Raina Cohen

Regardless of whether we are partnered now, we need to rely on more than one relationship to sustain us throughout our full, unpredictable lives.

We need other significant others.

And there's an overlooked kind of relationship that we can turn to.

Friendship.

I got the sense that friendship could be this stronger force in our lives because of a friendship that I stumbled into.

We would see each other most days of the week, be each other's plus ones to parties.

I went out and interviewed dozens of people who had a friendship like ours, and I wrote a book about them.

Natasha and Linda are the first legally recognized platonic co-parents in Canada.

Joe and John have been best friends for many decades,

When Joe was struggling with alcohol and drug use, John got him into recovery.

And then John decided that to support his friend, he would also become sober.

Joy took care of her friend Hannah during Hannah's six-year battle with ovarian cancer.

And that included flying out to New York, where Hannah got specialized treatment.

Joy had trouble actually sleeping overnight in the hospital because she was too busy watching to make sure her friend's chest was still rising and falling.

Some of the friends that I spoke to had this friendship occupy the space that's conventionally given to a romantic partner.

Some had this kind of friendship and a romantic partner.

It's not either-or.

As I spoke to these people, I realized that they were at the frontier of friendship.

helping us imagine how much more we could ask of our platonic relationships.

Hi, I'm Raina Cohen.

I'm the author of the book, The Other Significant Others, Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center.

I'm also an editor and producer for the NPR podcast, Embedded.

Well, fidelity is really a word that I think we associate with romantic relationships.

And when I was thinking about what does it look like to be fidelitous within friendship,

It's not necessarily having one friend who you are exclusive with, which is maybe the way we would think about fidelity, but caring for a friend in a way that isn't just responsive, but is also anticipating what might they want or need from you in a difficult time.

It's being both a fair weather friend and a foul weather friend, like being there for

all of it and not running away, whether something is hard for that person or whether conflict has come up between the two of you, it's really sticking it out through all of those seasons and all the challenges that come up.

I do think that we have this idea that friendship shouldn't be hard.

I mean, one of the people that I interviewed for my book had said that he had gotten this message growing up that if you are thinking that much about a friendship, you're trying too hard.

Like, you shouldn't even be exhausting your emotional and mental energy on a friendship.

And I think that there is something a little bit maybe unintentionally malicious about saying that a friendship should be easy because

I think we have all experienced that the closest relationships in our lives are also the ones that are the trickiest.

You know, familial relationships, romantic relationships, we get it.

Like, if you are spending a lot of time around each other, if you are invested in each other's lives, that kind of proximity and time together is going to create friction.

And the trick isn't to...

exist without friction.

It's to figure out how do you run toward it in a way that can resolve it for the different people involved.

So maybe people want to have a respite from these other complex relationships in their life and see friendship as an outlet, but that might lead to less close platonic relationships as a result.

There are trade-offs to everything and absolutely having social templates is a plus and a minus.

I mean, it is, we're trying to avoid awkwardness by having social scripts and there's something that seems efficient and it just kind of like takes it out of your mind and hands to know that there are certain things you're supposed to do.

But that assumes that everybody has the same expectations and people don't realize until sometimes they are deep into a romantic relationship that they are not on the same page.

What I've seen is that there's this kind of interplay between our expectations around friendship and romantic relationships that I think we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.

And then on the flip side, we expect so little of friendships that we end up weakening them or not realizing their full potential when really these different types of relationships, if we sort of maybe offloaded some of the romantic ones onto friendships, that could...

Make it so that people could feel more fulfilled in their romantic relationships because they have realistic expectations of them.

Yeah, I mean, we distinguish between certain kinds of relationships.

So romantic, familial, platonic, and have certain things that we deem appropriate and certain things that you're not supposed to do.

And I think particularly within friendship, that's too much that you're not supposed to ask of friends.

And I guess my question is a little bit why.

On what basis have we made those decisions?

And going out and talking to many dozens of people who have friendships that really even...

break our definition of what a friendship is by going so far as to be living together maybe raising kids together taking care of each other through cancer and in old age it's like well these people have platonic relationships and they're doing it and it's not breaking the friendship and it's not breaking their other relationships so it's not like

by definition, friends can't do these things.

