April 30, 2024 • 25 mins
Society treats marriage like the end goal of human intimacy. Platonic friends can never be as important as romantic partners.
What would life look like if we made friendship the goal? Journalist and producer Rhaina Cohen tackles this question in her book The Other Significant Others. She tells the stories of people who made platonic friends the closest people in their lives, doing things together like buying houses, executing a will, and raising children.
I wanted to talk with Rhaina because redefining what friendship means in our lives lets us connect in new and deeper ways outside the rigid boundaries of a marriage or relationship. And it might take the pressure off our romantic partners to fulfill every one of our social needs.
This...is A Bit of Optimism.
To learn more about Rhaina and her work, check out:
her book The Other Significant Others
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
As we grow older, we hit our thirties and many
of us aren't married, and yet society puts pressure on us,
and we put pressure on ourselves because we have to
conform to this model that marriage is the goal. But
what if we can imagine a world in which friendship
is the goal.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Stay tuned for more.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I have never been married, and a lot of people
look down on me for that, but I have friendships
that are as close as some people's marriages. That's why
I wanted to talk to Raina Cohen. She wrote a
book called The Other Significant Others. She's a prolific journalist
and producer, and in her book she tells the stories
of people who made platonic friendships the most significant people
(00:45):
in their lives, even bordering on partnership.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
I love this topic.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Redefining what friendship means in our lives freezes up to
connect with people in new and deeper ways, beyond the
rigid definitions of a relationship or a marriage, and it
just might take the pressure of our romantic partners to
fulfill every one of our social needs. Also, this is
a bit of optimism, Raina. I'm excited to talk to
(01:13):
you because you wrote and I think it was an
op ed for the Washington Post. I loved it, and
what I really sort of zoned in on was that
there are these friendships that are as intimate and as
powerful as marriages, though they may not be sexual. Pretty
much everything else other than the sex is the same.
(01:34):
And I think the story you wrote about was a
friend whose friend was going through cancer treatment, was there
for her throughout the whole thing as a spouse and
had no rights at the end. But the thing that
I found so appealing was you raise the level of
what friendship means. And it really started asking like why
(01:55):
is there so much pressure? Like I have a friend
who's single. She's been single since she got divorced over
a day decade ago. I've been single a lot of
my life, and people have criticized me for it. But
if you look closely at our friendship, we have a
friendship that, without sex, is akin to some people's marriages,
and I would say better than some people's marriages.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
And yet that is not.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Talked about or held up as a perfectly viable alternative
living alongside marriage.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
So I wanted to talk to you about that.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Yeah, no, no, there's a lot there.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
I think most people can't conceptualize that it is possible
to be that close and that committed and have such
an enduring relationship with someone who you aren't romantically involved in.
I mean, even you know, if the question was have
you had an enduring relationship in your life? Or what
is the most devoted relationship in your life? It sounds
(02:46):
like you have an answer. It's just that the term
relationship now has been monopolized by romantic relationships, and that
the only kind of relationship that is considered legitimate would
be a romantic relationship, and otherwise it just doesn't count.
And what I'm trying to show is that there are
other kinds of really abiding relationships that matter, and that
for reasons that I don't think people have really questioned
(03:07):
that they've privileged romantic coupling over the other kinds of
ways that we can be bound to other people. Where
your romantic partner, your spouse is supposed to be your
confidante and your lover and your best friend. That only
in the last like seventy years or so have we
expected that the only kind of relationship where you can
(03:28):
discover deep emotional intimacy is within a marriage, as opposed
to with friends, and in the past people saw their
friends as the most important relationship in their life, as
the way that ancient Romans would talk about their friends
as the greater half of my soul. So if you
go really far back, it starts to look quite different
in terms of how people valued platonic versus romantic relationships.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
What specifically got you on this path, like why did
you find yourself so interested in friends?
Speaker 4 (04:00):
What set me on the path for writing about this
is personal but in a kind of different way of
falling into a friendship that really scrambled to me what
the definition of friend is. So this is a friend
who I write about and referred to as M and
she and I like, I felt like I'd fallen in
love with her in a way that was not different
fundamentally from how I'd fallen in love with my husband.
(04:21):
It just didn't have a sexual component. So I had
so many questions that came up from that friendship around
how do we decide which relationships matter the most? Why
do we set certain limits on friendship? Why don't we
have more terms to talk about the closest of friendships?
And once I started asking questions about our specific friendship,
I found myself asking questions about all kinds of friendships
(04:44):
and have an interest in men's friendships and why you know,
it's especially hard for them to get the kind of
intimacy that I was able to find so easily. So
a lot of the writing came from like this specific
relationship that then made me look more broadly at friendships.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
And the piece you was you wrote about the legal
rights of friends where they have none.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
Yeah, I mean, the point for me is not that
we need to create like new categories for friendship in
the law, which I think might be one route to go,
but instead to say, on what basis are we designating
some types of relationships significant and others insignificant and invisible.
And when you look at friendships that have lasted fifty years,
(05:25):
and these are people who are there for a year's
worth of cancer treatments for their friend, and who are
executive of their friends of state and have medical and
legal power of attorney rights and doing everything that a
spouse is supposed to do. And it's that kind of
broader point that I'm interested in, is how we are
so set on certain kind of categories for creating this
(05:48):
hierarchy of which relationships matter and don't and are paying
less attention to what is actually happening within their relationships,
and can we be more expansive and open minded about
how people set up their lives and who they're turning to.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
I think it's such an interesting conversation about categories, right,
because we're talking about marriage is a category and friend
as a separate category, and we're not talking about that
friendships should necessarily have the same legal.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Rights as marriages.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
It's not what we're saying, but rather like for me,
it's a fascinating conversation from a societal pressure thing, which
is I found great relief and Catharsis in reading your
work that there's nothing wrong with me, right, And I
find the intense emotional intimacy from some of my friendships
satisfying and shouldn't that be enough? But in the talking
(06:35):
of categories, you know, Europeans make fun of Americans because
in America everybody you meet is your friend. My friend
is my friend that you've met them once, And I
do think there is the need for more categories a friend.
