I think we limit friendship by thinking it can do less than it actually can.

And one of the ways that feels really clear is by looking across time and across places and seeing what friendship looked like in those times and places.

It was different.

For one thing, I think the expectation now is that friendship is going to be a relationship that's private.

It's just between you and someone else, or maybe it's a small group of people.

And it is a nice addition to your life, but it is not an essential part of your life.

It's something that you can maybe put on the back burner.

And that was just not true in many other places.

I mean, you can see that there were rituals that were built around recognizing friendship, potentially for the rest of your life.

An example of this ritual is called sworn brotherhood.

And it was recognized as something that people would witness, like that commitment.

We don't think about friendship as

involving commitment, let alone a commitment that you are going to formalize in front of other people.

So I think even the idea of commitment is something that would surprise a lot of people.

And then I think the kinds of feelings that we think are possible to experience in friendship

are also kind of limited, that we hold out romantic relationships as the relationship where you can experience excitement and infatuation and the sort of fluttery feelings that actually friends can experience.

I can talk about my own experience with this.

It's partly what led me to write the book.