Raina Cohen

But again, if you look across different times and places, you will see that kind of affection where friends would talk about loving each other, and that was

obvious that you would love your friends.

And I think, especially, you know, we're talking about certain subsets of society, it's not that common to talk in that language of love or to snuggle up to your friend without that being a question of, you know, are you romantically involved?

So I think between the idea that friendship is private, that it doesn't, it should be easy, it shouldn't necessarily involve commitment, and that there are

There's kind of a cap on how intense the emotional experience might be.

All of those are ways that we, I think, underestimate what friendship can be and do for our lives.

So I found myself in a friendship that really broke the definition of friendship that I thought was, you know, what it was supposed to be.

And this happened in my early 20s.

And I ended up meeting a friend who it turned out lived five minutes, five minute walk away from me.

And we became much more intertwined in each other's lives.

then I had experienced maybe something somewhat comparable a couple of times.

But we found ourselves struggling with even a language of best friend, that that felt inadequate, that something more like partners maybe fit.

And I found myself thinking about other people that I had known at different points in my life who had these really intense, devoted friendships that didn't

kind of couldn't be captured with the term friend or best friend.

And then I looked to history, some of what I was just talking about before, and realized that we have a really specific idea about what friendship is now.

And I wanted to find people today who had these kinds of friendships and

essentially over the course of those interviews, I realized that this wasn't just a project to lift up and help people recognize that there were these extremely close friendships that I call platonic partnerships, but that because they challenged the definition of friendship by blending together kinds of elements of partnership and platonic friendship, that they ended up asking all these bigger questions about

How do we know that a romantic relationship is romantic?

Why are romantic relationships held up higher than friendships by default?

How do we define what family is?