So there's something else that's shaping our ideas about, well, maybe this is asking too much.

And then on the other point that you were making about, is your marriage strong enough if you have to turn to other people?

That seems like a really insidious effect of these expectations around marriage.

I think that there are people who end relationships too soon because, or end up having grave doubts about their relationships

Because they think that what they're supposed to do is get everything from this one person, as opposed to feeling like, yeah, this is a great situation right now that I have somebody that I love and that I can go home to and I can have the serious conversation with without the accents.

who loves me and who's a great co-parent.

And I have other people that I can go to.

Like, I don't know that I would want to be married to a journalist.

I think it would be shop talk all the time.

I really value having different, like, forms of separation in my life.

But maybe, you know, that means that I can't talk about everything with my spouse.

And I think it's kind of creating these unnecessary doubts in people's minds because they're told that everything is supposed to come from this one person, or like one person I interviewed called it a one-stop shopping approach to relationships.

Mm-hmm.

So I'll just kind of explain that trellis idea because it did not come from me.

It came from this guy, Art Pereira.

He is a man who has trained as a pastor in a conservative Christian denomination and is gay and has had a really hard time reconciling those two things, has since done it.

But it has meant that his life looks really different than it had before.

He had realized all of this and he has forged this very close relationship with a friend.

He was making a comparison to an ivying plant and that if you put an ivying plant on a trellis, it'll grow in the shape of a trellis.

But if there is no trellis, it grows toward the light.

And he felt like before he had kind of figured all this stuff out with this really close relationship that this really close friendship that he considers a familial level relationship at this point, he was on the trellis and that he and his friend needed to break the trellis to find something that's better.

And what I...

really want to encourage people to do and what I love especially Art and his friend Nick's story for is that it's really about how do you figure out what you want

in a world that's telling you that there are only certain things that are possible.

People who have created friendships that are so close that they are life partnerships are one example of people really breaking out of this narrow idea of what's possible in our closest relationships and showing us that there are other ways.

And there might be many other kinds of things that work for you in particular.

So it's really kind of a call for us to ask, like, what would we pursue if we thought it was possible?

It is not easy.

One exercise that actually other people that I that I interviewed ended up talking about was drawing what's called a social atom.

So like you make a circle for yourself and then you draw other people who are close, you know, who are important to you in your life and you make how close they are to your bubble and how big they are an indication of sort of how significant they are in your life.

Just putting that on the page can be illuminating for, like, who do you want to become closer to?

If in the process of drawing it, you're like, I feel close to this person, but I actually don't see them that much, that you can maybe get a sense of that gap.

You know, there are also, on a societal level, like, it helps to have more models.

It helps to have more stories of people who show you different ways of living life.

And I think to the extent possible, trying to seek out the stories that maybe are, like...

a little bit different than the ways that people immediately around you might live can be helpful for asking questions about what you yourself might want.

I think the definition of friend feels much more expansive to me than it had before.

I mean, one of the early interviews I did, I remember talking to a woman in her 60s who I'd asked, like, does she wish it was a term for, like, the friendship as close as hers?

It was like a friendship of decades where they saw each other basically, you know, as sisters.

And she was like...

I don't want another term.

I just want us to use the term friend to treat it with more value, to not diminish it.

And I think kind of related to that, I just see all of the possibilities that exist within friendship.

And I really bristle when anybody says just friends or more than friends.

Nothing that I think is categorically excluded from what a friend can do.

I've seen now friends...

do just about anything a family member or a romantic partner would do let's say something in my life comes up like i had i had sort of very difficult sort of incident happen a couple weeks ago and to me it wasn't like the first person i contact about this is my my husband it was like who are the people who could be most helpful and in this moment to me and my husband was on the other side of the country and i eventually did talk to him about it but i went to other people first

And so I think not kind of operating by default with what are roles and more like what is the task or the need at hand and who can best respond to that.

And also, you know, if somebody, if a friend needs something, I try to ask, like, what can I do?

And that feels, you know, reasonable given what my capacity is.

Man, simple question that feels hard.

