Raina Cohen

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.