I also like to you, I like the term acquaintance,
like do you know this person? Yes, they're my acquaintance.
(06:55):
Or I know them they're my work friend because I'm
it's helping me delineate intimacy or an emotional intensity, you know,
from the language, from the category. I have no intimacy
with an acquaintance. And so I do think that the
categories of friends should be normalized, like we should use
the word acquaintance and other words more than we do,
at least in America. Everyone's a friend, which then blurs
(07:18):
the lines.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Right, I mean, it makes the word almost meaningless, and
I think it's This was one of the issues for
me with my friend m that even the term best
friend felt like it didn't actually describe how close we were,
where we were spending you know, four or five days
a week. We would stop by each other's houses, and
(07:39):
we were the default plus ones to each other's parties,
and we're very intimately involved in each other's lives. And
I know people who talk about their best friend who
they see twice a year, or you know, they have
you know, not that frequent phone calls, but they have
a lot of affection for them, but it's not the same.
And to say we were best friends felt like it
(07:59):
was actually conveying what we meant to each other. So
I think there is something about having more precision because
you want people to understand. I mean, one way this
came up was I didn't an interview about my book,
and the interviewer talked about how he's described someone as
his best friend and had to move away, move across
the country from his best friend, but nobody got it
because it's his best friend, not his spouse. So maybe
(08:22):
if he had another term, like this was my platonic partner,
or this was there was some kind of legible category.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
That maybe people would have understood.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Oh, this is actually really devastating that you know, you
aren't in the company of this person who you have
built your life around. And best friend, let alone friend,
is not communicating that.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
I do think language matters because language creates the category
of possibility. Even if a failed romantic relationship, it allows
a new category. You know, Let's just be friends is like,
oh my god, that's like a death sentence, you know,
when somebody says I want to just be friends with you.
I mean, that's like seven levels of demotion, and so
it does need to new word. Well, let's just be
(09:01):
best friends. Even that that just sounds like, you know, egostroking.
That's you know, it's awful.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
The thing that I found so interesting about my friendship
with M is that it had some of the kind
of flutters like infatuation that I associated with romance. But again,
there was no sexual component. And I've heard many people
talk about I was talking to these two women last
night who were saying the experience love at first sight
and their friendship. So I was interested in how within
a platonic relationship it is actually possible to have these
(09:30):
feelings of excitement that we've been told are only possible
within a quote unquote romantic relationship, and that it blurs
categories that are.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Really seen as distinct.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
But if you think even about romantic relationships, so there's
a whole spectrum for the emotional experience people have.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Some people have very.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Passionate romantic relationships and others have more companionate ones. Where
it does it might feel more like a familial relationship.
You know, it doesn't feel kind of out of place
to me that we could both be talking about really
close friendships, but the emotional experience might be a little
bit different.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Let's change tax lightly. We see an increase of loneliness, anxiety,
depression and in some demographic suicide in the United States
and actually indeed.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Around the world.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
So you can have friends and be lonely or depressed.
You know, why are we struggling? Why are we struggling
to make the kinds of friends that we could call
in darkness and say I need you, or who would
be aware enough to show up and say something's wrong,
Like what's happening in our society today that we're struggling
(10:37):
to make those kinds of friendships that you write about.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
I'm thinking of the you know, one of your first
comments about how you are, like you have been scrutinized
for being single, essentially like if you don't have this
one kind of relationship, then what's going on in your
life and what's wrong with you? And I think there's
this phenomenon of what's called compulsory coupledom like that basically
there's so much pressure to be coupled, which means, you know,
you're putting so much effort towards this one relationship and
(11:04):
we're not saying what does a good life look like.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
A good life looks like.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
One where you have a community, where you have a
bunch of friends who you are investing in, and I
think that, you know, we get into these sort of
feedback loops where we don't open ourselves up to other
people and then think, Okay, there is just this limit
to how close a friendship can be, because I've never
felt any closer, rather than understanding that maybe what we
(11:28):
refuse to give over to other people, what we refuse
to show, makes it impossible to have the kind of
closeness that actually is there's potential to have within friendship.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
What's interesting as you were explaining that, you know, the
thought that came to mind was it's goal setting in
some weird shape or form, which is when I was
a young entrepreneur and I just started my business, every
networking anything I did, I felt like I had to
close a deal, like in the first meeting, Like you know,
I had to like the first phone call. I needed
(12:09):
to like get a deal, and obviously I got none
because I showed up guns of blazon and so much
pressure that I put on myself because I thought a
successful entrepreneur was somebody who closes all the deals. So
I was just trying to live up to this image
that I had of what it needed to do, and
it wasn't until I completely changed the goal of an
(12:29):
initial interaction. So, for example, if I have a first
meeting or a first phone call with somebody new, my
only goal is to create an environment in which if I.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Call them back, they'll take the call. That's it.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
I don't care about closing a deal, getting anything. And
I think about that relative to what we're talking about,
which is, you know, we go on dating apps, we're
set up on a date our friends, that we have
the societal pressure, we have, the pressure from ourselves, pressure
from our parents, you know, all of the things that
make the interactions. That the goals are too much, too soon,
and they're not allowed to evolve and just state and
(13:03):
so what a magical thing to go on a first
date and say I hope I make a friend. I
think the goal setting is part of the problem, and
how we show up profoundly changes. If we simply downgrade
our ambition for this new relationship, taking the pressure off
is what it is, right, Yeah, I mean I.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Feel like maybe I'm reacting a little bit to downgrade
because of the way that people think of friendship as
itself a downgrade from the real thing, which is romantic
I don't like, but I think what you're getting at
is we conceive of only one kind of relationship that
can be a container for the many things that we
might be looking for in our life, like somebody who
is going to be there to talk to at the
(13:40):
end of a hard day, who knows when.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Your plane lands, is going to hand you a mug
of tea.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
And if we can understand that, there might be other
kinds of relationships, like friendships, could be a sibling relationship.
