486 - Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center with Rhaina Cohen
Welcome, Rhaina!
Today we’re excited to welcome Rhaina Cohen, author of the bestselling book The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. She's an award-winning producer and editor for NPR's documentary podcast Embedded. And she's written about social connection and policy for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and other outlets.
Some of the terms we discuss in today’s episode you may not have heard before are:
“The other significant others” was coined by Eli Finkel, a psychology professor at Northwestern University.
Compulsory Coupledom: The notion that long term monogamous relationships are necessary for a normal, successful adulthood. Coined by Eleanor Wilkenson, a professor at the University of Southampton.
Boston Marriages: Unmarried women who supported each other as a kind of “cousin of romantic friendships,” said historian Susan Freeman.
Rhaina tackles the following topics and questions with us:
Her own background and reasons behind writing her bestselling book.
The term relationship being used to describe more than just a romantic relationship. What would a full definition encapsulate, and what are people missing out on when they use it to describe only one type of relationship?
Why do you think the cultural paradigm is so intrinsically heteronormative? Why is it the norm to put so much emphasis and pressure on romantic relationships? Do you think having extremely deep friendships could ultimately lead to healthier romantic relationships?
The history of friendships and how they have changed over time.
The fear that is involved with people mislabeling, misunderstanding, or generally being averse to the depth of someone’s relationship.
Possessiveness, specifically from those who are romantic partners to people who have deep friendships.
Can you talk a bit about the grief involved with losing friends, both to things like illness and death, but also the changes that can occur due to other factors?
Disenfranchised grief, ambiguous loss, and intrapsychic grief.
How changing or questioning cultural norms and paradigms also leads to the role of sex in relationships and our lives.
Do you see a future in terms of legislation and legal rights for non-traditional relationships?
Make sure to check out Rhaina on Instagram, get her book, and find her newsletter here!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking to Rhaina Cohen about her book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. Rhaina is an award-winning producer and editor for NPR's documentary podcast Embedded. She's written about social connection and policy for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many others, and we're super excited to be talking about her new book today.
If you're interested in learning more about our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show, you can check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers some of our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. We also love to emphasize in those tools and in that book that it's for all your relationships, not just the romantic or sexual ones. You can find links to buy that at multiamory.com/book or wherever fine books are sold.
Also, check out the first few episodes of our podcast where we go over some of our most commonly referenced tools and tips and episodes so that you can join in on these current ones and not be lost if we talk about a certain tool that you haven't heard of before. Rhaina, thank you so much for joining us today.
Rhaina: So glad to be able to talk to you all.
Dedeker: You wrote this wonderful Atlantic article a few years ago titled, What if Friendship, Not Marriage Was at the Center of Life, and that article definitely made the rounds. It really made the rounds within the non-monogamous community, and it feels like it was part of the seed for the subject that you explore in your book, which, if I'm going to grossly oversimplify, is basically making the argument that as human beings, we need more diversification within our relationships, not just putting all those emphasis on our romantic relationships and that we also maybe need to be exploring more depth within our friendships as well. I found myself wondering, since putting out your book and writing the article, have you gotten any pushback against that argument?
Rhaina: I've seen comments on Facebook or wherever. I'm not trying to look too closely at these things where the general line will be, but my spouse is my best friend. The idea is like, ha, I caught you, and these things don't have to be at odds. I really am not trying to put romantic relationships and platonic relationships at odds, but I think that that's what people end up jumping to or the ways certain kinds of coverage of the book end up getting framed for reasons that are understandable.
If the thing at the top of the hierarchy is romantic relationships, and I'm saying let's take friendship really seriously, it can feel like what I'm saying is let's replace one hierarchy with another. I think that that is where maybe some of the pushback comes from. In fact, I'd had a conservative social scientist tweet a couple weeks ago about Rhaina Cohen says that friendship will make you happier than marriage, but that's not what the stats say. I'm like, nowhere do I argue this.
I think that, yes, I think it's coming because there's maybe a bit of a defensiveness about the role of marriage or romantic relationships that people really feel is worth defending and they're worried about. Then they see the elevation of friendship as potentially being at odds with any kind of belief that romantic relationships are important.
