Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: More Than Friends

Episode Date: February 11, 2024

What happens when you put friendship at the center of your life?NPR's Rhaina Cohen has been thinking about this question for years. It started when she met someone. This someone was not a lover, but a friend. As their relationship deepened, Cohen began to wonder why there wasn't a special term for a platonic relationship that felt romantic, or an understanding of partnerships that went beyond the status of "best friend."In today's episode of The Sunday Story, host Ayesha Rascoe sits down with Rhaina Cohen to talk about her forthcoming book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center.You can listen to the song, "Dear Friend," by Rings of Maple here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe and this is the Sunday Story. Valentine's Day is right around the corner and love is in the air. There are a lot of cliches around Valentine's Day and, you know, I will say I do like bouquets and candy hearts and all of that. I don't mind saying I'm a little bit cheesy, but we all need love. It comes in so many forms. In today's episode, we'll be talking about a type of relationship that isn't celebrated as often as romantic relationships are, but is often hidden in plain sight. I'm talking about deep, committed friendships. Friendships that are the first priority in your life.

Joining us today is Raina Cohen, a producer and editor here at NPR, and also the author of a new book called The Other Significant Others. In her book, Raina shares the stories of friends who have made each other life partners and she shows how friendships of this kind can shake up our assumptions about all kinds of relationships in our lives. How we define what a family unit looks like, who we grow old with, and how we show up in the day-to-day for the people that we love and care about. The friends who Raina writes about own homes together, raise kids together, and care for each other in old age. It is love. Today on the Sunday Story, we consider what it means to put friends at the center of your life.

My conversation with Raina after the break. Stay with us. Now, our change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to our change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. I'm here with producer and author Raina Cohen. Raina, thank you for joining us. And you're on this side of the mic, you know, so no longer behind the scenes. Reading these stories, you know, it made me think of my best friend, Jasmine.

We met as students at Howard University, but we did not, we weren't tight then. We really got close when we ended up working at the same job shortly after college. And that was at a point where I was also in this transition where I had a significant other, but I didn't have someone to just hang out with, like who wasn't him. And a romantic partner is great, but they can't fulfill everything for you. And that's when I reached out to Jasmine and was like, why don't we go work out and stuff like that? And we would go work out, child. And then we'd go eat some pizza afterwards. We were horrible. Quite a combo.

Yeah. So we would do stuff like that. And ever since then, we've become completely inseparable. And what I value so much about this relationship with Jasmine is that she has always been there for me. And I hope that I've always been there for her. So yes, this is what to me, I absolutely can see how someone in your life who is not, you know, you're not related to them, and they're not your romantic partner, can really be someone you can build a life around. I think one of the most kind of beautiful parts of working on the book is finding that so many people have some kind of experience with this, like what you're describing with Jasmine, of feeling like there is this person in your life who feels almost like a partner

and they're a friend and that's possible. Yeah. You know, I just waxed on and on and on about my best friend. So, you know, I got to ask you about yours. Your first chapter reads like a love letter to your best friend. Yeah, that seems like an accurate way to put it. Can you tell us more about this friendship? Yeah. Well, I mean, I call my friend in the book Em. And Em and I met when I first moved to D.C. when we lived a five-minute walk away from each other and saw each other four or five times a week. We would host parties together. She, like, went with me to the DMV.

Like, she made me, you know, do things that I was supposed to do in the way that a partner would try to help you kind of move forward in life. So I really felt the kind of excitement that I had felt in romantic relationships, but it was just in a friendship. It's like a rom-com for friendships. Yeah. But without the like romance and the kisses and stuff. Yeah. I actually think friendships can be super romantic. I mean, that was a thing that I discovered with Em, just like wanting to be in Em's presence all the time, like wanting to sort of like get the warm glow of her brilliance and charisma by being around her. It just sort of showed me that there are these emotional experiences that are possible to have in a friendship that aren't usually acknowledged, that you can, you know, be so excited about a friend that you want to tell everybody about them. Like I wrote in my journal,

I remember after, you know, a few months of getting really close to Em that I felt like I was falling in love with her not so differently from the way that I felt like I had fallen in love with my now husband. At one point, a friend of mine and I had a conversation and he was like, what's the difference between these two relationships to you? Like this friendship and this romantic relationship. And I was kind of like, I don't have sex in one of them. Like they felt like they were both like really nourishing people that I felt really understood me and they were devoted. I mean, I love hearing about your friendship, but this book, it's not a memoir. So how did you go from that personal experience to this book, which is mostly

telling the stories of other people? So this friendship, you know, helped me realize that friendships can be a lot bigger than we're told. But I really quickly realized that there was no name for it. And Em and I would talk about like, you know, how do we describe each other? Should we use something like partner? And to me, you know, one of the questions was like, why don't we have a name for a relationship that is one of the most important connections a person has in their life? And I had the sense that it wasn't just me who had this. I'd kind of known people who people throughout my life who had this kind of friendship. I saw Broad City and Insecure, and there were these examples in pop culture, but there was no language for it. So I kind of wanted to set out to find some of these people. And I learned that I definitely was not alone.

