Raina Cohen

I mean, thank you for saying that.

It was really important to me to show the variety of people who have these sorts of friendships.

It is not just some, I don't know,

often believe that they've invented everything.

And in fact, I think the most powerful stories were people in their 60s, 70s, 80s who have really shown what it looks like to have a real committed long-term friendship.

But as we move forward, there are demographic trends that I think

point to people finding or having the need to look more broadly for the kind of support and connection that they get.

Many of the people that I wrote about, something didn't quite work out in their lives as they'd expected.

They maybe didn't find a partner.

Or there's one person I wrote about who is on the asexual spectrum and realized that a sort of

I don't know, a standard or conventional relationship was not going to be the kind of thing that they would pursue.

And I think as we see the rates of marriage declining and people getting married later, that that can be a form of encouragement to be more creative with finding a life that you feel fulfilled by.

I think there's also increasing recognition that the ways that we have set expectations for

a healthy relationship are actually undermining those relationships and that it really helps to have a wider set of people.

I mean, Esther Perel, the psychologist, has famously said that we now expect of one person what we used to expect of a whole village.

So I think there are some kind of cultural forces that might increasingly encourage people to look to the significance of their friendships and broadening the kinds of people that they

want to have in their lives.

And I think I've just seen such a blow up in interest in chosen families and also particularly for caregivers having this idea of a village that they don't have to go it alone.

That parenting has been so difficult for so many people and isolating and there's just a lot more interest

that I have seen, and I can point to organizations that are doing work on this in response to that growing interest in looking to friends and being creative about what it looks like to rebuild something that had existed