Dedeker: Which it's a little bit surprising to me considering that something you point out in your book is that our understanding of romantic relationships as it is today, and especially of marriage as it is today, is not really the way that marriage has functioned for most of human history, most of the history of marriage. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Rhaina: Marriage used to take up a lot less of people's emotional lives than we now expected to do, that marriage was a pragmatic institution. It would join together two people and their families and would be really like an economic contract more like what we would see on The Bachelor of people supposedly falling in love. I don't know if that's even the best comparison because The Bachelor is obviously very performative, but it was more of an economic contract.
Now we expect our romantic partners or spouses to be the confidants in our lives, our best friend, which doesn't leave that much space for friends, the perfect roommate and co-parent, and to take on all of these roles that in the past, people might not have expected. I can also see this in different parts of the world in a contemporary way, like talking to friends whose parents were in arranged marriages, they have very different expectations for what they will get in their romantic relationship, what love even is, and often, they have a lot of very close friendships because they expect that a lot of their emotional intimacy will come from outside the marriage. The way that we think about romantic relationships is being all-encompassing, that your romantic partner is your everything, is your best friend, is really just recent and to the part of the world we're in right now.
Dedeker: I'm going to tweet that Raina Cohen thinks we should all be in arranged marriages.
Rhaina: Yes, hardly. I guess what I will-- like you're making a joke about that, but I like to take everything seriously. I'm a pluralist, and I think that there are different ways to live well. Even if I would not do those things myself. That's why I'm not trying to say that everybody should end their marriages or marriage is the worst thing ever. There are lots of problems with marriage, certainly historically.
I think with the arranged marriage thing, it was so interesting to talk to a friend of mine who actually wanted an arranged marriage from her parents for reasons that I thought were very interesting and also realizing that the way that I had been trained to think about romantic relationships was a really specific one, and that there are everything, that there are trade-offs in the way that we arrange this part of life now versus what other people do now or have done in the past.
Emily: You talk about the word relationship and how we do only think of it in one specific way, that it's a romantic relationship and that's it. In our book as well, we discuss the fact that relationship can mean so many different things. What do you think people are missing when they simply use that word to only mean one thing? What do you think that relationship the word should encapsulate?
Rhaina: I like this question. I haven't been asked it before. I want to think about this.
Dedeker: We like that. We always like when we're able to ask a question that hasn't been asked of somebody before.
Rhaina: Yes. Maybe one way to respond to this is with the story that I tell in the book, which is of a mother who's trying to make sense of her son's friendship. She couldn't wrap her mind around what exactly it is. He has the kind of friendship that I am exploring in the book where it is close enough to be a partnership. These men have made career decisions with the other person in mind. They have lived together for many years, planned to continue treating each other as the most significant relationship in their lives, but it is not sexual. It's not romantic. It's a friendship.
The mother was saying that she kept asking about the nature of the friendship and then was asking about the dating life of her son. Her son was like, "Why do you keep asking me this?" She said that, "I want you to have a relationship that gives you emotional wholeness." He was like, "I have that. I have this person who's supporting me." Everything that she wanted, that she listed, he was getting. She said, "I don't understand how you can be partners with somebody that you're not romantic with."
I think one of the things that people will miss out on by using the term relationship as the equivalent of a romantic partnership is that they miss that there are other forms of intimacy and connection and support that people find and that everything that's not a romantic relationship becomes lesser. Just like with this mother, she just couldn't see what was right in front of her. It didn't compute. She kept trying to get her son to find something that he actually already had, but she couldn't really process that. I think if people could be more encompassing with what a relationship is and more curious about what happens inside a relationship or what it looks like, that there's more that people could accept and also pursue in their own lives.
Jase: This also makes me think about, you mentioned before, that social psychologist who was tweeting about your book saying that you're arguing people would be happier with friendships than they are with marriage, things like that, and that the data doesn't back it up. That we've talked about this in the past on the show, but a lot of those studies that are cited to say people are happier and healthier and live longer and all these things when they're married are compared to people that are single. They're always people that are single but don't want to be, that there's this bias built into the way that they're even conducting the studies.
