Raina Cohen

So like you make a circle for yourself and then you draw other people who are close, you know, who are important to you in your life and you make how close they are to your bubble and how big they are an indication of sort of how significant they are in your life.

Just putting that on the page can be illuminating for, like, who do you want to become closer to?

If in the process of drawing it, you're like, I feel close to this person, but I actually don't see them that much, that you can maybe get a sense of that gap.

You know, there are also, on a societal level, like, it helps to have more models.

It helps to have more stories of people who show you different ways of living life.

And I think to the extent possible, trying to seek out the stories that maybe are, like...

a little bit different than the ways that people immediately around you might live can be helpful for asking questions about what you yourself might want.

I think the definition of friend feels much more expansive to me than it had before.

I mean, one of the early interviews I did, I remember talking to a woman in her 60s who I'd asked, like, does she wish it was a term for, like, the friendship as close as hers?

It was like a friendship of decades where they saw each other basically, you know, as sisters.

And she was like...

I don't want another term.

I just want us to use the term friend to treat it with more value, to not diminish it.

And I think kind of related to that, I just see all of the possibilities that exist within friendship.

And I really bristle when anybody says just friends or more than friends.

Nothing that I think is categorically excluded from what a friend can do.

I've seen now friends...

do just about anything a family member or a romantic partner would do let's say something in my life comes up like i had i had sort of very difficult sort of incident happen a couple weeks ago and to me it wasn't like the first person i contact about this is my my husband it was like who are the people who could be most helpful and in this moment to me and my husband was on the other side of the country and i eventually did talk to him about it but i went to other people first

And so I think not kind of operating by default with what are roles and more like what is the task or the need at hand and who can best respond to that.

And also, you know, if somebody, if a friend needs something, I try to ask, like, what can I do?