It is hard to describe our sort of relationship. I do see him as my family. So then I started calling her my platonic life partner. This is my platonic life mate, as we call each other. Lifetime friendship love partner. Friendship love partner. You know, it's just frustrating because you need a lot of words, but then it's awkward. And, you know, something happened as I started talking to these people, which was, yes, they adored their friends, and that was wonderful to hear about, but they also often felt really misunderstood. And they got kind of comments from people that really get at these assumptions that are about both romantic

relationships and friendships. So one of them is like that your spouse should be your everything, this kind of like one-stop shopping model. And that doesn't really leave much room for friends if you're supposed to get everything in one person. You know, another one was like, if you don't have a romantic relationship, that you as a person are incomplete. And, you know, a third that I came across was like, in the drama of your life, a romantic partner is supposed to be the main character. And the friends are the supporting cast. So it really made it hard because of these assumptions for people on the outside to recognize that a friendship, you know, could be the main character. And as I started to realize this, like, I knew then that I didn't want to just kind of validate these friendships and, you know, show them. I wanted to understand how we

got to the point where we think of friendship in this way and how these really, really devoted friendships challenge how we think about relationships of all kinds. It's like that idea from Boss Baby, if you've ever seen that classic movie. Basically, the idea is that love isn't limited, that just because you add another person in who you love, that doesn't have to take away from the people you already love. I'm sorry, I love that movie. You know, especially with this one person should be your everything model. And you like spend any of that energy elsewhere than it's taking away. And, you know, I just saw again and again how people felt like the more close relationships they had, the more support they had. It was like a multiplier

effect instead of zero sum. And you look to history for this too, right? Yeah. I mean, that was kind of my first stop. And I very quickly found that friendship has been way more significant in history than we now treat it. So I'll just give a really specific example. There's a chapel in one of the colleges at Oxford that has a monument and it marks the joint burial of two men. This was from the 14th century. And these men appear to have this kind of relationship that was really common in England, but also across the world in different cultures. It's called the sworn brotherhood.

And what would happen is that men would be ceremonially turned into brothers and expected to protect each other and kind of help each other out for the rest of their lives. And it was a public way to acknowledge and ritualize friendship. And, you know, you can look forward in history to like the 1800s, 1900s, to what are called romantic friendships that you would see with both men and women, these same-sex friendships, where there's just like level of effusiveness that would strike most people as pretty bizarre. You know, women would exchange locks of hair. You could see photos of men doing studio portraits where they have their arms entwined around each other. That was really normal. There was this idea that was understood that friendship could contain a lot of these

bigger emotions and also more devotion than we think about now. Well, it makes me think of David and Jonathan in the Bible and their deep friendship. I mean, they were just like, I mean, they had deep ties to each other, cried over each other. I mean, these two men in the Bible who just had a deep and abiding love for each other. And yeah, they make a covenant. Make a covenant with each other. I mean, it's a, you know, that's like one of the earliest models of friendship that a lot of religious people also still look to as this kind of paragon of friendship. But in the 1800s, men's friendships were kind of using the David and Jonathan model as something for them to look up to. To aspire to.

Yeah. I mean, this goes pretty far back. So as you reported in your book, you also found many examples of devoted friendship, not just from history, but from now. Yeah, I mean, I really got to speak to dozens of people who have this kind of like invisible but really important friendship. And I got to follow some of them for years and sort of see how their friendships unfolded. And two of the first people who I got to talk to were this pair of women named Barb and Inez. I just love their story because of the longevity of their friendship. They are now both in their 80s. They met like 50 years ago and they were working in the same place at a time of transition in their lives. Inez had just gotten this administrative job because she was splitting from her husband and needed to take care of her kids and, you know, support them. And Barb had

just moved back to help out her parents. And the two of them became really close, and Barb became very close to Inez's children. Soon they basically went on family vacations together. Eventually, Barb moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and Inez followed her. You know, we were doing so many things that maybe a family would do if there had been a father in the picture. I think that to me, whether it was totally conscious or even unconscious, we began functioning as a unit that we would back each other up. Barb had always wanted to have children, but she had emergency surgery in her 20s that left her unable to have biological children. And once I was told that, I don't think the drive to get married

was as strong as it had been before. And because she had Inez in her life, her kids basically became pretty much her kids, too. Inez's younger son started calling her his angel mom, and she became the godmother to Inez's older son, Scott. There's this moment the first time that I talked to them that has to do with Scott that really captures how close they are, I think. Barb was telling me how Scott responded when she was recovering from surgery she'd gotten when she was in her 30s. Inez and the boys kind of took care of me. You know, I mean, even Scott, who at the time I think was only 13, would come and sit with me.

