The Other Significant Others | Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

Relationships

Dec 23

Friendship is not a “nice-to-have” but a core, potentially transformative human connection. Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center, joins us. Highlights of our conversation include:

The “friendship recession” and how modern culture undervalues friendships compared to romantic or family ties;
Historical and cross-cultural insights into how friendship has been understood and prioritized in different societies;
Stories from Cohen’s book about people redefining relationships, including platonic co-parents and friends who live together as chosen family;
The legal and cultural barriers to elevating friendship as a socially sanctioned form of kinship and how policy reforms could better accommodate diverse relationships;
Cohen’s personal experiences with an intense friendship that reshaped her understanding of love, intimacy, and societal expectations.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Rhaina Cohen (00:00:00):
I think it's so hard today for people to realize it is possible to have an abiding, committed relationship with somebody and have sex not be part of it. It just really confuses people, which I think is interesting because it's kind of a trope that over time a marriage loses its sexual component, especially if there's kind of caretaking of children involved. So people understand that a relationship can start out sexual and kind of lose that component and still be a loving one, but the idea that you would start off and never have the sexual piece, it just does not make sense to people.
Alan Ware (00:00:34):
In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we talk with author Rhaina Cohen about her bestselling book, The Other Significant Others, Re-Imagining Life With Friendship at the Center. At a time when more and more people are moving beyond the traditional models of family, this incisive book challenges us to ask what we want from our relationships, not just what we're supposed to want and transforms how we define a fulfilling life.
Nandita Bajaj (00:01:09):
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast, where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware (00:01:32):
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. We are proud to be the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism,human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Our mission at Population Balance is to inspire narrative, behavioural,and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. And now on to today's guest. Raina Cohen is the author of the national bestseller, The Other Significant Others, Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center and an award-winning producer and editor for NPR's Embedded podcast. Her writing about social connection has been published by The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and other outlets. And her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Program. Cohen lives in Washington DC with her husband and close friends. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj (00:02:36):
Hi Rhaina. It's lovely to have you on our show. Thank you so much for joining us.
Rhaina Cohen (00:02:41):
So glad to get to talk to you both.
Nandita Bajaj (00:02:43):
Great, and we're excited to chat with you about your fascinating new book, The Other Significant Others, Re-Imagining Life with Friendship at the Center, which really invites us to rethink how we prioritize emotionally intimate non-romantic relationships. And your research strongly resonates with our work of challenging pronatalism, the social bias and pressure toward having children, and empowering people to make liberated and informed choices, including adopting as you are doing broader understandings of family, both with our human and nonhuman kin. So we can jump right into that book. Let's start with the role of friendships in our lives as you lay out. What are we learning about the importance of friendship and what's the current state of friendship in the US where most of your research is based?
Rhaina Cohen (00:03:41):
Current state of friendship in the US is not great. There's been research from the last few years that has identified a friendship recession. So essentially the number of close friends that Americans have has declined quite precipitously over the course of 30 years. And the research with the friendship recession came out in 2021, so in the midst of the pandemic. But the researcher who led that, Daniel Cox, came up with a more recent study that found there are continued problems with the lack of adequate friendships in people's lives and that there's a real class difference in the access that people have to the basic forms of community like libraries and parks and so on where people gather and make friends. So I think we're in a place where people have fewer friends than they really would like to. And we also, I think as a culture at this point take for granted in the US and in other places as well, that friendship is a nice-to-have but not a need-to-have relationship, that it is fungible. It is not as enduring as something like a romantic relationship or family. And I think that that leads to people having less rich friendships, but something that is a kind of consequence of the friendship recession that has come up a lot in the news. And also the idea of the loneliness epidemic. So that it is really a public health issue at this point with the prevalence of loneliness that it's making some people wake up and realize that the friendship actually does matter. It is not trivial. How they go about finding closer relationships is a bit of a different question. But I do think we are in a place where people are realizing there is an issue and starting to try to maybe think a little bit differently about how we organize the relationships in our lives.
Nandita Bajaj (00:05:22):
And do you think it's this kind of overworkism culture that's placing so much demands on people's times and this responsibility with family commitments, et cetera, that are taking away that precious time from friendships?
Rhaina Cohen (00:05:39):
I think there are a number of things, and what you're reminding me of is a conversation I had with a friend of mine who had a book come out, I guess a little over a year now called The Good Enough Job. So it was arguing that people kind of place too much of their identity in their work, and I realized that we had kind of parallel arguments in our books. He was saying that people sort of seek so much of their sense of self and completeness in their work. And I was arguing that people seek so much of their sort of sense of wholeness in romantic relationships. And these I think are kind of related places that people are trying to find who they are in. And there used to be a more diversified set of places where people would go including to religion or just other forms of community. So I think there's the time piece in work, but also just the idea that you can find, as my friend will call a vocational soulmate, or in the romantic realm that you can find somebody who makes you whole and complete, who is by the way supposed to be your best friend. I mean that is, if you go to weddings these days, it's very common to hear people as part of their vows to say that they are marrying their best friend. I'm always a little bit like, what about the maid of honor or the best man who's standing right there? Who are they? Like, did they just get demoted? But it is built in that I think work and marriage are just so central that friendship really doesn't have as large of a place in people's lives.
Nandita Bajaj (00:07:03):
That makes a lot of sense in terms of the gradation of loss of the closeness of relationships you're talking about, because my question came from the fact that for so many of us work has even taken over our romantic relationships and there's less and less time to devote to that and even less time to devote to friendships. But you're right, in terms of the hierarchy, friendships fall below both work and romantic relationships
Rhaina Cohen (00:07:33):
And parenting. Also, we have a culture of intensive parenting. I have heard again and again that parents now spend more time with their children or maybe mothers in particular than they did in the 1960s. So if you feel like you have to be kind of constantly either supervising children or shuttling them to their competitive soccer practice that is two hours away three times a week, which I have colleagues who will do that, doesn't really leave much time for adult relationships flourishing.