I've also encountered a number of lifelong sibling relationships where
that is the anchoring one. We could just be thinking
about what a loving relationship is, because otherwise it feels
like there's only one form of success and that that's
what you're driving toward, and otherwise it's a failure. And
this sort of success failure dichotomy, rather than starting from
(14:07):
a place of curiosity of like, who do we want
to be to each other? And how might that the
answer to that question change between the first time we
meet a year from now, ten years from now, and
it might be we don't want to be anything to
each other, like we never clicked whatever. But the impulse
toward curiosity could solve a lot of problems here rather
than trying to box people in.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
There's an eerily an uncomfortable similarity here when you talk
about the definition of success of a relationship, which is
even the definition of success of a career or a life,
which for too many years was associated almost entirely with
rank or money, And we are having that conversation now, Covid,
I think was a catalyst, but that conversation was already
beginning of what are the other definitions of success? And
(14:50):
I may want to pursue a different kind of success.
My parents may still put pressure on me to make
more money buy a house, but I am exploring a
different definition of success that works for me, and I
think that's where your work lies. I think it's very
contemporary that we're exploring different expectations and different definitions.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Of what is required of a good life.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
And this different definition, these new definitions of what success
in relationship looks like, which is it's not always the
metaphor carrying over money, you know, marriage, you know tradition,
I find very interesting and I wonder these challenging of
all these definitions of what's expected of our lives from
our careers our friendships, our romances. I wonder what the
(15:31):
common thread is that we're pushing against all of these definitions.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
I think that the common threat here is intentionality, and
that we have been put on a kind of conveyor
belt in different areas of life where we've been told
that there's one type of success, and that a lot
of people, you know, hit a point where they're like,
I've tried this and it's not working, or I'm starting
to question for the first time the thing that I've
(15:56):
been told.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
To do, and that if you instead.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
To look at the ladder you're climbing without having actually
asked if you want to get to the top.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
I live in DC. There are a lot of lawyers,
and I.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
Feel like are a lot of people who are attracted to
the law like to climb ladders, and I just have
seen for people a few years after law school there's
still at a firm and then they're like, I did
all the things I was supposed to do, Why am
I not happy? Or like if you hit a point
where you're dissatisfied and start to ask, like, are there
other ways that I might find meaning, then you might
(16:28):
realize that the singular path is not the only one.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Ooh, this is interesting. Okay, So if I've been climbing
the ladder of rank and money and I've made the
money and I've made the rank, and I'm still not happy,
and now we see, you know, the divorce rate the
United States remains at fifty percent. It has not gone down,
it's not getting better. Second marriage is even worse. And
so maybe there's a similar thing happening here, which is
I keep trying the relationship that you know, I was
(16:54):
told that I would find whatever the thing is. I'm
looking for happiness, joy, companionship, safety, and I haven't found
and I've done it your way, So I'm questioning the
alternative ways. Are these new definitions of friendships being challenged
by people from the beginning, Like what the definition of
success is? Or is it after they've tried the tried
and true way? In other words, it's only because things
(17:15):
aren't working that we're now exploring alternatives.
Speaker 4 (17:18):
I would say, I think actually this is coming from
two directions, Like maybe the best example of this would
be like parents who are overwhelmed and are like I
have a two parent household, I have a nuclear family
that is supposed to be the you know the gold standard,
and yet I am totally exhausted, and I don't feel satisfied.
I think there's a sense that like I've been duped.
(17:40):
Something I'm working on right now is about parents who
raise their kids among friends and in these larger networks.
You know, some of the people whoend up doing that
have seen how exhausting it is for other parents and
don't want to get themselves into that same trap. Then
there's the sort of positive thing that gets people to
come off course, which is not unlike what happened with me,
Me and em where we fell into a friendship that
(18:02):
nobody had told us you could find. There was no
dating app to find a platonic partner or whatever we
wanted to call ourselves. But life happened, and then we're
suddenly questioning, well, why is it that only a romantic
relationship is supposed to be the thing that's going to
make us complete, you know, a successful person in the
eyes of others, where Nobodeo will be asking us like
(18:23):
why are you still single? I think that you can.