Yeah, he did. I probably can't say that. We lost Scotty. Scott died. When Scott was in his late 30s. Went out for a run one morning and he had a massive heart attack and we lost him. So that was very, and Inez, the biological mother, had to step in. And notice at the end, Inez said, like, that was very hard for us. Like, they really – it's an us. It's a we with the two of them.

And after Scott died, I mean, Barb was the one who came over every day to Inez's house and cooked for her, took care of her and really mourned with her. That's so beautiful. You know, a lifelong friendship like that, that will outlast everything else. You know, it's interesting because talking to you, like, I feel like one of the reasons why society kind of underestimates and limits friendship has to do with this idea that if you don't have this romantic partner, then you might end up alone. But it seems like when you look at Barb and Inez, that's not necessarily the case. Yeah. I mean, they have been taking care of each other for decades. When they decided they were going to retire, they wanted to live near each other, which they had done for a long time, and they couldn't afford it.

We thought, wonder if we could share a house because we traveled together overseas and all around the West. And we thought, well, we never killed each other on a trip. You know, maybe this could work out. And they decided to become roommates, to buy a house together. And that's where they have lived for the last 25 years. That was the home that I met them in. Well, you know, and my grandmother, I always admired her because she had very deep friendships. And some of her friends, she did end up being like their power of attorney. She helped them in the nursing homes, like get them in nursing homes when they could no longer care for themselves.

Like she would be that person who would step in for her friends that way. And she was a legal stranger to them. Yeah, yeah. She wasn't getting probably much social credit for it. No, no. She was just doing this because she had a husband who she also took care of and children and grandchildren. She was just but that was just who she was. Like and I always admired that even though she had a husband and a family, she had friendships outside of that that she nurtured and that were meaningful to her.

And also, I think what your grandmother's story illustrates is that like our kind of social lives are much more complex. Lots of people care for their friends or want to organize their lives around friends, but we just kind of don't have that in our picture of what people's lives look like. And the reality is different. We're going to take another quick break and be right back with the Sunday story. We're back with the Sunday story. Sometimes you may, for whatever reason, not have the romantic partner or, you know, it didn't work out. And it seems like sometimes you might make a choice to say, well, I'm going to focus on this friendship that works and that this person is there for me. And that's I'm going to make that like a focal point in my life. Yeah. I mean, I certainly saw that.

And I think actually, especially for young people who are at a stage of life where the expectation is that their energy is going to go toward a romantic relationship. There can be a lot of skepticism about like, well, you know, who is this friend? You know, what's going on basically with this friendship? And that happened with a couple of these men who I interviewed named Andrew and Tolly, who have been best friends pretty much since they were 15. They met in suburban New Jersey and like very nerdy, loved Ultimate Frisbee. And as they grew up and they went to college and graduate school, their friendship deepened and they talked almost every day on the phone.

Like at one point, Tully decided to move across the country to live in the same place as Andrew and go to school in the same place so that they could build their lives together. And that's a hard thing for people to understand. You make that decision for your, you know, romantic partner, but not necessarily a friendship. People in their lives had a really hard time understanding their relationship because it didn't fit into kind of the standard expectations for what a friendship can be. And this included Andrew's mom, Lisa. I don't understand how your life partner can be someone who you aren't romantic with. You know, to me, a life partner, someone that you made decisions with was always a person that you had a romantic relationship

with. She had asked Andrew at different points, you know, are you sure it's not romantic? If it was romantic, I would be supportive. And Andrew, you know, basically was like, no, I've told you multiple times, this is like not a romantic relationship. I would absolutely tell you if it was. But as Lisa was saying, it's like the idea that these two men could act as partners to each other, but not be romantically involved, just like doesn't compute with her idea of what partnership is. Well, and with much of society, I think, you know, probably even for people listening, they can be like, I don't get it. What do you mean? Are there larger consequences to the fact that, you know, society doesn't really recognize this sort of relationship or this suspicion that just friendship, it cannot be really a legitimate basis for partnership?

Yeah, I mean, completely. I've heard from a lot of people that it's really difficult to have this relationship that matters so much in your life be invisible to everybody else. To have people assume it's a sexual relationship. So many people, even still to this day, will be like, oh, were you lesbians? Or, you know, did you have this sexual relationship? And we didn't. She was my soulmate. What it is is not sexual, but that emphasizes the negative.