Alan Ware (00:08:02):
And it's kind of a shame. I think as you mentioned in the book, physiologically and psychologically, the power of friendships to improve our health with heart disease and immune function, quicker recovery from illness, and then psychologically, of course, depression and anxiety being such an epidemic in much of the developed world especially. What have you learned about the importance of friendships that way in terms of health, in physical and mental health?
Rhaina Cohen (00:08:31):
A lot of the loneliness research I think points to everything that you're talking about really, the negative consequences of the absence of these sorts of ties. And another very famous body of research comes from a study out of Harvard that tracked first a group of men, but then it sort of expanded beyond them for many decades. And the finding that was loud and clear was that the quality of people's relationships, and that was not exclusive to marriage, predicted their physical outcomes and their happiness. So it's hard to beat that kind of longitudinal study where you can see what's happening to people over time, but I'm inclined to also be like, don't we just know it in our souls? I think the research is important. I'm a social science nerd. We should find ways to really make tangible the effects of things that can feel a little bit fuzzy. But I don't know who among us hasn't felt better after commiserating with a friend. And I think people who are dealing with remote work, for instance, I can say for myself, I have realized despite being at my home office today, like when I go into the actual office, I usually just have a higher baseline of contentment being around other people. And I think that the pandemic for people who had to be retreating into their homes realized that even if they had a partner, that partner was not enough to sustain them, that they still wanted other contact in the world. That there is something that feels like we're missing. And I mean it makes sense that we're missing it because we as human beings are wired to connect with other people from the time that we're born. But I think that friendship is not always treated as some kind of core need in the way that, well, of course as a kid you are going to be snuggling up with your parent, then that makes a lot of sense. Or we think that people need touch and that's going to come in the form of a romantic relationship. But there are many ways to get these really, really core social needs filled. And one of those is friendship.
Alan Ware (00:10:26):
And in the book you explore some fascinating shifts in how friendship has been understood throughout history. What are some of your favourite examples that highlight how that idea of friendship has evolved over time?
Rhaina Cohen (00:10:39):
To me, the revelation was that we are the odd ones today for, in places like the US, for seeing friendship as this secondary relationship where you fit it in if you can. But if you look back across history, friendship has not always been a kind of relationship that's private, confined to a couple of people where you sort of do your own thing. That one example that stands out to me is a practice called sworn brotherhood. So in parts of the Christian East, you would have men go into churches. They would put their hands on the gospels. They would have a priest say blessings over them and they would be turned into brothers in the eyes of the church. There are places throughout the world, including in England and parts of the Middle East where you can see men buried together who appear to have had these ceremonies, sworn brotherhood, and you can see versions of these in other cultures as well. So that stands out to me because it is a public ceremony of recognition that friendship matters and that it is enduring. But even the kind of language that people would have used in the past is different. So it's pretty common for people today to talk about, oh, we're just friends as a kind of diminishment. And there's a book that I read about friendship in ancient Roman society, and the author points out that that term 'just friends' would not have made any sense, or 'more than friends' as a way to talk about romantic relationships would not have made any sense in some ancient Roman culture because what could be more than friendship at the time? People would refer to a friend as half of my soul or the greater part of my soul. And part of this has to do with marriage being very different in hundreds or thousands of years ago when women were property of their husbands. I think it's really hard to have an emotionally intimate relationship when there is so much inequality baked into the marriage. And something that ends up happening in concert is that same-sex friendships becomes this locus for real emotional intimacy. And also there's a lot of physical intimacy too. I love, I have a couple of books here of ordinary photos of men in the late 1800s through the early 20th century where you just see much more physical affection than we are at all used to seeing in western culture with men today because it would be coded as gay, and that was not the case in the past. I love the history, as you could probably tell, and I just think that there's, to me the history helps get us out of the assumptions that we have about these divisions between different relationship types and the hierarchies and the things that are okay and not okay in different relationship types. That was really scrambled compared to our own ideas now.
Alan Ware (00:13:16):
Yeah, I like how you look at the history, especially in terms of masculinity and friendship and how some of the sworn brotherhood, the physical closeness of men during the enlightenment or Victorian periods. You talk about, well, the cult of domesticity during the Victorian era and the nuclear family becomes more and more important and men I suppose, are increasingly expected to find their intimacy within that nuclear family. You talk too about Teddy Roosevelt and some of the new masculinity around the turn of the century, and I remember hearing about the Ivy League and football that was this new masculinity that they were concerned that men were becoming emasculated somehow. And then the 20th century, you've talked some of the industrialization, a mobility of people tearing apart kind of community ties and community friendships to the point now where men very much rely on their romantic partner for their intimacy, right. Much more than women. And men are kind of hobbled that way I think, and I think probably it's related somewhat to the deaths of despair seem to be much more among men, older men especially because those friendships get frayed over time. So it's disappointing and it just shows how far men have come in having a very truncated view of what friendship could be and not having as many outlets for it.
Rhaina Cohen (00:14:36):
One of the things that was also really interesting at looking at the history is that men were kind of chauvinists in the past about their ability to have friendships, which is like Montaigne, the French philosopher, said that women were not capable of true friendship because they had a rash and wavering fire that was sort of incompatible with friendship. You look at the ancient Romans and Greeks and they also thought of friendship as something that was sort of specific to men. So what this suggests to me is not that men are uniquely able to have friendships or that women are now uniquely able, but these are sort of cultural constructions and that men and women alike across lines of sexuality are very capable of friendship. But it's in many ways a question of what does your society enable? What does your society say is okay? What does your society give you the skills to do and the language to, like what are the cultural categories and language and things that are condoned and how does that enable or disable us from really building platonic intimacy?