I think good friend is going to depend on what you're, like who you are to each other.

When I think about, you know, the friends I run into at swing dance, my expectations of what makes them a good friend are very different than my absolute closest friends who I see all the time.

But I think in general, showing

care for one another showing affection not holding back about how you feel about one another which is something that is very common in friendships to let a lot of things go unsaid not calling it quits when someone is going through something difficult or when you within the friendship are going through something difficult and

I'm just thinking about if you were talking to a 13-year-old, we would be like, of course, you're going to spend a ton of your brain space thinking about your friends.

Peers really matter.

But why is it that as adults, we don't think that you should be?

That shouldn't be your focus.

I mean, that it's...

I think it's just that's not the reality for a lot of people that their friends do matter a lot and they, you know, ground their lives and cause heartache sometimes.

But there is really this mismatch between what we're told is what an adult should care about and what we actually do.

The specific obstacle that I feel ashamed about is my husband and I were like thinking very seriously about moving in with a couple of our close friends.

And at first we talked about buying a home and realized that that was just not going to be feasible given the timeline of when our friends were going to move to D.C.

from where they had been in Massachusetts.

And I was like, well, you know, if we can't buy and we have to rent, is that really a good move?

Yeah.

you know, you and I, we really, like, we want to be able to save for a down payment.

This will slow down the process because, you know, we won't have as cheap of an apartment.

We had a really good deal on this one bedroom.

And he was like, do we actually care about buying?

Is that important to us?

Like, what do we value here?

And it was immediately clear, like, oh, okay, community is this thing that we've been talking about that we value, our friends.

And

I had just put this, the idea of buying a home, this kind of adult stepping stone in front of a value that that was the one thing that stood in the way.

And I can go on and on about living with or near friends.

I'm currently in the process with, there are a group of us who are trying to buy property together and we'll have some people like living, even more people living in my house at the moment to start testing out, do we actually want to be in such close proximity for the long haul?

And for me, I love like coming home to having more people in the house who are playing piano and, you know, can run and like spontaneously sing some songs with or coming home after a long day and having my housemate, you know, having cooked a meal.

I wish the structures around it were easier.

We're kind of having to figure out a lot of things as we go.

I think the trade that you make is that you put a lot of work in the front end to get the support and the ease and friendship on the back end.

You have to coordinate with more people to find the right kind of house, for instance, or the right neighborhood or so on.

But then it means that you are able to have these spontaneous interactions and you don't have to schedule three weeks out a one hour coffee with somebody and then you won't see them for three more months because you can't fit them into your schedule.

The first thing I want to say is that you are not alone in this.

I've come to expect now when I do any kind of book-related event that someone will come up to me afterward and will cry because they will tell me about a friendship that they lost because of falling out or the person passed away.

And the sense of isolation that people feel

because nobody took them seriously adds this extra layer of suffering that I think is completely unnecessary and is really imposed by our society not treating this form of grief as legitimate.

And there's a term for this, it's called disenfranchised grief, that there's some forms of grieving that we do not recognize as legitimate.

If someone is suffering because a friend is gone from their life, that should be a really clear indication of how much the friendship meant to them.

not that they are making too big of a deal of it.

I think as a society, we're probably, you know, we're pretty uncomfortable with grief in general, but there's a dismissal of platonic relationships that you should just, you know, it's just not that big of a deal.

But the proof is in the pain that it is a big deal.

The most recent encounter I had just a few days ago where a woman came up to me crying, probably in her 40s, maybe 50s, and said that she felt like she had had a divorce with her friend.

And that it was devastating and that nobody understood it.

And she and her friend have since reconciled.

But that is the kind of thing that people have to sort through.

So I think to the extent possible, removing any judgment of yourself for the pain is maybe the best advice that I can offer.

We also just don't have really good concepts or language for this.

I mean, I've thought about leveling down in friendships or transitions, but the kinds of ways that we think about loss are really about categorical shifts.

Like, somebody was your partner, and now they aren't.

Or somebody was alive, and now they're dead.

This kind of gray area is a lot messier.

I will say, like, I have dealt with the gray area, and I found it really hard both to talk about because it felt like, well,

Maybe am I making too much of this because it's not like we're not friends anymore.

