Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. As the holiday season continues around the world, many of us find ourselves thinking about family and loved ones. And yet, the most meaningful relationships in our lives aren't biological or romantic.
In this eye-opening conversation, journalist and author Raina Cohen sits down with TED's Whitney Pennington Rogers to explore why close platonic bonds Chosen family, as some call it, deserve intention, commitment, even public recognition. And she illuminates the path to deep and lasting friendships in today's world.
For a lot of us, this is a moment when questions of family come into sharper focus. Who do we gather with? Who supports us? Who do we choose and who chooses us? And for some of us, those answers might feel wonderfully clear, but for others, there might be a tenderness around this or a sense that your answers aren't quite what tradition tells you they should be.
And that's why our guest today feels especially essential right now. She's a journalist and author of The Other Significant Others.
Chapter 2: Why are friendships essential to our health and happiness?
And last year, she delivered a TED Talk that pushed us to expand who we count as our people. and to recognize the deep, sustaining connections that don't always fit neatly onto holiday cards or family trees, but can shape our lives in very profound ways. I'm so grateful she's here to help us reflect on belonging, connection, and relationships that can carry us into this season and well beyond it.
Please give a welcome to Raina Cohen.
What a nice intro. Thanks, Whitney.
Well, I think just maybe to kick things off, your talk, the talk that you delivered on the TED stage is sort of a distillation of the big idea from your book, the other significant others that essentially argues for a more expansive approach to friendship and the role it can play for all of us.
And to pull a quote from the book, you say, if we don't limit friendship, it can be central to our lives. So for those of us who aren't familiar as a primer, I think for our conversation, what do you mean by this? How are we limiting friendship and how could we think about it more fully?
I think we limit friendship by thinking it can do less than it actually can. And one of the ways that feels really clear is by looking across time and across places and seeing what friendship looked like in those times and places. It was different. For one thing, I think the expectation now is that friendship is going to be a relationship that's private.
It's just between you and someone else, or maybe it's a small group of people. And it is a nice addition to your life, but it is not an essential part of your life. It's something that you can maybe put on the back burner. And that was just not true in many other places.
I mean, you can see that there were rituals that were built around recognizing friendship, potentially for the rest of your life. An example of this ritual is called sworn brotherhood. And it was recognized as something that people would witness, like that commitment. We don't think about friendship as
involving commitment, let alone a commitment that you are going to formalize in front of other people. So I think even the idea of commitment is something that would surprise a lot of people. And then I think the kinds of feelings that we think are possible to experience in friendship
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Chapter 3: How do we define and limit friendship in today's society?
So that's one thing that I would recommend. I think on the idea of what is acceptable to ask of a friend or do for a friend, I think trying to experiment with asking for help a little bit more or at least telling people when you're in a you're having a low mood, being open about the parts of your life that are not polished. It invites other people to then share those things with you.
I've seen this play out with people in my own life, that sharing something that is vulnerable becomes an invitation, and then that kind of is a flywheel that can bring you closer. And then the last suggestion I'll give is a more radical one, but maybe something to consider. On the one hand, I really believe in the idea that we should take friendship more seriously.
We shouldn't run away at the first difficulty. We should try to have harder conversations and be intentional. But on the other hand, I think that there are ways that we make friendship harder than it needs to be.
because we have oriented so many of us our lives around a different set of priorities which might be as you know the the idea that like you want to have everything to yourself you want to have a home that you have control over or you make a decision about where to live so that it's as close to work as possible or um you know any any number of other kinds of uh priorities
And then we accept that we're just going to have some social deprivation as part of it. I don't think that's actually or I'd say except, but I'm not sure that people are even conscious of it, that there's this huge loss that we incur when we to build our lives for some of these other values.
And I have found that in my experience and in other people that I've interviewed, if they situate their lives so that they, it's built around friends physically close by their, to their friends, it makes it so much easier to maintain those friendships. And that is especially true for people who are really time strapped and like bound to the home. Like if they have young children or if they have to
caretake for a relative in their life, that having somebody next door or down the block or just very close by can make or break the ability to get close to other people. So I know that that can take some work and we can talk about that, but that's the more radical suggestion that I think you're doing work on the front end that makes friendship easier in the longer run.
What you've shared is a lot around people that maybe are already in your life in some capacity and you see some opportunity to deepen the relationship. What are some tips you would suggest for people who are interested in meeting people with the hopes that it could turn into something more? How do you approach those sorts of relationships?
Yeah, I mean, there are kind of a few steps there. So one is like the search process. How do you find people who you might potentially want to become friends with? And then there's, okay, you found somebody who you want to be friends with. They're a group of people. How do you make them, how do you like end up becoming friends?
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Chapter 4: What personal experiences led to the writing of 'The Other Significant Others'?
more commonly in the past and exist in some cultures all over the place to not just have a small nuclear family, but maybe to have multi-generational homes or extended households where you have aunties and uncles who may or may not be related to you, but really feel like those deep connections.
Well, you mentioned tech earlier and how that wasn't really a big part of how you approach this. But as we're thinking to the future, I'm interested to hear your perspective on how you think tech will impact the nature of, I guess, all relationships, but these sort of platonic partnerships, as you say.
A lot of people say that tech might lead us to retreat from each other more and spend more time away from other humans interacting less with one another. How do you see this changing?
playing a role in the future of these relationships i mean my best guess is that it will be a mixed bag as it currently is a mixed bag so i feel really grateful that i have a way um to be in touch with friends from all over the place i mean just the other day i had a friend um text me uh you know a photo from a place she's saying staying and that she was thinking of me she lives on the other side of the country and we only get to see each other a few times a year in person um
Or I left a voice memo on a walk yesterday for a friend of mine who lives in another city. So I think those ways of being able to reach out or coordinate so that you can go on a trip together or whatnot, those are great ways that technology can enable or help us maintain friendships.
I think the risk comes when technology becomes a replacement for the kinds of interactions that you might otherwise have with friends. When you're watching YouTube video after YouTube video, or you develop a parasocial relationship with someone that you haven't met, and it might feel like you are being known by
whatever the uh i work in podcasting but you know i think this can happen with podcast hosts or with television with celebrities um that it's but it's fundamentally one-sided so um i think tech can give us the illusion of having relationships when we don't and then the i think that so with this newer technologies um that around um ai tools that
are really skillful at mimicking certain aspects of human relationships. I think one of the concerns there is that having relations is again about this one sidedness, that having relationships with real humans or even like pets like any kind of living being, comes with some difficulties.
And I'm recalling a story that a journalist I know told where she was visiting some people who are working on these robots that they think will kind of become friends for kids, and it's supposed to be a replacement for iPad interactions.
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