Nandita Bajaj (00:15:36):
Yeah, that reminds me of, you also spoke about the cross-cultural differences in friendship and you're speaking about how language and social norms play such a huge part in how much physical intimacy one is able to express within same sex relationships that aren't romantic. And I grew up, I was born and raised in India and I've been in Canada for over 25 years. So I'm kind of speaking from a point in time that I grew up in. And at the time I remember, especially in more traditional parts of India, it was very common for men to be physically intimate, to hold hands as they're walking in public. And if anybody from say the west went to India now they would think that they are gay men, but they were just friends who were really close to one another. But I think that also was happening against a backdrop of highly segregated genders. And like you said, in traditional cultures where women are kind of seen as part of the domestic sphere or property or just someone that is lesser than you wouldn't see them as subjects of friendship or closeness. So it's a really interesting paradox because on the one hand you see the capacity that men have to be intimate, but it's occurring in this kind of a traditional patriarchal way. But it also shows that you are able to transcend that within more egalitarian societies and have that kind of cross relationship, those relationships that you are trying to help shed light on and normalize, that you can have these really close friendships among men that don't have to be romantic.
Rhaina Cohen (00:17:28):
Absolutely. And I try to be clear in talking about the history that it's like I don't want to have rose-colored glasses about some of the conditions that made it possible to have that kind of connection. But I also don't think those are the only conditions. You don't need to have a society where homosexuality is so beyond the pale that no one would suspect you of it, so then it's okay to hold hands, or that you can't at all relate to a different gender because there's this huge imbalance of power. I think we see that in queer communities where friendship is so important and people are not particularly concerned about being seen as queer because they are. And this can coexist to have friends you consider are chosen family and to have a romantic partner. So I think people are very much capable of it. And one of the things that I did in the book really, I guess the main thing was follow people who have extraordinarily close friendships. And one of my favourite stories is about these two men who grew up in conservative environments. One is straight and one is gay. They met training to be youth pastors and the straight man learned from his friend over time how he'd really internalized these ideas about what was okay as a man in terms of how he related to other men. He had no idea what emotional intimacy was until he had this friendship, because he had only experienced it in the context of a romantic relationship. So to the point where he thought he might be in love with his friend because he didn't know what emotional intimacy was and he wanted to hug his friend and missed him. So I think he is such a model for what it looks like to change and to kind of deprogram yourself from a culture that does not leave a lot of room to have that kind of intimacy. And it's hard and it takes a lot of self-awareness and it takes patience from someone who's willing to deal with the bumps along the road, but it very much is possible and you don't have to predicate that closeness on any kind of pushing down of, in their case, of women.
Nandita Bajaj (00:19:23):
And on that thread of emotional intimacy, as seen as the realm of the romantic relationships, it's also placed this unreasonable expectation on romantic relationships and we've loaded more and more emotional expectations onto our romantic partner. Why do you think that change happened and what has that meant for the health of people's romantic relationships including marriage and how has that affected our capacity for friendships?
Rhaina Cohen (00:19:56):
There's also a bit of a historical answer to this, that marriage in the West has historically been an economic institution really binding together two families, kind of more like a contract than anything that you would see on reality TV today about people falling in love. So as it has become not just financial but also about love and that love, as the historian Stephanie Coontz has put it, it is not just a bonus, but the basis of marriage. That has changed what people expect to find in their relationships and that you can start to see around like mid to late 1800s, that kind of change in marriage expectations and it's only kind of ratcheted up over time. So, Eli Finkel, who has done work on marriage, has talked about since about the sixties that marriage is not just love, but about self-actualization for a lot of people, that they expect their spouse to be the equivalent of Michelangelo who is unlocking the best version of them if they were some marble. And that has been wonderful for some couples who have the kind of time and resources to invest in a relationship in a way that they can find that and also just find somebody who they are that compatible with. But for a lot of people, those expectations are just unrealistic. It's really hard to find all of that in one person. So I think this is another case where I think it's great for a lot of people that they have higher expectations of marriage, particularly for women who are in marriages with men, that it's not just he doesn't hit me, so it's fine. That was truly what Stephanie Coontz, again this historian, had found when she was interviewing women decades ago that that was their bar for a good marriage and now they have a different bar. But I think there's a question of whether maybe there's a bit of overcorrection or we have crowded out the other relationships that really matter and that one of the ways many of us have been taught to think about marriage is that there's a zero sum quality - that if you are spending any less time with your spouse and spending more time on other people or activities that that, instead of maybe bringing more energy to the relationship because you have some new things you can bring together, instead it is detracting from it. So that's kind of the arc of things from going from a place where two people getting married might be strangers to each other and have to figure out how to make life work to now expecting some grand love story and also for your partner to be your professional coach and your confidant and the person who shares your hobbies and a great co-parent and a great lover and can a relationship sustain all that.
Alan Ware (00:22:32):
I was even a little bit surprised where you mentioned research showing married Americans are less engaged with relatives, friends, neighbours, less likely to care for aging parents or be politically active. I wasn't quite expecting that, but I suppose that there's more and more energy, time invested in that one relationship. It looks like a lot of these other suffer.
Rhaina Cohen (00:22:55):
And I don't think it should have to be that way, but some of this is tied up with beliefs that single people are supposed to kind of tend to everybody even though they don't get the credit for it. So I am thinking about a colleague of mine who had some family things to deal with and her brother has a partner and has kids, and she was just sort of expected to handle a lot of logistically and emotionally complicated things because she didn't have those responsibilities. So sometimes I think it's by choice and sometimes by force essentially, or by default, that people who are not married end up having to take on the responsibility for other people in their lives. And the conclusion that the authors of this study that you're citing, Alan, said is that we are told that marriage is a cornerstone of society, but they really were questioning that and did it actually undermine community ties at times? And I think there are ways that marriage doesn't always have to be detracting, but in a model that we do have where you're supposed to be looking so inward in the home and sort of getting everything from there, it's not shocking that then people are not maybe as involved in other aspects of life.