Rhaina: Yes. There's a researcher, I think she might still be doing her PhD, Hannah Tessler, who's working on singleness and is trying to disaggregate these different categories within this huge category that's seen as one of being single or unpartnered that there are-- and also Bella DePaulo, who has done so much work on singleness, just had a book come out about people who are single at heart. As in people whose best lives or those lived unpartnered, and that is very different than people who are longing to be in a romantic relationship.
There is a bit of a back and forth between me and him and another reporter about this, where if we live in a world where you are stigmatized for not being in a romantic partnership, if you are seen as not an adult, if you don't get invited to activities because you don't have a partner, if you're seen as incomplete, I mean that might weigh on you and be separate from actually your own pleasure.
This came up with a woman who had read The Atlantic piece that Dedeker mentioned, and she told me that she has a friend that rises to the level of a partner, but she was divorced. She felt like there was a missing piece in her life that she had to go out and pursue, she had to date. It took seeing the stories of other people who had these friendships and were fulfilled for her to realize that she herself was fulfilled.
If this woman, Paula, was filling out a survey about her happiness before she had read that piece and realized it was even possible to be happy and unmarried, then she might have said that she wasn't very happy, and how do we make sense of that information when it's capturing biases and it's not piecing apart the different kinds of people who are not married and it's just collapsing them together.
Dedeker: Yes. I want spend some time also speaking about the history and the many ways that our attitudes toward friendship have changed over the years, because I think what's funny as we're talking about this, the platonic life partnership, friendships that you describe or people who are co-parenting with friends or deciding to do end-of-life care with friends rather than with a romantic partner. The funny thing is that these things aren't new. It's not like, oh, we've just uncovered this cool bit of technology and human relationships that, if anything, this reflects maybe more what we would've expected from friendships and the other people in our networks previous to this emphasis on marriage and the nuclear family. Is that correct?
Rhaina: I think that people who have grown up in small towns or had a lot of community around them might have personal experience with people showing up for them in really deliberate ways. At a couple of recent events, I've asked people as a warmup, what is something a friend has done for you that went beyond the call of duty? That can be something that's pretty mundane or can be profound, whatever they want.
A lot of the stories people told in this last group, which leaned maybe a little bit on the older side, where a friend who was with them every day after their spouse died. I've heard just so many beautiful stories particularly connected to grief and how a friend was there for them during the grieving process or while getting cancer treatment. These things are both not new and they are happening and are really hidden in plain sight to a lot of people.
I think part of that is that people don't talk about it or they might use language like my sister or my aunt or use some other shorthand to make it seem like this person is in a more recognizable role of a familial relationship. I've seen in my own workplace that people are taking care of their friends in really serious ways and don't communicate that to anybody else on the team that we're on but they've told me because I'm the friendship person. I'm the person to talk about.
Dedeker: You're the one safe friendship person to be out here.
Rhaina: I just think this has been happening for so long and is happening now, but we just aren't necessarily recognizing it.
Emily: I do want to touch on that mislabeling and misunderstanding and just generally being adverse to this depth of relationship that people have with their friends. In the Andrew and Toly story, you talked a lot about this and that story, and can you just discuss their relationship a little bit and the othering that tends to happen with people when they do have these types of friendships and when people outside of that friendship can't really understand what's going on there?
Rhaina: Andrew and Toly were really the first people I talked to before I fully understood that I was writing a book. They're friends of a friend or related to friends of a friend, and they are two straight men who have been essentially best friends since they were 15 and have gone through a lot in the 15-20-ish years since then, including having a third friend who they were extremely close to and then ended up dying by suicide. They took care of that friend and really were the only other people in the world who knew what it was like to go through that grief together.
They were in PhD programs, where one of them two years in transferred, moved across the country to be able to live with the other and be in the same lab. They took time off from their PhDs to start a nonprofit together. They currently work together, live together, and all this is inscrutable to many of the people around them, including, at one point, the head of the lab that they were in was gossiping with the other students to try to ask like, are Andrew and Toly in a romantic relationship?