You can stumble into a relationship that's really important. We're
stumble into a career that you know, nobody told you
was going to get you status points and find that
it's meaningful and then start pushing back at everything else
that people have been telling you. And I think on
the flip side, you can try the thing that you
were supposed to. You know, when I think about some
(18:44):
dam close to who grew up Mormon, and one of
the ways that she left Mormonism was that she had
felt like she had done everything she was supposed to,
and yet she still was not hearing, you know, the
voice of God in her head. She was not getting
the result that she was going to have.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
And I think that those.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
Kind of opposite pressures can lead to the same place
of questioning.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Tell me something that you've done over the course of
your professional career that you.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Absolutely loved being a part of.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
That if every project you ever worked on was like
this one project, you'd be the happiest personal live Specifically, I.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Mean, I loved working on the book.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
There's some stressful parts of it, but I love being
let into people's inner lives. I know an interview is
good if I get chills in it, which is not
a totally infrequent experience. There are these women, Barb and Inez,
who are in their eighties and.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Have just lived a lot of life together.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
They met when they were around thirty, at a point
of transition in each other's lives. A couple of things
I love about their story, like one is, they didn't
expect to fall into the kind of friendship that they
now have where they have lived together for twenty five
years in a house that they bought in their retirement.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
They didn't plan on on.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
This, but life took them by surprise, and they found
a way to adapt to it, adapt to getting divorced
when that was never and as would have expected, especially
coming from a religious family. In Barb's case, she had
really wanted to have biological children. She's adopted and had
never gotten to see anybody who looked like her, and
then had emergency surgery in her late twenties that made
it impossible for her to have biological children, and after
(20:23):
that happened, her desire to marry really dropped off. She's
never been married, but she's had this relationship with a
friend that has outlasted I think most marriages. So the
level of their devotion though many ways they've showed up
for each other over the course of fifty years. The
fact that They're not even trying to do anything radical,
but their mere existence as these friends, I think challenges
(20:47):
a lot of people's unquestioned ideas about like what is partnership,
which relationships matter, what can a friendship be?
Speaker 3 (20:52):
All of that. I really love about the two of them.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I mean early specific, happy childhood memory, something specific that
I can relive.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
With you, maybe one of the early moments of experiencing
nostalgia for childhood even though I was still a child.
So I was in high school and a friend and
I decided that we were going to make a pillow
for it and makesmores over the gas stove. We lived
in the suburbs. I mean, this was as rustic as
I guess I was going to get. And we watched
Schoolhouse Rock like we were having this call back to
(21:22):
childhood and a way of kind of aimless fun together
at a stage of life where it must have been, like,
I don't know, sophomore junior year, where we were really
worried about all of our ap classes and getting into
college and SATs and acts, and that we were getting
to co exist together in a way that had already
been a little bit taken away from us as teenagers.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
As you tell those two stories.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
You know, I'm sort of struck by a lot of
the language that you've used and that we've used over
the course of this conversation. You know, there's a hearkening
back to innocence and curiosity, you know, of childhood, and
there's there's an innocence in the approach to the making
of friends that is free from expectation, free from conditions,
free from definition even and it sounds like a lot
(22:06):
of your thinking and work is sort of just from
the at least from this conversation. Is that struggle of
the magic and beauty and innocence and curiosity that we
have as children that for some reason is forced out
of us, that we have to let go of it
as adults, and then we're supposed to have all these
quote unquote adult relationships and adult this and adult that
(22:28):
and adult responsibility, but in reality, every single one of
us still has that kid inside of us. And the
question is why can't we be kids in a modern,
responsible world. Why do we have to let go of
this beautiful innocence, magic and curiosity that would allow for
the kinds of friendships that you've written about as well.
Speaker 4 (22:47):
Yeah, I mean magic is a term that has come
up in a lot of the conversations I've had with
people who have these extremely intense friendships, like there is
something that they can't quite explain about it and that
they enjoy. I think think, yeah, the sense of possibility
and like the sort of unconstrained possibility for kids feels
right to me. You know. One of the tensions that
(23:08):
like is very apparent to me and these sorts of
friendships that I look at.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Is like, on the one hand, they are beautiful.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
Because they're free of expectations, Like there's no social script
for these kinds of friendships, so people have to kind
of imagine what they're going to be for themselves, have
conversations for themselves. And that coexists with well, if your
friend is in the hospital, you want someone to take
you seriously.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Of course, it's not the rejecting of adulthood.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
Yeah, And so what I don't want to do is say, Okay,
here's a new box that these fit into, because that'll
help them get recognized. It's how can we start from
a place of questions rather than these.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Little discrete boxes.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
And I think the ability to shape shift to have
conversations with each other to play is a really beautiful
thing that we can learn from these sorts of friendships
that don't fit inside the lines.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Recommendations to start from a place of questioning and start
with the place of questions, and I think it's a
place to end to, which is why can't we have
the kinds of relationships that fulfill us in any way
form that we want?
Speaker 2 (24:10):
And just that's the.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Question that should be we should be showing up with.
You know, the closest person in my life is my sister,
not a friend or a spouse. And some of my
friends are so close to me that you know, it's
been said to me, like you know, Simon, if you
ever get married, they're gonna have to deal with the
fact that, you know, you have these close friendships.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
But why not.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
You can have all these people in your life and
you can all enjoy each other's company at the same time.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
If you are somebody who has a lot of deep relationships,
then the person who's going to be most compatible as
a spouse to someone who's going to see that as
a bonus and not as a negative. You know, I
have a friend of mine who you know is newly
in love and a new relationship and it has this
really very big and tight friend group, with saying that
his previous romantic partner really like didn't see it as
(24:53):
a positive and just like was an introvert, wasn't into it.
And what's so wonderful about his new partners that she
wants to get to know everybody that this is something
that really draws her to him, makes her love him.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
And so you know, that's it.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
If you were going to end up in that kind
of relationship and is that that's the thing that matters,
It's going to be a plus for someone love Randa.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Thanks for the questions and getting to think about my
childlike disposition, which sometimes I'm accused of being too serious,
so this will be my pushback against that.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more,
please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts, And
if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website
Simon Sinek dot com for classes, videos and more. Until then,
take care of yourself, take care of each other. A
Bit of Optimism is a production of the Optimism Company.