Nandita Bajaj (00:24:06):
Yeah, and when you were talking about this emotional expectation that we put on our spouse, especially kind of in modern marriages, I think the same goes with the emotional fulfilment that we expect from having children and the amount of time that we invest in children, as you were saying a little bit earlier, that we're spending more time rearing children than we ever have before. And I think the intensity of that probably ties in really well to the intensity of the romantic relationships because so much of it is now based on an expectation of love and fulfilment and even self-actualization.
Rhaina Cohen (00:24:49):
Absolutely. And I guess I'm very interested in pluralism, in thinking that there are sort of different ways to live a good life and that there are different ways to experience the same thing. Like, I have no desire to kind of discount the way that some of my friends have found parenthood to be extremely meaningful, including friends of mine who have had very tough families of origin, and the fact that they were able to create a different family that does not kind of have some of the same issues that they grew up in is huge for them. But that also is not necessarily a loss for people who decide they don't want to have children and that that's not going to be something that's defining for them. And it just feels like this is a very big challenge for people to look at a life that does not resemble their own and to see that as legitimate and not as either a threat or as some kind of commentary that they themselves are doing something wrong. And I see this in the reaction to some of the sets of friends that I followed who have decided to orient their lives around each other that they become a source of discomfort for people around them because I think it's just very hard for people to believe that it is possible to be happy living a life that's different than yours or not feel threatened by it.
Nandita Bajaj (00:25:56):
Totally. We see that so much in the research that we look at with people who choose to be single. You've talked about the pressures that are placed on them sometimes by force and people who are childfree or childless as you know they are kind of seen as outcasts either because people like you're saying, cannot imagine their lives being half as fulfilling as theirs are. And I think the discrimination that's then built into the process, because if marriage is seen as a cornerstone in society and if policies are based around that, then whether it's workplace policies or whether it's the way people are treated in culture, you end up seeing those discriminatory comments or people even like pitting somebody who's chosen singledom as a legitimate path. And some of them are much, much happier than people who are in relationships. So that's really fascinating too, is how the stories we tell, and how we're expected to feel even, dictates so much of what we end up doing in life, whether or not that aligns with our values or our authentic desires.
Rhaina Cohen (00:27:12):
That is an undercurrent of my book, that I am writing about friendships but it is also about figuring out what you want in a culture that tells you what you're supposed to want and how do you step back from that. And I think there are ways that it can be really helpful to have guideposts from society that are kind of helping orient you toward certain values, but they don't work for everybody. And I think sometimes what ends up happening is that we are using something as a proxy that is not precise enough. So I think a generous interpretation, for instance, of partnered people looking at somebody who's single and pitying them is believing that connection really matters, and that knowing that you have somebody if you are sick, who you can call on or someone you can talk to at the end of a hard day, that that's really important. And in fact, I mentioned earlier these two men who I interviewed, one decided to become celibate. There's a whole backstory there, but he said that for him, the idea of being celibate, that was hard, it was not sex. It was the idea of not having someone to hand him a mug of tea after a hard day, feeling like he was going home to an apartment alone, because he was somebody who is extremely extroverted and loves connecting with people. And basically he felt like the lack of partnership would make him unhappy. But then he expanded what it would look like to find those things. So instead of being really constrained or fixated on one kind of relationship to fulfill these core needs, it's possible to be more imaginative. And he ended up having this friendship that is essentially like a familial relationship. He calls this friend his brother, they live together, plan to live either right next to each other or together for the long haul and that he's much happier with the life that he has constructed for them himself. But I think there are sort of less well-meaning ways that people are judgmental of those who are single. And actually a colleague of mine at NPR named Meghan Keane just came out with a book called Party of One, which is about trying to not internalize all of these sorts of messages, but I think it can be helpful to try to understand, okay, what is a good thing they're trying to point a single person to? And it might be misguided how they're doing it, and how can we actually turn it around and say, here's what you can learn from what single people are doing, how they have been more open-minded, and what it means, what it looks like to get these really core needs met.
Nandita Bajaj (00:29:41):
It reminds me of this book by another sociologist, Bella DePaulo, maybe you're familiar already, where she talks about it's really a play on your book is single people who've chosen to be single end up not having one significant other, but many significant others and their network of intimate relationships is much stronger and maybe less demanding on each individual than the romantic partnership that you were talking about. So I thought that fits in so well with the work that you are trying to illuminate as well.
Rhaina Cohen (00:30:15):
Yeah, I think she's doing something very helpful by disaggregating at least one type of single person from this huge category. And there are also academics who are doing this by saying like you're collapsing in the category of single people who are single but want to be partnered, people who are divorced and maybe unhappy about it, divorced and maybe fine about it, people who never want to be a partner. And she uses the term single at heart. And if you are orienting your life with the expectation that you are not going to have a romantic partnership, probably you're still going to want some kind of connection. Some people want to live alone. Some people want to live in a house with eight people. There are different ways to do it, but she's pointing to, for a lot of single people, it looks like having multiple close relationships rather than just relying on one.
Alan Ware (00:30:59):
Yeah. You've been talking about the plurality of all these different types of relationships and certainly the book you go in-depth in a very rich detailed way of describing these different kind of relationships. And you've talked about a couple of those so far from the book, but I'm wondering if you could share some you'd like to highlight and how they reveal some of the broader ideas we've been talking about.