The story I told earlier of the mother who really just wanted her son to have a relationship that gave him emotional wholeness. That was Andrew's mom, who, from a well-meaning place, wanted to say that she accepted if her son was gay, was in this relationship with a man, and couldn't understand how they could be so close if there wasn't a romantic relationship involved.
Then they also would date women and then would hit a point three to six months into the relationship where the woman would realize the significance of the friendship, even if they had been told it previously, like would really get it after witnessing it and then might not feel comfortable anymore.
They came to a place where they realized they couldn't really date women who were monogamous or who expected monogamy because they essentially had a primary partner, it was a platonic one, and at least the people who were non-monogamous would understand the structure of having more than one person that you are really devoted to. That has been more successful for them. They needed to go outside the mainstream of how people think about relationships to be understood in the friendship that they have.
Dedeker: That is such a fascinating entry point into non-monogamy. That's a new one. I was pretty sure I've heard every single entry point into non-monogamy for people, but that's so interesting.
Rhaina: Yes. It's really the same kinds of principles about not needing to get everything in one person. I think there are some people who use the term partner to talk about a non-romantic relationship, and I think like the asexual community, it's a reason for quite a few people to think about non-monogamy.
It's like doing two things. It's like approaching relationship in a nonmonogamous way, romantic relationship, and also challenging the hierarchy that assumes that a romantic relationship is necessarily going to be more significant than a friendship because that can feel like a real blow to people who have been told from the time they watch Disney movies, that a romantic relationship is what you build your life around. They really are challenging quite a lot in the way that they organize their lives.
Jase: Before we go on, I want to give a quick shout-out to our amazing community members in our Discord and our Facebook group. These are all people who are part of our private discussion group tier on Patreon. These communities are such cool places where people are actually there to support each other and listen and have constructive conversations, which feels like it's a rarer and rarer thing to find on the internet these days.
It's just been an incredibly inspiring community to be able to be part of our Discord server is really cool because there are channels for all sorts of different topics. Everything from work talk to crafts, to parenting, to being polyamorous when you're over 40. All sorts of different topics as well as some channels where you can talk about games and just have fun with fellow Multiamory listeners. Most importantly, it helps us support this show and keep this going and make it available for free for everybody out there every week in the world.
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Emily: Yes, I want to talk and touch a little bit on possessiveness by other partners who start dating people or in these types of friendships because I know for myself, at least my last relationship, one of the big sticking points and ultimately one of the reasons I think why it ended is because of my relationship with Jase and Dedeker.
They are together romantically, and I'm not with them romantically anymore, but we own a business together and have for the last decade. I think it's really difficult for people to understand I have a level of commitment with the two of them that is not ever going to change and is not ever going to go away, but for so many people coming into that, that's a really, really challenging thing to see and to not be intimidated by.
Dedeker: Yes. I think all of us, just to jump in there really quick, all of us, individually, have run into that in our daily lives, that people have a really hard time understanding that not only is it us running a podcast together, which takes a lot of time and a lot of energy, but there's also this really deep friendship between the three of us, where it's even when we're not doing podcast stuff, it's like we still want to hang out and travel together and prioritize being there for milestones and stuff like that. I do think all three of us have run into other people really having a hard time understanding that.
Rhaina: This is even among people who are non-monogamous that they have trouble with this.
Jase: Especially with monogamous people but even sometimes in non-monogamy.
Emily: Yes. My last partner was monogamous, so I do think that with newer partners, I have prefaced my interactions with them. You got to be okay with this. You got to be okay with this relationship in my life, because if you're not, then there's going to be an issue. I do think it takes a specific type of person to be able to say, "I am not going to be intimidated by this or have a lot of insecurity about myself and the way that I function in a relationship with this person because I know that other people are also going to be as important as I am, if not more."
