Raina Cohen

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.