Rhaina Cohen (00:31:21):
One story, because we've got a co-host in Canada, is about two women who ended up becoming the first legally recognized platonic co-parents in Canada. So one woman decided that she wanted to have a child on her own because she had not found a partner and didn't want to forego the opportunity. And then her coworker slash friend ended up wanting to help with the process of preparing for birth. And then that friend named Linda just totally fell in love with the baby when he was born and kind of like functioned as a parent for years and years and eventually realised she should have some legal rights because what if something happened to her friend Natasha and she would be a legal stranger to this boy who she was raising as her own. And to give you an idea of this, like Lynda sold her house to move into a condo unit in the same building as Natasha and this boy Elaan. They consider each other vertical neighbors. They had daily routines starting at 7:00 AM. She was able to relate to Elaan with a lot of intimacy and Elaan has complex disabilities, so it became really, really valuable, extra valuable to have an extra set of hands for somebody who loved him and wanted to be there. So I think that what they point to is that there are certain kinds of expectations that all get bundled together in a marital relationship or a romantic relationship and that caregiving, for instance, does not necessarily have to be tied to a romantic partner in this case with children, that the parent-child relationship could be something that we focus on rather than the adults in a romantic relationship. And there are legal scholars who've pointed this out. Sacha Coupet said that there's too much focus on eros, essentially kind of erotic or romantic love between the adults and not enough on agape or self-sacrificing love between adult and child. And I just think the idea of peeling apart these roles that are bundled together is powerful. And it applies not just to kind of a parent-child relationship, but you know who do we expect to be the first stop as our confidant or who do we want to be in the hospital with us making medical decisions about us? If you are married, is your spouse the best person to do that or would you actually prefer to have your sister do it or your friend? And would you feel uncomfortable asking someone who is not a spouse to do that and why? And how can we say that it is okay to not have all of these roles be in one person? And if you don't have that one person then you know like the consequences that you have no one to fill those roles when in fact actually it's not so kind of all or nothing.
Alan Ware (00:33:58):
And with child rearing, why not have somebody who's not related care a lot about the child? Sarah Hrdy talks about allo parenting, the parenting of the village, Hillary Clinton that it takes a village that she was so excoriated for that comment. But we know from the long human history, the hunter gatherer foragers, it was definitely the whole community was helping raise children. So our legal systems creating such a small definition of who can take legal responsibility is really detrimental to the children it would seem. I also like the Inez and Barb example. That was quite a story.
Rhaina Cohen (00:34:35):
Yes, I am a big fan of the two of them. So Inez and Barb are two women who have been best friends for 50 years and they are now in their eighties. And I got to spend time with them in the home that they bought together in retirement. That's now about 25 years ago that they bought that house together. And what I really love about their story is that I think they point to just the unpredictability of life and that one model for how you live is not flexible enough for all of the twists and turns that life has. So in their cases, Inez got married young, had two children, live in the suburbs, that kind of ticking all the boxes there. But her husband was not a great man to her or to her children and she decided to divorce him. And that was in the sixties, so like pretty bold thing. And so she had to make a new life for herself and she ended up becoming quite close to Barb, her office mate. And Barb herself was kind of taking a bit of a detour. She had moved across states to help parents out. She had always wanted to have children and then ended up having an emergency surgery that made her unable to have biological children. And that really diminished her desire to chase after a potential spouse because really what she had wanted was children. And she ended up kind of having children by helping to raise Inez's kids and they have navigated all sorts of difficulties together and also gone on vacations, international ones two week trip with these two boys to DC and hiking and so on. They've really been through it together and they did not expect to buy a home together in retirement, but they couldn't afford to buy separate homes and now they're really glad that it worked out the way that it did. So they've been extremely adaptable. And I think there's a way that deciding to center friendship can seem very radical and very countercultural, but there are lots of people who do it because it is the thing that makes sense because they have been lucky enough to find someone who they feel really close to and trusting of, and they just kind of respond in a fashion that makes sense for what their life looks like, and as a result can I think be a model for a lot of us for what's possible.
Alan Ware (00:36:49):
And I think you mentioned with them, now that they're older, they don't get all the people assuming they have a sexual relationship, unlike Andrew and Toly who are younger men, where people are assuming that they're sexually involved and they have to constantly kind of deal with that.
Rhaina Cohen (00:37:05):
Yeah, I mean certainly I would say it is very hard for straight men to have these friendships and not be kind of the subject of scrutiny. I think women, regardless of sexual orientation, I think have it easier that we have images in movies and TV shows, even if they're jokey ones like Broad City that help us understand that like women can have these really deep ties. But Andrew and Toly, who you're referring to, they're now in their thirties and have been best friends since they were in high school and just have faced again and again, a lot of judgment. If not judgment, then at the very least misunderstanding and questions about whether they were romantically involved and these men, look, like if they were into each other romantically and sexually, they would have nothing, I think, keeping them from honoring that and being okay with it, but that's just not the nature of their relationship. And I think it's so hard today for people to realize it is possible to have an abiding, committed relationship with somebody and have sex not be part of it. It just really confuses people, which I think is interesting because it's kind of a trope that over time a marriage loses its sexual component, you know especially if there's caretaking of children involved. So people understand that a relationship can start out sexual and kind of lose that component and still be a loving one, but the idea that you would start off and never have the sexual piece, it just does not make sense to people and they have faced that. But with Barb and Inez, who as I mentioned during their eighties, yeah at this point in their life, certainly nobody's saying anything to their faces. And Barb's read on it basically was that people who are in their age bracket are just less judgmental. They've kind of seen and they've, at a certain point in life, you learned to judge people less was her take on it. Kind of just seen how life doesn't turn out, how you expect. And I think that maybe the less positive thing that's going on is the desexualization of people who are older and that it wouldn't occur to people that there was something happening in a kind of romantic realm. And I don't think that's great either. But for their particular circumstances it does relieve them a bit of people having nosy questions.
Nandita Bajaj (00:39:04):
And you in your book share some of your personal history of being in an intense friendship with someone you call M. Can you talk about how the ebb and flow of this friendship shaped your understanding of what friendship can be?