(25:48):
It's produced and edited by David Jah and Greg Reuterschen
and Henrietta Conrad is our executive producer.
As we grow older, we hit our thirties and many
of us aren't married, and yet society puts pressure on us,
and we put pressure on ourselves because we have to
conform to this model that marriage is the goal. But
what if we can imagine a world in which friendship
is the goal.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Stay tuned for more.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
I have never been married, and a lot of people
look down on me for that, but I have friendships
that are as close as some people's marriages. That's why
I wanted to talk to Raina Cohen. She wrote a
book called The Other Significant Others. She's a prolific journalist
and producer, and in her book she tells the stories
of people who made platonic friendships the most significant people
(00:45):
in their lives, even bordering on partnership.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
I love this topic.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Redefining what friendship means in our lives freezes up to
connect with people in new and deeper ways, beyond the
rigid definitions of a relationship or a marriage, and it
just might take the pressure of our romantic partners to
fulfill every one of our social needs. Also, this is
a bit of optimism, Raina. I'm excited to talk to
(01:13):
you because you wrote and I think it was an
op ed for the Washington Post. I loved it, and
what I really sort of zoned in on was that
there are these friendships that are as intimate and as
powerful as marriages, though they may not be sexual. Pretty
much everything else other than the sex is the same.
(01:34):
And I think the story you wrote about was a
friend whose friend was going through cancer treatment, was there
for her throughout the whole thing as a spouse and
had no rights at the end. But the thing that
I found so appealing was you raise the level of
what friendship means. And it really started asking like why
(01:55):
is there so much pressure? Like I have a friend
who's single. She's been single since she got divorced over
a day decade ago. I've been single a lot of
my life, and people have criticized me for it. But
if you look closely at our friendship, we have a
friendship that, without sex, is akin to some people's marriages,
and I would say better than some people's marriages.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
And yet that is not.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Talked about or held up as a perfectly viable alternative
living alongside marriage.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
So I wanted to talk to you about that.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Yeah, no, no, there's a lot there.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
I think most people can't conceptualize that it is possible
to be that close and that committed and have such
an enduring relationship with someone who you aren't romantically involved in.
I mean, even you know, if the question was have
you had an enduring relationship in your life? Or what
is the most devoted relationship in your life? It sounds
(02:46):
like you have an answer. It's just that the term
relationship now has been monopolized by romantic relationships, and that
the only kind of relationship that is considered legitimate would
be a romantic relationship, and otherwise it just doesn't count.
And what I'm trying to show is that there are
other kinds of really abiding relationships that matter, and that
for reasons that I don't think people have really questioned
(03:07):
that they've privileged romantic coupling over the other kinds of
ways that we can be bound to other people. Where
your romantic partner, your spouse is supposed to be your
confidante and your lover and your best friend. That only
in the last like seventy years or so have we
expected that the only kind of relationship where you can
(03:28):
discover deep emotional intimacy is within a marriage, as opposed
to with friends, and in the past people saw their
friends as the most important relationship in their life, as
the way that ancient Romans would talk about their friends
as the greater half of my soul. So if you
go really far back, it starts to look quite different
in terms of how people valued platonic versus romantic relationships.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
What specifically got you on this path, like why did
you find yourself so interested in friends?
Speaker 4 (04:00):
What set me on the path for writing about this
is personal but in a kind of different way of
falling into a friendship that really scrambled to me what
the definition of friend is. So this is a friend
who I write about and referred to as M and
she and I like, I felt like I'd fallen in
love with her in a way that was not different
fundamentally from how I'd fallen in love with my husband.
(04:21):
It just didn't have a sexual component. So I had
so many questions that came up from that friendship around
how do we decide which relationships matter the most? Why
do we set certain limits on friendship? Why don't we
have more terms to talk about the closest of friendships?
And once I started asking questions about our specific friendship,
I found myself asking questions about all kinds of friendships
(04:44):
and have an interest in men's friendships and why you know,
it's especially hard for them to get the kind of
intimacy that I was able to find so easily. So
a lot of the writing came from like this specific
relationship that then made me look more broadly at friendships.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
And the piece you was you wrote about the legal
rights of friends where they have none.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
Yeah, I mean, the point for me is not that
we need to create like new categories for friendship in
the law, which I think might be one route to go,
but instead to say, on what basis are we designating
some types of relationships significant and others insignificant and invisible.
And when you look at friendships that have lasted fifty years,
(05:25):
and these are people who are there for a year's
worth of cancer treatments for their friend, and who are
executive of their friends of state and have medical and
legal power of attorney rights and doing everything that a
spouse is supposed to do. And it's that kind of
broader point that I'm interested in, is how we are
so set on certain kind of categories for creating this
(05:48):
hierarchy of which relationships matter and don't and are paying
less attention to what is actually happening within their relationships,
and can we be more expansive and open minded about
how people set up their lives and who they're turning to.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
I think it's such an interesting conversation about categories, right,
because we're talking about marriage is a category and friend
as a separate category, and we're not talking about that
friendships should necessarily have the same legal.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Rights as marriages.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
It's not what we're saying, but rather like for me,
it's a fascinating conversation from a societal pressure thing, which
is I found great relief and Catharsis in reading your
work that there's nothing wrong with me, right, And I
find the intense emotional intimacy from some of my friendships
satisfying and shouldn't that be enough? But in the talking
(06:35):
of categories, you know, Europeans make fun of Americans because
in America everybody you meet is your friend. My friend
is my friend that you've met them once, And I
do think there is the need for more categories a friend.