It's just we are less close than we were.

But there is a kind of loss to grapple with.

But also it's not like, okay, this person's gone from my life and now I come up with some story about how they were, you know, we were never a good fit or they were a terrible person.

It's like you're having to then rework, like, who are you to each other, which means potentially ongoing conversations.

And each of those ongoing, each of those new conversations can itself be a reminder of the gap between where you were and where you are now.

And that can create change.

more pain but ultimately be worth it because you still want to be in each other's lives just in a different way and i just think that there's much more kind of improvisation that that has to happen and really open communication when you're not just kind of slamming a door or have a kind of black and white on off switch to the friendship we're going to take a quick break but we will be right back after this

I have struggled with this, I think, partly because I really like my friends to be friends with one another.

And one of the ways that kind of political differences can play in can be like,

If people have views that feel like they would be really in conflict even in everyday life, if you're spending time in smaller groups or one-on-one doing activities together or spending time doing kind of making memories in a way that don't poke at the things that are different, it's like a gift to be close to people who are different from you.

You know, I lived for three years with friends who are very religious.

I learned a ton from them and love having a different perspective.

I don't know that there was sort of like conflict over that per se, but I think to the extent possible, viewing the differences as something that isn't a liability, but a way that you can help sharpen each other's

thinking and open your minds and to just approach the relationship with as much curiosity as possible, especially in a time where people really kind of operate in their silos.

And it just feels like actually something to cherish and nurture if you do have relationships with people who are pretty different from you.

One is make a routine.

Like if you have a friend that you want to see more, don't make it so that you have to plan every single activity.

So I have a friend where Thursday mornings we go on a run together and we joke that it's our free therapy session.

And sometimes we have to reschedule it.

But the kind of standing event really makes a difference.

The second is to rethink the idea that friendship is something that you kind of stuff into the rest of your life.

Like the image that comes to mind for me is like when I'm packing a suitcase and I put the shoes in first.

And that that's, you know, that's the romantic relationship or your work or your marriage.

And then the friends are like the extra pairs of socks that you fit in wherever you can.

Like to not treat friendship as this sort of added thing if you can fit it in.

and to consider it as something that is actually going to be an anchor or the central part of your life.

And one way to do that is really to think about how is the architecture of your life set up?

Friendship can be a lot easier if you are in close proximity to people.

And that opens up a whole process of how do you find your way to living in close proximity to friends.

But certainly one thing is when you're deciding where to live,

consider friends.

Consider friends as part of it.

I think for a lot of people, it is about a commute or maybe being near family or there are other kinds of factors, but treating friendship as something maybe worth making trade-offs for.

I think it can make life more meaningful.

It allows for more spontaneous interactions.

We are social animals.

We need people.

Let's build our lives around them or at least consider that as an important factor.

And the third thing is something that's just maybe on my mind right now about not expecting people to always come to you when they need something and not necessarily expecting that people are always going to accept your offer when you offer something and trying to make abundantly clear that you will be there to support them.

And like a conversation I had this week was with a friend who had mentioned that she has been really down a couple weeks ago.

And I spent time with her and I had absolutely not noticed that because she's good at covering it up.

And we talked about, you know, when she mentioned that, I was like, well, how can I notice this in the future?

You know, rather than waiting for her to tell me a week after she's had a really low point.

And I borrowed a kind of method from somebody else I know, which is that she would send like a specific emoji that meant that things were not going well to her close friends as a way of indicating, you know,

I need some support.

I don't really have the mental or emotional space to explain it.

And I think that it's an example of friends kind of coming up with solutions for their friends.

Once you've seen something happen once, to try to get ahead of it.

And I think for so many people, it's really hard to ask for help.

It's really, really, really hard to ask friends for help because we have these ideas that...

We shouldn't depend on them so much.

So trying to get ahead of it.

And in the end, I think you'll get it back to you once you model it for the people in your life.

Two other things.

One is to not operate from a place where you are assuming you are a burden.

As people in places like the U.S.,

get older, make more money.

We farm out the things that we need.

We pay for people to move our stuff.