Rhaina Cohen (00:39:19):
I mean, I would not have written this book if I had not met M, which was really fortuitous. We met at a mutual friend's birthday party and I spotted her across the room and knew I wanted to talk to her because of the way that she was kind of leaning into conversation and making people laugh. And there was something that was very charismatic and magnetic about her even without talking to her face-to-face. And we clicked when we talked and found out we lived a five minute walk from each other. Proximity is really helpful for developing a friendship. And we also had a lot of space in our lives then cause we were both relatively new to the city and saw each other most days of the week. Meanwhile, I was in a long distance relationship with my now husband and who I saw every other weekend. I was in a romantic relationship. I also was not living with him. So I think it probably gave me more space, but really with M, it was exhilarating to get to know her. She's brilliant. I wanted to be able to learn as much as about how her mind worked as possible, and I loved being in her presence and I continue to. And it showed me that it is possible to feel the kind of excitement that I had been told happens in romantic relationships, but I'd never been told could really happen in a friendship before. And it wasn't just the kind of emotional excitement, but also the way that we kind of were built into each other's everyday lives, that we were part of each other's routines. We sort of functioned often as a unit, which was again, not something that I had been told could happen within a friendship. So that really made me interested in why don't we have an understanding of a relationship that can be so powerful and meaningful? Like why was this a surprise to me? Like couldn't I have chased after this? Why don't other people know about it? They seem to want what we had. And then what does it say about everything we're taught about how romantic relationships work, about which relationships matter, about how the law treats different kinds of relationships. If we understand these kind of ultra-committed friendships, what can they teach us more broadly? So I kind of set off from there.
Nandita Bajaj (00:41:31):
Yeah, I love that you differentiate between love and lust and how they are different pathways and chemicals in the brain and how a lot of people would confuse that love that you experienced with lust. And I can think of so many examples where say two people of opposite sex who are straight, who have that kind of a friendship of experiencing the kind of love that you are expressing with M and feel like that must somehow manifest into a lustful relationship or they have to engage in sexual intimacy because how else can you explain that kind of a love and how that ends up ruining so many friendships because they end up realizing, well, they never really were looking for sexual intimacy. They just really wanted to be friends. And you're shining a light on the expectations that we place on the sensation of wanting to be in an intimate relationship with someone non-romantic is so limited and makes us kind of follow a certain script to its end to kind of match society's expectations.
Rhaina Cohen (00:42:47):
I've seen this happen in my own life where people had a very close friendship and one person was like, this should be a romantic relationship, like we are so connected to each other, but there wasn't actually romantic desire there or sexual desire there. It was like in order to bring this to its highest form, we should make this a kind of conventional romantic relationship. And then things don't necessarily work out. And there is not for some people a clear place to go. I mean, I have seen counterpoints to this. I know a couple people who had dated and then realized like the romantic piece wasn't working and they took that out and just like have a platonic life partnership essentially. But I don't know that everybody is so open to that or would have any kind of concept for it or would be willing to come up with a type of relationship that makes sense to the two of them, even if it doesn't make sense to the people on the outside. So I just think that the kind of hierarchy of relationships that makes friendships seem like they are an inferior form of connection and that if you really want to get it to the next level that you add on the sexual and romantic piece can keep people from actually looking at the person in front of them and figuring out what is it that we want for us? And it does not have to be something that we rank depending on what the items are, that you can have like the commitment and love for each other without some of these other pieces.
Alan Ware (00:44:12):
Yeah, I think it's interesting how you mentioned the lack of language we have to talk about gradations of friends. It's just kind of friend, buddy, close friend, whereas lover, we have all these other words for different types of romantic relationships - soulmate, boyfriend, girlfriend, fiance, fling. And then you talk about when you and M geographically move apart, that makes everything a lot harder. And you feel a sense of what this professor you mentioned of the book calls ambiguous loss. There weren't many words to describe it, right? Or much of a social script of how to talk about it with people?
Rhaina Cohen (00:44:53):
And I will say having done a number of in-person events with people, it's like people want to talk about loss in friendship. It is a very hard subject. And what I have seen and experienced myself is that there ends up being this added, I think, unnecessary layer of pain for people who experience some kind of loss in friendship. Whether that's a falling out or a kind of levelling down of intimacy is that you experience the loss of the relationship and then also you have this sense that it shouldn't be this hard or there's no one to talk about it too, or there's no greeting card that someone can give you or there's no script for them to know how to console you versus if a family member died or if you had a breakup. So that is something that makes it very painful. In my case, M and I are still very close, but it's a different kind of friendship than it was in the early years we had together. And part of that had to do with the geographic distance, that we weren't popping by each other's houses four or five times a week. And you don't get that kind of accumulation of everyday info that leads to intimacy. I still find it difficult, like a little bit painful when I we're seeing each other in person and I realize there's a bunch of stuff I didn't know. Like where does she go to her office, or like I see a new piece of furniture and I didn't know about her getting it. I mean, it can be all sorts of things that really drive home that a person's life is moving on and you are not there for it. And so we basically levelled down, I would say, from being platonic partners to being really close friends. And I found it hard to talk about. I found it hard to acknowledge because I thought maybe I was being unreasonable. I also just didn't know how to talk about it with others because I didn't know people who had the kind of friendship I did. And it felt hard to explain what it is I had lost if they had never had the thing that I had in the first place. And ambiguous loss that you mentioned is this form of loss that has no clear ending versus like if someone dies in a hospital and you're sitting with them like you see what happened and that there are other forms of losses that are, it's fuzzier and maybe you aren't sure, like is the person still kind of part of your life or not. And this can manifest in many ways, but that's how I felt with the friendship. And I also felt an experience of disenfranchised grief. So that's the term from a grief expert who points out that there's a hierarchy to grief in American society, and the loss of a spouse or a child, for instance, is really recognized to be devastating, a friend not so much. So that's kind of that layer that I was talking about that I think is unnecessary pain, that people experience because they aren't getting the kind of support and recognition and even maybe feel a little bit embarrassed, if not worse about the absence of the friendship.