I also like to you, I like the term acquaintance,
like do you know this person? Yes, they're my acquaintance.
(06:55):
Or I know them they're my work friend because I'm
it's helping me delineate intimacy or an emotional intensity, you know,
from the language, from the category. I have no intimacy
with an acquaintance. And so I do think that the
categories of friends should be normalized, like we should use
the word acquaintance and other words more than we do,
at least in America. Everyone's a friend, which then blurs
(07:18):
the lines.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Right, I mean, it makes the word almost meaningless, and
I think it's This was one of the issues for
me with my friend m that even the term best
friend felt like it didn't actually describe how close we were,
where we were spending you know, four or five days
a week. We would stop by each other's houses, and
(07:39):
we were the default plus ones to each other's parties,
and we're very intimately involved in each other's lives. And
I know people who talk about their best friend who
they see twice a year, or you know, they have
you know, not that frequent phone calls, but they have
a lot of affection for them, but it's not the same.
And to say we were best friends felt like it
(07:59):
was actually conveying what we meant to each other. So
I think there is something about having more precision because
you want people to understand. I mean, one way this
came up was I didn't an interview about my book,
and the interviewer talked about how he's described someone as
his best friend and had to move away, move across
the country from his best friend, but nobody got it
because it's his best friend, not his spouse. So maybe
(08:22):
if he had another term, like this was my platonic partner,
or this was there was some kind of legible category.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
That maybe people would have understood.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Oh, this is actually really devastating that you know, you
aren't in the company of this person who you have
built your life around. And best friend, let alone friend,
is not communicating that.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
I do think language matters because language creates the category
of possibility. Even if a failed romantic relationship, it allows
a new category. You know, Let's just be friends is like,
oh my god, that's like a death sentence, you know,
when somebody says I want to just be friends with you.
I mean, that's like seven levels of demotion, and so
it does need to new word. Well, let's just be
(09:01):
best friends. Even that that just sounds like, you know, egostroking.
That's you know, it's awful.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
The thing that I found so interesting about my friendship
with M is that it had some of the kind
of flutters like infatuation that I associated with romance. But again,
there was no sexual component. And I've heard many people
talk about I was talking to these two women last
night who were saying the experience love at first sight
and their friendship. So I was interested in how within
a platonic relationship it is actually possible to have these
(09:30):
feelings of excitement that we've been told are only possible
within a quote unquote romantic relationship, and that it blurs
categories that are.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Really seen as distinct.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
But if you think even about romantic relationships, so there's
a whole spectrum for the emotional experience people have.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Some people have very.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Passionate romantic relationships and others have more companionate ones. Where
it does it might feel more like a familial relationship.
You know, it doesn't feel kind of out of place
to me that we could both be talking about really
close friendships, but the emotional experience might be a little
bit different.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Let's change tax lightly. We see an increase of loneliness, anxiety,
depression and in some demographic suicide in the United States
and actually indeed.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Around the world.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
So you can have friends and be lonely or depressed.
You know, why are we struggling? Why are we struggling
to make the kinds of friends that we could call
in darkness and say I need you, or who would
be aware enough to show up and say something's wrong,
Like what's happening in our society today that we're struggling
(10:37):
to make those kinds of friendships that you write about.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
I'm thinking of the you know, one of your first
comments about how you are, like you have been scrutinized
for being single, essentially like if you don't have this
one kind of relationship, then what's going on in your
life and what's wrong with you? And I think there's
this phenomenon of what's called compulsory coupledom like that basically
there's so much pressure to be coupled, which means, you know,
you're putting so much effort towards this one relationship and
(11:04):
we're not saying what does a good life look like.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
A good life looks like.
Speaker 4 (11:07):
One where you have a community, where you have a
bunch of friends who you are investing in, and I
think that, you know, we get into these sort of
feedback loops where we don't open ourselves up to other
people and then think, Okay, there is just this limit
to how close a friendship can be, because I've never
felt any closer, rather than understanding that maybe what we
(11:28):
refuse to give over to other people, what we refuse
to show, makes it impossible to have the kind of
closeness that actually is there's potential to have within friendship.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
What's interesting as you were explaining that, you know, the
thought that came to mind was it's goal setting in
some weird shape or form, which is when I was
a young entrepreneur and I just started my business, every
networking anything I did, I felt like I had to
close a deal, like in the first meeting, Like you know,
I had to like the first phone call. I needed
(12:09):
to like get a deal, and obviously I got none
because I showed up guns of blazon and so much
pressure that I put on myself because I thought a
successful entrepreneur was somebody who closes all the deals. So
I was just trying to live up to this image
that I had of what it needed to do, and
it wasn't until I completely changed the goal of an
(12:29):
initial interaction. So, for example, if I have a first
meeting or a first phone call with somebody new, my
only goal is to create an environment in which if I.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Call them back, they'll take the call. That's it.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
I don't care about closing a deal, getting anything. And
I think about that relative to what we're talking about,
which is, you know, we go on dating apps, we're
set up on a date our friends, that we have
the societal pressure, we have, the pressure from ourselves, pressure
from our parents, you know, all of the things that
make the interactions. That the goals are too much, too soon,
and they're not allowed to evolve and just state and
(13:03):
so what a magical thing to go on a first
date and say I hope I make a friend. I
think the goal setting is part of the problem, and
how we show up profoundly changes. If we simply downgrade
our ambition for this new relationship, taking the pressure off
is what it is, right, Yeah, I mean I.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Feel like maybe I'm reacting a little bit to downgrade
because of the way that people think of friendship as
itself a downgrade from the real thing, which is romantic
I don't like, but I think what you're getting at
is we conceive of only one kind of relationship that
can be a container for the many things that we
might be looking for in our life, like somebody who
is going to be there to talk to at the
(13:40):
end of a hard day, who knows when.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Your plane lands, is going to hand you a mug
of tea.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
And if we can understand that, there might be other
kinds of relationships, like friendships, could be a sibling relationship.
