A Bit of Optimism - Happily Friended with author Rhaina Cohen

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

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:rhainacohen.comher book The Other Significant Others 

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 in their lives, even bordering on partnership. I love this topic. Redefining what friendship means in our lives frees us 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 off our romantic partners to fulfill every one of our social needs also.

the pressure off 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 you because you wrote, 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. And I think the story you wrote about was a friend whose friend was going through cancer treatment. It 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 is there so much pressure? Like, I have a friend who's single. She's been single since she got divorced over a 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. And yet that is not talked about or held up as a perfectly viable alternative living alongside marriage. So I wanted to talk to you about that.

Yeah, no, no, there's a lot there. 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 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 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 confidant and your lover and your best friend that only in the last like 70 years or so, have we expected that the only kind of relationship where you can 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. What specifically got you on this path? Like, why did you find yourself so interested in friends? 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 refer 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. 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 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. And the piece I found you was you wrote about the legal rights of

friends where they have none. 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 50 years. And these are people who are there for a year's worth of cancer treatments for their friend and who are executor of their friend's estate 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

hierarchy of which relationships matter and don't and are paying less attention to what is actually happening within the relationships. And can we be more expansive and open-minded about how people set up their lives and who they're turning to? I think it's such an interesting conversation about categories, right? Because we're talking about marriage as a category and friend as a separate category. And we're not talking about that friendships should necessarily have the same legal rights as marriages. 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 of categories, you know, Europeans make fun of Americans because in America, everybody you meet is your friend. My friend this, my friend that. You've like met them once. And I do think there is the need for more categories of friend. I also like to use, I like the term acquaintance. Like, do you know this person? Yes, they're my acquaintance, or I know them, they're my work friend, because 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. You know from the language, from the category, I have no intimacy with an acquaintance. And so I do think that the categories of friend 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 the lines, right? I mean, it makes the word almost meaningless. Meaningless. 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 we were the default plus ones to each other's parties and were 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 wasn't 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, something about having more precision because you want people to understand. I mean, one way this came up was I did 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 if he had another term,

like this was my platonic partner, this was, there was some kind of legible category that maybe people would have understood, 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. 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 a new word. Well, let's just be best friends.

Even that, that just sounds like, you know, ego stroking. That's, you know, it's awful. 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 they experienced love at first sight in their friendship. So I was interested in how within a platonic relationship, it is actually possible to have these feelings of excitement that we've been told are only possible within a quote unquote romantic relationship and that it blurs categories that are really seen as distinct.

But if you think even about romantic relationships, there's a whole spectrum for the emotional experience people have. Some people have very 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. Let's change tack slightly. We see an increase of loneliness, anxiety, depression, and in some demographics, suicide in the United States, and actually, indeed, around the world.

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 that something's wrong. Like what's happening in our society today that we're struggling to make those kinds of friendships that you write about? 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 toward this one relationship and we're not saying what does a good life look like? A good life looks like one where you have a community, where you have a bunch of friends who you are investing in. And I think that we get into these sort of feedback loops where we don't open ourselves up to other people and then think, okay, there's just this limit to how close a friendship can be because I've never felt any closer rather than understanding that maybe what we 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. 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 to like get a deal. And obviously I got none because I showed up guns a blazing and so much pressure that I put on myself because I thought a successful entrepreneur was somebody 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 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 call them back, they'll take the call. That's it. I don't care about closing a deal, getting anything. And I think about that relative to what we're talking about, which is we go on dating apps. We're set up on a date. Our friends said we have the societal pressure. We have the pressure from ourselves, pressure from our parents, all of the things that make the interactions, the goals are too much too soon, and they're not allowed to evolve and gestate. And 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 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 love. I don't like the term. 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 end of a hard day,

who knows when your plane lands, who's going to hand you a mug of tea. 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 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, 10 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. There's an eerily and 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 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 of what is required of a good life. 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, marriage, 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 common thread is that we're pushing against all of these definitions. I think that the common thread 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 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 been told to do. And that if you instead look at the ladder you're climbing without having actually asked if you want to get

to the top. I live in D.C. There are a lot of lawyers and I feel like or 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, they're 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 realize that the singular path is not the only one. 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 in the United States remains at 50%. 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 told that I would find whatever the thing is I'm looking for happiness, joy, companionship, safety. And I haven't found it 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 aren't working that we're now exploring alternatives. I would say, I think that 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. 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 who end 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 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 nobody will be asking us, like, why are you still single? I think that you can stumble into a relationship that's really important or 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 somebody I'm 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. And I think that those kind of opposite pressures can lead to the same place of questioning. Tell me something that you've done over the course of your professional career that you absolutely loved being a part of, that if every project you ever worked on was like this one project, you'd be the happiest person alive, specifically. I mean, I loved working on the book. There are some stressful parts of it, but I love being led 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 80s and have just lived a lot of life together. They met when they were around 30 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 25 years in a house that they bought in their retirement. They didn't plan on this, but life took them by surprise and they found a way to adapt to it, adapt to getting divorced when that was never what Inez would have expected, especially coming from a religious

family. In Barb's case, she'd 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 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, the many ways they've showed up for each other over the course of 50 years, the fact that they're not even trying to do anything radical, but their mere existence as these friends, I think challenges a lot of people's, you know, unquestioned ideas about like, what is partnership? Which

relationships matter? What can a friendship be? All of that I really love about the two of them. Tell me an early specific happy childhood memory, something specific that I can relive 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 fort and make s'mores over the gas stove. We lived in the suburbs. I mean, this was as rustic as I guess it was going to get. And we watched Schoolhouse Rock. Like we were having this callback to 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 coexist together in a way that had already been a little bit taken away from us as teenagers. taken away from us as teenagers. As you tell those two stories, 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.

There's a hearkening back to innocence and curiosity of childhood. And 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 of your thinking and work is sort of, 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 and adult responsibility. But in reality, every single one of us still has that kid inside of us. And the question is, 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. 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's something that they can't quite explain about it, and that they enjoy. I think, yeah, the sense of possibility and like, the sort of unconstrained possibility for kids feels right to me. Well, you know, one of the tensions that like is very apparent to me in these sorts of friendships that I look at is like, on the one hand, they are beautiful because they are 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. Yes, of course. It's not the rejecting of adulthood. 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 little discrete boxes? And I think the ability to shapeshift, 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. The recommendation is to start from a place of questioning and start with a place of questions. And I think it's a perfect place to end too, which is why can't we have the kinds of relationships

that fulfill us in any way, form that we want? And just, that's the 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 going to have to deal with the fact that, you know, you have these close to me, like, you know, Simon, if you ever get married, they're going to have to deal with the fact that, you know, you have these close friendships, but why not? You can have all these people in your life and you can all enjoy each other's company at the same time. If you are somebody who has a lot of deep relationships, then the person who's going to be most compatible as a spouse is someone who's going to see that as a

bonus and not as a negative. I, you know, I have a friend of mine who, um, you know, is newly in love in a new relationship and it has this really very big and tight friend group was saying that his previous romantic partner really like, didn't see it as a positive and just like, was an introvert, wasn't into it. And what's so wonderful about his new partner is that she wants to get to know everybody, that this is something that really draws her to him, makes her love him. And so, you know, if you are going to end up in that kind of relationship and that's the thing that matters, it's going to be a plus for someone.

Love. Raina, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. 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. 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, simonsenic.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. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.