Nandita Bajaj (00:47:37):
Yeah, I can see that another type of grief that fits under the ambiguous loss is the passing of a companion animal. And society doesn't allow us a lot of leeway to express that grief in the same way. You know if you have an intense relationship, as many people do, with animals who live with them who are part of their family just as much. And it's not recognised in workplaces, you know you get a bereavement leave if somebody in the family passes, but you can't express that same grief in culture. I mean, it happened with me and my husband a number of years ago, and we were completely distraught when our dog passed away. And at the same time, we couldn't really express it in public because, in the same way as you're expressing your feeling of losing that relationship with M, people would kind of just give you funny looks. It was just like, well, it's just a friend. It's just a dog. Get another dog. You'll find a new friend. And so you kind of end up feeling alienated. You don't know what to do with that sense of grief and how to express it, and then you suppress it and it comes out in weird ways. And so it's so helpful to shine a light on some of the same kind of feeling rules too, that it comes back to the socialization internalization of these rules of how are we supposed to express certain emotions, but not only express even feel certain emotions? Both of us felt really odd that we felt this much grief when society was not allowing us to express that much or experience that much pain. And we ended up seeing a counsellor who understood loss of companion animals who was incredible. But had we not found, or it would've been really difficult to process it and to move on in a healthy way.
Rhaina Cohen (00:49:33):
I think something that seems as simple as validation makes all the difference. And the kind of grief that is condoned is reinforced in policies in workplaces and in laws. So yeah, it makes total sense that if you don't get the signals from the world around you that this is a understandable or typical difficulty that you're going through, that not only will you not have support, but then you start to question yourself and start to have essentially these secondary emotions. So like these feelings about your feelings that are judgmental and are not doing anything to actually help you move through the grieving process.
Alan Ware (00:50:13):
So zooming out from the stories we've been talking about on the specific psychological feeling of a lot of these relationships, what do you see as some of the social changes that might increase the desire for people to center friends as significant others in the coming decades?
Rhaina Cohen (00:50:30):
There are alarm bells going off about the lack of depth in a lot of friendships and the craving that lots of people have. And one thing I think this does is helps people realize that it is okay to want more than they have been told up until now. So I have some hope around the kind of newfound permission to admit that people want more friends or closer friendships. I'm maybe unusually plugged into this, but there's been a lot of writing lately about friendship. There have been a number of books that have come out just in the last year that are sort of running the gamut from very literary essays on really close friendships to self-help books about making close friends and navigating conflict that I think are a way to signal to people it is okay to take friendship seriously. So I think those on the kind of cultural side are really important. I also am aware of people doing work on the law and policies sort of within professions like clinical psychology who are trying to help make sure that people's relationships of all kinds are valued and to reduce obstacles to people getting rights like medical and legal power of attorney to someone who they are not related to by marriage or blood or adoption. And also kind of trying to train psychologists to understand a wider breadth of relationships that really can matter. So I see kind of the interest and the push for these changes that can end up creating feedback loops that allow people to lean more into their friendships and then have that respected once they do
Alan Ware (00:52:07):
In addition to cultural changes, and I think you mentioned this in the book, but the economic pressures of, I would think just on the starting out phase, you're seeing more 20 somethings and almost obligatory in a big city to live with several people in a way that 40 years ago living alone was something that could be achieved much faster. And then the elderly often coming in to retirement without enough savings. And so it seems like those economic pressures will be building too for this to be more prevalent.
Rhaina Cohen (00:52:40):
Yeah, definitely. And you can see in cities like San Francisco where the costs of buying are really making it unattainable for people to purchase homes, people will pair up or team up with friends and do that. And I think that they're kind of pluses and minuses to this. I find it exciting on some level that constraints can make people more imaginative, like necessity is the mother of invention, like Barb and Inez finding themselves living together, which maybe they wouldn't have felt like it was okay to do, or it would've felt like asking too much or it just would've been odd. But when you have money as an explanation, it's like, oh yeah, that makes total sense. So I like that people might be pushed out of a kind of rote way of thinking about how they organize their lives, but of course, I don't want people to be operating under those financial constraints. And I think some of the work that I find really interesting that I know some people are doing are they're trying to make living with their near friends not something that you do because you have to, but because it is an act of choice and that it is something to not be apologetic about, but to aspire to. And I think that they're partly because of some of these cultural changes and discussions about friendships and a little bit of a pushback to romantic partners should be everything, it means that people are now able to talk about actually wanting to make friends a central part of their life and to be proud of that rather than to hide it and feel like it means that they're juvenile.
Alan Ware (00:54:08):
Yeah, that reminds me of that, I think it was in the book, where you talk about the tiny home village in Texas that was immediately subscribed to or oversubscribed.
Rhaina Cohen (00:54:18):
It was these friends who built this compound in a relatively rural part of Texas, and a bunch of people contacted the architect afterward because they wanted to make something like that for themselves. And even though this is a years old story, I think there is something that's really appealing to people about the idea of retiring together and the slight sceptical part of my brain on this, what I hear people say, I've literally heard when my husband dies, I want to move in with my friends. Or when our husbands die, we're going to move in together. And I'm a little bit like, why do you have to wait until your husbands die? If this is a way that you want to live why don't you just like sort of sort that out now to do something that's more communally oriented. But there's clearly some real appeal to that for people at some stage of life to live with their friends. And my husband and I currently live with two of our close friends, and I just have felt so many times like I'm hacking adulthood. Like it just feels sometimes like an endless sleepover and it is, it's wonderful. Why did no one tell us that this is something that you can do? And we did not have this living arrangement to save money. We did it because we wanted all live together and that this was an exciting, fun, lovely way to be. So I guess I feel particularly invested in the idea of putting friendship as a central relationship when you potentially kind of build your home situation around as an option to aspire to. I'm not trying to make a new hierarchy and say nobody should be partner, no one should live with their partner, whatever. But there are multiple really kind of wonderful ways to live. People want different things. Some people absolutely want to live alone. I'm not that person. Some people want to live with their partner alone. Some people want to live in a multi-generational home. My brother and sister-in-law do. And for some people it's friends. And those are all legitimate options.