I've also encountered a number of lifelong sibling relationships where
that is the anchoring one. We could just be thinking
about what a loving relationship is, because otherwise it feels
like there's only one form of success and that that's
what you're driving toward, and otherwise it's a failure. And
this sort of success failure dichotomy, rather than starting from
(14:07):
a place of curiosity of like, who do we want
to be to each other? And how might that the
answer to that question change between the first time we
meet a year from now, ten years from now, and
it might be we don't want to be anything to
each other, like we never clicked whatever. But the impulse
toward curiosity could solve a lot of problems here rather
than trying to box people in.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
There's an eerily an uncomfortable similarity here when you talk
about the definition of success of a relationship, which is
even the definition of success of a career or a life,
which for too many years was associated almost entirely with
rank or money, And we are having that conversation now, Covid,
I think was a catalyst, but that conversation was already
beginning of what are the other definitions of success? And
(14:50):
I may want to pursue a different kind of success.
My parents may still put pressure on me to make
more money buy a house, but I am exploring a
different definition of success that works for me, and I
think that's where your work lies. I think it's very
contemporary that we're exploring different expectations and different definitions.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Of what is required of a good life.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
And this different definition, these new definitions of what success
in relationship looks like, which is it's not always the
metaphor carrying over money, you know, marriage, you know tradition,
I find very interesting and I wonder these challenging of
all these definitions of what's expected of our lives from
our careers our friendships, our romances. I wonder what the
(15:31):
common thread is that we're pushing against all of these definitions.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
I think that the common threat here is intentionality, and
that we have been put on a kind of conveyor
belt in different areas of life where we've been told
that there's one type of success, and that a lot
of people, you know, hit a point where they're like,
I've tried this and it's not working, or I'm starting
to question for the first time the thing that I've
(15:56):
been told.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
To do, and that if you instead.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
To look at the ladder you're climbing without having actually
asked if you want to get to the top.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
I live in DC. There are a lot of lawyers,
and I.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
Feel like are a lot of people who are attracted to
the law like to climb ladders, and I just have
seen for people a few years after law school there's
still at a firm and then they're like, I did
all the things I was supposed to do, Why am
I not happy? Or like if you hit a point
where you're dissatisfied and start to ask, like, are there
other ways that I might find meaning, then you might
(16:28):
realize that the singular path is not the only one.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Ooh, this is interesting. Okay, So if I've been climbing
the ladder of rank and money and I've made the
money and I've made the rank, and I'm still not happy,
and now we see, you know, the divorce rate the
United States remains at fifty percent. It has not gone down,
it's not getting better. Second marriage is even worse. And
so maybe there's a similar thing happening here, which is
I keep trying the relationship that you know, I was
(16:54):
told that I would find whatever the thing is. I'm
looking for happiness, joy, companionship, safety, and I haven't found
and I've done it your way, So I'm questioning the
alternative ways. Are these new definitions of friendships being challenged
by people from the beginning, Like what the definition of
success is? Or is it after they've tried the tried
and true way? In other words, it's only because things
(17:15):
aren't working that we're now exploring alternatives.
Speaker 4 (17:18):
I would say, I think actually this is coming from
two directions, Like maybe the best example of this would
be like parents who are overwhelmed and are like I
have a two parent household, I have a nuclear family
that is supposed to be the you know the gold standard,
and yet I am totally exhausted, and I don't feel satisfied.
I think there's a sense that like I've been duped.
(17:40):
Something I'm working on right now is about parents who
raise their kids among friends and in these larger networks.
You know, some of the people whoend up doing that
have seen how exhausting it is for other parents and
don't want to get themselves into that same trap. Then
there's the sort of positive thing that gets people to
come off course, which is not unlike what happened with me,
Me and em where we fell into a friendship that
(18:02):
nobody had told us you could find. There was no
dating app to find a platonic partner or whatever we
wanted to call ourselves. But life happened, and then we're
suddenly questioning, well, why is it that only a romantic
relationship is supposed to be the thing that's going to
make us complete, you know, a successful person in the
eyes of others, where Nobodeo will be asking us like
(18:23):
why are you still single? I think that you can.
You can stumble into a relationship that's really important. We're
stumble into a career that you know, nobody told you
was going to get you status points and find that
it's meaningful and then start pushing back at everything else
that people have been telling you. And I think on
the flip side, you can try the thing that you
were supposed to. You know, when I think about some
(18:44):
dam close to who grew up Mormon, and one of
the ways that she left Mormonism was that she had
felt like she had done everything she was supposed to,
and yet she still was not hearing, you know, the
voice of God in her head. She was not getting
the result that she was going to have.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
And I think that those.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
Kind of opposite pressures can lead to the same place
of questioning.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Tell me something that you've done over the course of
your professional career that you.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Absolutely loved being a part of.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
That if every project you ever worked on was like
this one project, you'd be the happiest personal live Specifically, I.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Mean, I loved working on the book.
