Rhaina Cohen
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
So glad to get to talk to you.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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...
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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?
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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,
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
And that often what people are talking about when they say,
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
She ended up functionally becoming a second mother and legally eventually becoming another mother to this child.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
Yeah, often it is something happens and that escalates the closeness of the friendship. Like with, you know, I'm thinking of one woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer and her friend immediately offered to be there for every single appointment. And she did that for a year.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
And, you know, when you start to spend four hours every week at Kibo with somebody that you love, like you're just going to build intimacy and trust and trust.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
you know, see each other in a vulnerable state and that makes you closer and then it becomes less of an odd thing to ask, you know, for each person to ask for other forms of help or to put that person in your will or to designate them as the medical power of attorney. There is this way that there can be this kind of snowballing that people don't necessarily anticipate at the front end.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
It can go in different directions. I've certainly seen cases where a romantic relationship crowds out the friendship. And I mean, I've had a number of people write to me about how hard that has been for them. And then there's a psychologist named Robert Dunbar at Oxford who does a lot of research on friendship.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
And he's found that in general, the beginning of a new romantic relationship crowds out two of the five closest relationships. relationships in a person's life. So it really can take up a lot of space and can lead to a kind of demotion of close friends. I have also seen cases where there's kind of competition and jealousy often on the part of
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
the romantic partner, and that can be a real source of tension. Something has to give. So either the romantic relationship ends or the friendship ends. And that's in the kind of worst case scenario. And I've seen other situations where with the right person, the right romantic partner, it all becomes additive rather than competitive.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
I had mentioned these two men who decided to operate as a family, Nick and Art. And Nick is a straight man, has always wanted to get married and have children. And he had a romantic partner who was really suspicious of the friendship. She had a lot of issues with it. They ended up breaking up. Nick was introduced to a woman who herself had what she calls a chosen family, has a really close
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
friends. And to her, it was a plus that Nick had this close friend in his life, Art, and that all three of them see each other as kind of enhancing both the friendship and the romantic relationship because they can all support each other. They can take the load off of each other.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
Well, as I said, there's no association for platonic partners that I can look to. So I don't totally know what is more or less common. But I can say sort of anecdotally from what I was able to find, it was certainly much easier for me to find women who had these friendships than men, and that men ran into issues that women didn't in the same way.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
So specifically, there is a lot of sort of distrust and rumors around men, around straight men, or if at least one person in the pair was straight.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
So there are a couple of straight men who I followed who they worked in the same lab together as grad students and their PhD, you know, the head of the lab basically gossiped about the two of them and was like, are they, you know, are they romantic partners?
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
The mother of one of them kind of kept trying to ask if they, if the two of them were romantically involved and was trying to be supportive and Um, so those are not things that I hear really in the same way with women.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
I think there's, uh, there's a lot more license for women to be close to one another, um, emotionally and, you know, and, and physically close and to not be, um, suspected of having romantic involvement. Um, and there isn't that kind of disapproval. So, um, it, so it certainly was less common for men. And I think that there's, uh, men are swimming against the tide even more than, than women are.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
You know, not always, but yeah, I, you know, have seen friendships that have lasted decades, but I think it's, if you were to ask the same question about what is the lifespan of a marriage or of a romantic relationship, you're going to get a ton of variation. And I think that that is true here.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
And they're kind of parallels to like a lot of these friendships naturally foster when people are very young and when they are, you know, have spending a lot of time together and when that is kind of condoned and not seen as as taking away from dating or a taking care of family. And those can be really intense and they can flame out or people make different decisions.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
So I think some of the younger ones might be less likely to sustain versus people who are maybe meeting a little bit later in life when things are more settled and they would have to potentially work more to to maintain the friendship. But yeah, I just, I have interviewed people where in the course of a year, like they had been they gone from being very close to having a falling out.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
And I have interviewed people who have been, you know, best friends for many, many decades. So I think it really runs the gamut. I mean, somebody sent me an email recently asking, like, essentially for self help books for platonic partners, like, there aren't any, there's there's no kind of structural support for these relationships, and yet they they persist.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this was one of the things that made me so interested in these friendships to begin with. I mean, well, one thing, I fell into an extremely close friendship, and the two of us had trouble naming it. And we thought that best friend was inadequate, and we, you know, were looking around at, like... aren't we just kind of partners?
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
Like I bring you to my office holiday party and, you know, all of my, like all of our coworkers know, um, like know the other person and we host parties together. We're kind of assumed to, you know, if one person is invited, you invite the other. Uh, so we were playing around with, with what language we could use. And then as I interviewed people, like everybody had their own terms that, and, um,
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
Like platonic life partner, platonic soulmate, best soul friend, non romantic life partner. I mean, you know, the list goes on. And there's, it is very difficult to get people to understand something if you don't have language that other people
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
people recognize and even if you come up with your own term it doesn't mean other people will respect it um and you know when you like i think about people who told me they didn't know what to do and they were filling out their emergency contact on the the doctor's office and you know like came up with different terms each time so
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
It can feel really invalidating to not have language for you and the person in the friendship, but it also can make it really inexplicable and confusing when you're trying to tell people what a person means to you.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
I think what you're saying there, like the roommate example, is actually really a good case of why we don't know about more of these friendships. I have heard people say, well, I don't really want to have to give people my whole life history or map out my family tree, so I'm just going to use a proxy.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
I'm going to say that my best friend's partner is the stepmom of our child, even though that's not really what it is. Or That this person is my roommate or housemate or best friend. And so there's, or calling people, giving people family names. This is my aunt or my cousin when that's actually not what you are.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
So there are this kind of euphemistic language that makes it more legible what the relationship is. But what it ends up doing is that, we all have a kind of obscured sense of reality. So we don't have people telling us about these deep friendships because they think that we won't understand it.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
And because we're not presented with them, if we ourselves have that kind of relationship, we're not gonna tell anybody else about it. I think there's something that's very powerful about talking about this subject because people will, it just cracks open lots of stories, past and present, that people have that they didn't realize anybody else would understand.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
Well, thank you for giving it attention.
Something You Should Know
Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners
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.