We pay for people to paint our walls.

Instead of asking people around us, we pay for strangers to do it.

The office that I'm in right now, I had two friends of mine help me paint it and hang up this art piece that I'd had for years finally behind me.

And they were thrilled to be able to do it.

So it brings you closer to people.

And I think, yeah, if you're questioning it, drawing your own experience, when's the last time someone has asked you to do a favor and did you resent them or did it actually feel like it was an opportunity to get closer?

And then the way that so many people as adults operate in their friendships is that they are doing the catch up.

So they are going for a meal or something and then they're summarizing their lives over the last few weeks or months to each other.

Which is so different from, you know, when we were younger, we're probably making memories with our friends.

We are, you know, going on little adventures, even like in the woods or just scheming together.

And adult scheming might mean painting your office walls.

Like that is the most fun thing you have.

But, you know, when you...

get covered in paint and you listen to some Lizzo while you're doing it.

Or, you know, there are ways that even doing the most mundane things can become these really wonderful experiences that you remember.

But if the conversation is all about catching up and summarizing your life, it's just it's not going to deepen the friendship in a way that doing things together that you're going to remember will.

you know, sorry.

And now I'm like, I had an idea for the other thing.

We celebrate romantic relationships.

We don't really celebrate friendships.

People I know have like a, they celebrate the anniversary of their friendship or they have, they do things to commemorate the friendship.

That is also like a mark of really close friends.

This woman and her friends, they had, yeah, they had rituals.

They had a secret language.

They like had these notebooks that they wrote in every day that they filled.

They would do, they had these like

basically like holidays that they made together and like artwork that they would make.

I mean, it was very elaborate.

And she just felt that adult friendship was not doing it for her because like everything felt so stale and just like you're having a conversation over dinner.

And it was just so different from what it was like in childhood for her.

I've seen people navigate this, and I think the one thing that I would encourage people to ask themselves is, what is driving me toward the romantic version of this relationship?

I have seen cases where friends are extremely close, and one of them is like...

Well, like, I love you, so this should be a romantic relationship, right?

Like, that is the highest expression of what love for another person looks like.

And I have seen friendships absolutely dissolve over that because somebody can't put up with the possibility of, you know, being rejected romantically.

Is the desire for a romantic relationship because you actually want to be in a romantic relationship with this person or because...

There's an idea that friendship is lesser and therefore the way to fast track closeness is to be romantically involved with somebody.

There are different forms of attraction and romantic and sexual attraction are not the only kinds.

Like you can be really drawn to somebody.

There are studies on like a lot of people have experienced forms of attraction that have nothing to do with sexual desire.

And so it helps to know that if you are really into somebody, there are different ways for that to be true.

But if you do end up pursuing a romantic relationship, and a lot of romantic relationships come from being friends, I think trying to not feel like there has to be an on-off switch.

That if it turns out that the romantic relationship is not kind of the best way to do things, sort of talk on the front end about how you guys can be open-minded about...

How do you change the terms of the relationship?

Some of the things people most hate is having to imagine bad outcomes.

So we like to say like, everything's going to work out great.

But if you are forced with this question to say like, imagine a year from now, we decide we, you know, we, the romantic relationship isn't for us.

What are the, you know, the three most likely reasons, you know, what are the things that might lead to this not working out?

And then you could potentially address them ahead of time to prevent them.

And then in addition to that, it's like, okay, if it doesn't work out,

And we can't, you know, we can't do anything to prevent it.

Like, what do we want our relationship to look like?

And it doesn't, you know, you might feel very differently on the other side of it.

But I just, I think particularly in heterosexual relationships, romantic relationships, there's this very, you know, strict idea that you're not supposed to be friends with your exes.

So to enter a romantic relationship feels like you're really, really risking something.

And I think, you know, in the queer community, there's just much...

It's much more common because because you can't hate all your exes because you're going to run into them like at, you know, your friend's party.

So I think also taking a bit of a cue from the queer community and how this kind of toggling between romance and friendship actually is really OK and possible.

It's been so nice to talk to you.

And yeah, I really just appreciate all the care that you and the people behind the scenes have put into the questions here.