Rhaina Cohen
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Rhaina Cohen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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When I have talked to people about platonic partnerships, people who have a friendship that goes well beyond even what a best friend is, I have been kind of shocked to find out how often people say, I have that, or I know someone who has it.
So glad to get to talk to you.
So I think people have an association with the term significant other and that they're thinking about a spouse or a romantic partner. And what I have found is that there are a lot of people who don't have a romantic partner or who don't only have a romantic partner as an extremely significant relationship in their lives.
A friendship can play as meaningful of a role in shaping people's lives as a romantic partner, even sort of rise to the level of being a partner like the person you would live with or raise kids with and make life decisions around.
Often enough that I have spent many hours talking to people who have these sorts of friendships and that I have experienced one in my own life. We don't really have great language for these friendships, so it makes it really hard to know how common they are. But it is really something I think that is hidden in plain sight that...
When I have talked to people about what I'm calling platonic partnerships, people who have a friendship that goes well beyond even what a best friend is, I have been kind of shocked to find out how often people say, I have that, or I had that, or I know someone who has it, that my aunt and her best friend lived next to each other for 30 years or whatever the case may be.
So I think it's more often than we probably think. We don't really know for sure because we don't have any stats on this. But I think regardless of how common it is for people to have these sorts of friendships, they're really worth looking at because they show us how much more we actually can ask of our friendships.
And they also provoke really profound questions, I think, about what it means to have a good life. What are the components of a good life? How do we think about the significance of romantic relationships? And how do we define what family is?
A person that you treat as a platonic partner, we can use that term, is somebody that you are moving through life with in lockstep, that you are making decisions together about where to live, maybe what jobs to take or to not consider, that you are really figuring each other into your future, that you're building a future together.
Well, I think necessity is another of invention and that many of the people who I spoke to who have these friendships did have something about their lives that went off track where they couldn't have, or no longer had the kind of nuclear family set up that they had been really raised to aspire to. And they also were lucky enough to find a really deep connection with a friend.
And so they had kind of the space and the open-mindedness to let a friend into their lives in a way that usually, you know, you're supposed to only have a romantic partner do. But just because it often happens in circumstances like, you know,
the dissolution of a romantic relationship or people not finding one doesn't mean that it is by necessity a lesser option or a plan B. And what many people who I've interviewed, like, you know, women in their 80s who have been best friends for 50 years, own a home together, you know, have the same primary care doctor, have the same email address is like, you can get companionship in different forms.
And that often what people are talking about when they say,
don't want to die alone or i don't want to you know be alone is doesn't really have to do with sort of sex and sparks which we associate with romantic relationships but these other forms of connection intimacy commitment that are possible to find outside of romantic relationships and i'm looking at friendships but certainly siblings are a really great case of this do you find when you talk to people because it would seem it would seem like
I mean, there's no dating app for you to go out and find a platonic partner. So I think it is relatively unusual for someone to say, you know, I'm 25 or 30 or even 50. And like, you know what, what I want to go out and do is find a friend who's going to be my life partner. We just don't really have... a social script for that.
I have seen people be extremely intentional, partly because something about their life didn't quite work out. So, you know, one of the people whose stories I find, I think, very, very moving is this man named Art, who met his best friend at a Christian college when they were both
training to be youth pastors and, you know, in conservative congregations, art comes to terms with the fact that he's gay and the way that he reconciles his faith, which is so important to him and his sexuality is to become celibate. And he decided that, you know, so he's not going to have a kind of conventional romantic relationship.
And his friend sort of saw how devastating that would be to art and kind of offered to act as family with him. And the two of them, I think, have been kind of astonishingly intentional and open in their conversation about how they want to play a really important role in each other's life as friends. So intentionality can come in, but
you know, again, it's often arising because someone is being forced to be a little bit more creative to get core needs met in their lives.
And, you know, I think just as often it's like someone needs extra support and a friend is there and is jumping in, which was the case with a woman that I interviewed who saw that her, who like fell in love with her friend's baby after being this kind of birth coach. And the mother needed a lot of help because the child had complex disabilities and
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