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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She ended up functionally becoming a second mother and legally eventually becoming another mother to this child.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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,
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