That only is focusing on what is not there. It is hard to describe our sort of relationship and by the time you do, it's a mouthful, right? I wish that there was a terminology that everyone used. Like in Andrew and Toli's case at one point, a boss that they had had brought up to their co-workers like, oh, are Andrew and Tolly a thing? You know, so basically even gossiping in the workplace about them, treating them like they're in denial about their sexuality,

and also treating, you know, people who have this kind of friendship as immature for prioritizing this rather than a romantic relationship. So, you know, I think that really weighs on people emotionally. And there are real practical harms that come up. So, you know, in the case of Barb and Inez, who I was mentioning, there was a time where Inez ended up in an ambulance because she had an emergency and Barb was told she wouldn't be able to get into the hospital, so don't bother trying anyway. She tried and still couldn't get in.

She was literally waiting out in the cold. And eventually, you know, a nurse came around and asked, do you know who has Inez's medical power of attorney rights? And Barb did. And then she was allowed in. Wow. But so the kind of paperwork that they had set up, like your grandmother had for other people,

it did kind of protect them. But like it took some time for it to happen. And can you imagine being left out in the cold on a winter day in, you know, in the Midwest while the person you really care for is in distress, is in the ER? You know, it's undignifying and it's, you know, not good for anybody involved. In a similar vein, another woman I talked to took care of her best friend during the six-year battle with ovarian cancer that her friend had. She lied to doctors and nurses sometimes saying that she was her friend's wife because she was afraid of getting kicked out of the hospital as a non-blood tie. And all that time that she cared for her friend, she wasn't entitled to family medical leave. And when her friend eventually died, was not entitled to bereavement leave, though she could have been for an uncle that she had never met.

So, like, we just have these really strict dividing lines about, you know, what family gets, what spouses get, and friends are really left out. And people suffer from that. So how can we improve things for people like Barb and Inez, like to truly acknowledge that you can have a partnership that can be equal to what it is between married people that they could also or should have some weight? Well, I think it helps to consider like, why do we value marriage? And there are a lot of answers to that. But I've gotten to observe a little bit of this going to tons of weddings like I'm in my 30s peak wedding time and the moment where I really see people get choked up are during the vows

when the bride or groom whoever says for better for worse for richer for poorer in sickness and in health there's a shared future that people imagine and that's the thing inside marriage that really matters and that we hold close. It's not really the sex and sparks so much. It's about commitment and long-term

sacrifice and knowing that there's going to be somebody caring for you. And so I think what would help is if we can focus on the function that relationships serve in people's lives, like the commitment, rather than the form that they take. And if we are able to do that, I think it becomes clear that just because people don't have a sexual relationship doesn't mean that the relationship doesn't have value to society. Well, speaking of that, I mean, you know, if this episode were a rom-com, you know, it would probably end with a wedding. But there aren't like ceremonies like that to celebrate friendship. Yeah. I mean, you got to go back to like medieval England or like the sixth century if you're a pair of monks, like then you can get your ceremonies, but pretty hard now. Another thing there really

isn't much of for friendship are songs. Oh, yeah. The culture critic Hua Xu wrote a beautiful book about a friend of his who was killed and And he was really in grief after that. But there weren't songs about friendship, like the grief over friendship. So we had to listen to love songs for the most part. So we don't have songs about friendship that kind of get at the real lows and also the real highs. And I was talking to some friends about this who are songwriters. And they actually wrote a song. Wow.

Oh, my goodness. They're, like, filling in the gap. I mean, I love Carole King and You've Got a Friend, but, like, it's been 50 years. Like, we could use more music. So I'm going to play it for you, and it starts with the story of Barb and Inez. Oh, my goodness.

When Barb met Inez, her life was a mess. Everything was falling apart. Told her husband she's leaving, but she had a feeling she was off to a new start Through 50 years, through joy and tears, sharing an old brick home Share primary care and the peace they won't be facing the end alone My world feels easy when I'm with you my place of refuge you're my person you're my rock the one i call when life gets hard a part of my soul a piece of my heart dear friend you're my person you're my person, you're my life When I feel so bad

I'll be there for you the rest of our lives Dear friend True friendship and that true bond is really, it should be celebrated. So thank you so much for coming in and sharing these beautiful stories and ideas about friendship. Thank you. And I hope you and Jasmine get to have a great Valentine's Day together. I know, we're going to think of something. That's Raina Cohen, an editor and producer at NPR, whose book, The Other Significant Others, comes out February 13th. This episode was produced by Justine Yan.

Our editor is Jenny Schmidt. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. The engineer for the episode is Maggie Luthar. The song you heard earlier is called Dear Friends by the band Rings of Maple. We always love hearing from you, so feel free to reach out to us at thesundaystoryatnpr.org. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up first is Back in Your Feed tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend.