Raina Cohen

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.