Speaker 4 (19:23):
There's some stressful parts of it, but I love being
let into people's inner lives. I know an interview is
good if I get chills in it, which is not
a totally infrequent experience. There are these women, Barb and Inez,
who are in their eighties and.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Have just lived a lot of life together.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
They met when they were around thirty, at a point
of transition in each other's lives. A couple of things
I love about their story, like one is, they didn't
expect to fall into the kind of friendship that they
now have where they have lived together for twenty five
years in a house that they bought in their retirement.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
They didn't plan on on.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
This, but life took them by surprise, and they found
a way to adapt to it, adapt to getting divorced
when that was never and as would have expected, especially
coming from a religious family. In Barb's case, she had
really wanted to have biological children. She's adopted and had
never gotten to see anybody who looked like her, and
then had emergency surgery in her late twenties that made
it impossible for her to have biological children, and after
(20:23):
that happened, her desire to marry really dropped off. She's
never been married, but she's had this relationship with a
friend that has outlasted I think most marriages. So the
level of their devotion though many ways they've showed up
for each other over the course of fifty years. The
fact that They're not even trying to do anything radical,
but their mere existence as these friends, I think challenges
(20:47):
a lot of people's unquestioned ideas about like what is partnership,
which relationships matter, what can a friendship be?
Speaker 3 (20:52):
All of that. I really love about the two of them.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I mean early specific, happy childhood memory, something specific that
I can relive.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
With you, maybe one of the early moments of experiencing
nostalgia for childhood even though I was still a child.
So I was in high school and a friend and
I decided that we were going to make a pillow
for it and makesmores over the gas stove. We lived
in the suburbs. I mean, this was as rustic as
I guess I was going to get. And we watched
Schoolhouse Rock like we were having this call back to
(21:22):
childhood and a way of kind of aimless fun together
at a stage of life where it must have been, like,
I don't know, sophomore junior year, where we were really
worried about all of our ap classes and getting into
college and SATs and acts, and that we were getting
to co exist together in a way that had already
been a little bit taken away from us as teenagers.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
As you tell those two stories.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
You know, I'm sort of struck by a lot of
the language that you've used and that we've used over
the course of this conversation. You know, there's a hearkening
back to innocence and curiosity, you know, of childhood, and
there's there's an innocence in the approach to the making
of friends that is free from expectation, free from conditions,
free from definition even and it sounds like a lot
(22:06):
of your thinking and work is sort of just from
the at least from this conversation. Is that struggle of
the magic and beauty and innocence and curiosity that we
have as children that for some reason is forced out
of us, that we have to let go of it
as adults, and then we're supposed to have all these
quote unquote adult relationships and adult this and adult that
(22:28):
and adult responsibility, but in reality, every single one of
us still has that kid inside of us. And the
question is why can't we be kids in a modern,
responsible world. Why do we have to let go of
this beautiful innocence, magic and curiosity that would allow for
the kinds of friendships that you've written about as well.
Speaker 4 (22:47):
Yeah, I mean magic is a term that has come
up in a lot of the conversations I've had with
people who have these extremely intense friendships, like there is
something that they can't quite explain about it and that
they enjoy. I think think, yeah, the sense of possibility
and like the sort of unconstrained possibility for kids feels
right to me. You know. One of the tensions that
(23:08):
like is very apparent to me and these sorts of
friendships that I look at.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Is like, on the one hand, they are beautiful.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
Because they're free of expectations, Like there's no social script
for these kinds of friendships, so people have to kind
of imagine what they're going to be for themselves, have
conversations for themselves. And that coexists with well, if your
friend is in the hospital, you want someone to take
you seriously.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Of course, it's not the rejecting of adulthood.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
Yeah, And so what I don't want to do is say, Okay,
here's a new box that these fit into, because that'll
help them get recognized. It's how can we start from
a place of questions rather than these.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Little discrete boxes.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
And I think the ability to shape shift to have
conversations with each other to play is a really beautiful
thing that we can learn from these sorts of friendships
that don't fit inside the lines.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Recommendations to start from a place of questioning and start
with the place of questions, and I think it's a
place to end to, which is why can't we have
the kinds of relationships that fulfill us in any way
form that we want?
Speaker 2 (24:10):
And just that's the.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Question that should be we should be showing up with.
You know, the closest person in my life is my sister,
not a friend or a spouse. And some of my
friends are so close to me that you know, it's
been said to me, like you know, Simon, if you
ever get married, they're gonna have to deal with the
fact that, you know, you have these close friendships.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
But why not.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
You can have all these people in your life and
you can all enjoy each other's company at the same time.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
If you are somebody who has a lot of deep relationships,
then the person who's going to be most compatible as
a spouse to someone who's going to see that as
a bonus and not as a negative. You know, I
have a friend of mine who you know is newly
in love and a new relationship and it has this
really very big and tight friend group, with saying that
his previous romantic partner really like didn't see it as
(24:53):
a positive and just like was an introvert, wasn't into it.
And what's so wonderful about his new partners that she
wants to get to know everybody that this is something
that really draws her to him, makes her love him.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
And so you know, that's it.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
If you were going to end up in that kind
of relationship and is that that's the thing that matters,
It's going to be a plus for someone love Randa.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Thanks for the questions and getting to think about my
childlike disposition, which sometimes I'm accused of being too serious,
so this will be my pushback against that.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more,
please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts, And
if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website
Simon Sinek dot com for classes, videos and more. Until then,
take care of yourself, take care of each other. A
Bit of Optimism is a production of the Optimism Company.
(25:48):
It's produced and edited by David Jah and Greg Reuterschen
and Henrietta Conrad is our executive producer.
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