Nandita Bajaj (00:56:06):
And I love that you're using the word over and over, giving ourselves permission to imagine broader definitions of kinship and friendship and love. And we're interviewing people for a different podcast on kind of redefining family. And so many people are expanding their families to include animals and creating animal sanctuaries as part of their family, and that's going even broader beyond species type of families. And you've also spoken how some of these delineations are locked in policy and there are so many rights that are currently tied to marriage in the US. What legal reforms do you think are necessary to better accommodate these broad types of relationships and living arrangements that you've spoken about?
Rhaina Cohen (00:56:55):
When I talked to legal scholars about this, there are kind of a couple main ideas that came through again and again. And one is to kind of take apart marriage a little bit, where right now marriage has more than a thousand federal rights and benefits attached to it. That's to say nothing about the workplace benefits that you might get, healthcare or your state level benefits. And most people have no idea what they're signing up for when they're getting married. And one legal scholar I talked to spoke about doing an inventory of marriage and trying to figure out what is the purpose of this right or this benefit? And does it relate to really trying to stabilise the relationship or make sure that caregiving is happening and so on? And not just having a bunch of bonus items attached to marriage, even if they are not kind of bolstering the stability of the relationship and serving a function that the government has an interest in, which of course there's debate about what does the government have an interest in, but essentially one route is minimising marriage so that you don't have this huge imbalance between people who are unmarried and married another route. And these things can kind of happen simultaneously, is having a legal alternative to marriage that is robust. So in about 40 US states, the only option you have is marriage if you want to kind of bind yourself to another person. And I'm clearly a history nerd. There's like interesting history here like pre-Obergefell, pre the Supreme Court case that made marriage a constitutional right, regardless of the sex of the people getting married. There were civil unions and domestic partnerships. There were kind of more things and a lot of those got taken down because the assumption was those were lesser versions of a union that people really wanted, which was marriage. But you can look at places like California where they opened up their domestic partnership to two different groups of people. First, it had been restricted by age and the genders of the people involved, and there were big increases after you had those openings because not everybody, even if it's a romantic relationship, necessarily wants marriage as the kind of connection. And that could be because of all the laws that they end up being bound up in. It could be because there are things that happen automatically if you're married when it comes to, let's say, who can make medical decisions about you that a spouse that you have been married to for a day could usurp your child in the hierarchy of who gets to make those decisions, which not everybody wants. And then there are of course people for whom marriage, even if they wanted it or didn't care about the meanings attached to it, they're not eligible for marriage like siblings. Siblings came up a lot when I was working on this book because people would say maybe they knew friends who had this close relationship, but they also maybe knew two sisters or two brothers who were riding through life with each other as companions. And you cannot get married to your sibling, and that can make it so that people don't have legal rights for the person that they really want. So this is a long answer to the question of like legal alternatives to marriage could be very helpful, allowing people to designate somebody who matters to them. And this can be in the form of something like a domestic partnership. There's a very interesting law out of Colorado that various professors point to as a model. The simplest version of this would be like somebody you designate as a default decision maker, and you could do this, add it on the DMV form. There are different ways to tackle it, but I think all of these are pointing to not making our legal landscape 'marriage or bust' and giving people very straightforward ways to get both the legal rights and then the status that goes along with it. Because there are ways to kind of get these rights piecemeal, like medical power of attorney, but they might not be recognized in the moment because doctors, for instance, don't expect it. So some changes to the law could make a big difference.
Nandita Bajaj (01:00:39):
Yeah. I really appreciate the focus on minimizing the role of marriage in policies, especially when you look at the more patriarchal religious and traditional foundations of the institution of marriage and how so many of the egalitarian relationships are also just, including me, I never questioned it. I was just like, yeah, we're obviously going to get married. But so many of my friends were just like, no, it's just not an institution whose foundation I resonate with. So if you think of the roots of how even marriage came about and what does the government want from us, so much of the marriage was legislated as a form of institutionalising patriarchy within the home and ensuring that those kinds of relationships and gender segregation was taking place within the household. And marriage is often tied to this pronatalist assumption that marriage leads to children and governments benefit from lots of children and population growth, which is a big part of what we're trying to dismantle in our cultural understanding. And I really like the focus of, well, some people still find that as a valuable institution and it's beneficial for them, but minimizing the political emphasis that marriage gets within the landscape sounds like such a nice kind of way forward while elevating some of the other legal benefits that other non-romantic non-marriage type of relationships should get. Thank you so much for both your research and the time that you took today to expand our imagination for how we imagine kinship. It's been really wonderful to talk to you.
Rhaina Cohen (01:02:28):
Thank you so much. And I just wanted to say that the people who I got to interview for the book, I feel like are doing by opening their lives, make it easier to do this imaginative work. It's really hard to do it from scratch, and if one of the main issues is not having any models to look to, it's really helpful to see people who are navigating new terrain and stumbling and sorting through it. So I think for anybody who's trying to build relationships that don't look like what they're seeing out in the world, like it's okay if it's hard. That's just sort of how it goes. But I have certainly found that people tend to feel satisfied when they are consciously making decisions to move a relationship or build a life that they want rather than the one that they're supposed to want.
Nandita Bajaj (01:03:14):
Yeah. That is such a great insight. Thank you so much, Rhaina. That was an absolutely fascinating conversation.
Rhaina Cohen (01:03:21):
Thank you both.
Alan Ware (01:03:23):
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit Population Balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj (01:03:52):
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.