Rhaina: Yes. I think it's hard, and also what Andrew and Toly ended up finding in their situation, is that they would try to tell people from the outset how important the friendship was. I compare it to getting sunburned where you can't tell necessarily that the sun is shining on you until you've gotten burned because UV, you can't see. It was like these women were being told, this is what the friendship is, and until they got to a point where it was too uncomfortable, they just couldn't put the pieces together. At least that's my understanding having talked to them and getting a sense from a romantic--
They have found romantic partners who are okay with it, but I think it's again, because they have at least a framework of non-monogamy that has helped them understand that relationships can look in all sorts of ways, and it is possible to really love someone or be committed to them, and not have them be in the primary slot. I just think the challenge is that even if you tell people from the outset what the nature of the relationship is, if they've never seen anything like it, it might not compute, and by the time they see it, maybe they'll come around, and maybe they won't.
Then you have to do this big filtration from the start, if you're telling people, "Look, this is what my life setup is." Because I think there is some chance that people will witness the friendship and then change their mind in the same way that Andrew's mom really could not understand the friendship, and over time, has been able to, and has clarified to other people in her life who don't understand it, what it is, and has defended them. You just don't know which way it's going to go from the outset.
Jase: I remember a good friend of mine, he had a very long-term heterosexual female partner who wasn't fully threatened, but a little bit, and for, I would say, the first few years of their relationship, where she would just be like, "Are you sure there's not something with you guys or you're just holding yourselves back?" That kept coming up for her for a while. I think, eventually, she got it where it was just, "Oh, okay, these guys are very close, and they're just good friends, and that's what it is." It is this strange thing where it's hard for people to compute that. It's like there can be this little voice in the back of their head that even if they understand it generally, they can go, "But wait, but wait, this doesn't look like I was told it should look."
Rhaina: The plot of so many movies is, will they or won't they?
Jase: Yes.
Rhaina: We're primed to look for those that run up to romantic feelings. I get why that would be in the back of somebody's mind. I also think that part of it is that we are really made to conflate sexual intimacy with emotional intimacy and that it's hard for people to understand, or we haven't been necessarily told, it's not been made clear to us that you can be really, really close to somebody and not want to sleep with them. That those are drives that can overlap but don't have to.
Dedeker: I think this is maybe a good jumping point to talk about-- you mentioned these three magic ingredients that go into intimacy, platonic or romantic or otherwise. You mentioned time, togetherness, and touch. I think it is really interesting that, especially when you have someone maybe who's monogamous and also wants to have a romantic partnership in addition to a really close platonic partnership, that again, culturally, we may have this sense of like, oh, of course, you're going to want to spend time with your friends, but the romantic partnership gets the most time. Of course, you're going to want to have togetherness with your friends, but the romantic partnership gets the most togetherness.
Then when it comes to touch, that's where everything spins out because, of course, then it's like, well, no, you're not going to touch your friends. That's just bananas. I think especially if there's a gendered aspect to it, of as a man, you're not going to touch your male friends, like that's not a part of it. I guess I also just want to ask, it makes sense that these ingredients need to be there, but why is it so hard to have those ingredients in a modern-day friendship, do you think?
Rhaina: Well, I first want to give credit where credit is due. These three magic ingredients, time, togetherness, and touch comes from Lisa Diamond, who's a psychology professor and is talking about attachment relationships. That could be a parent-child bond. The other one people tend to think about is a romantic relationship, but you can have an attachment relationship with a friend. She is trying to make the point that if you have those ingredients, you can feel that strength of connection. Yes, certainly, this is gendered. My female friends, straight and queer, seem very able to be physically affectionate with each other and have that not read as romantic versus straight men, who I think are given way less latitude to be at all comfortable with touch.
In fact, one of the chapters of my book is centered on masculinity, and follows a straight man who grew up in a conservative environment who is trying to figure out what is it he even feels comfortable with when he's been rammed in the head from the time he was a kid, that he shouldn't touch other boys, he shouldn't get physically close to them. He has to think for himself about, what is he physically actually enjoy if he can separate all the noise from what he's been told.
I think part of this is socialization, that touch is only supposed to be something that makes sense within a romantic relationship, and if it's with the same-sex friend, then somehow your sexual orientation becomes a question mark. It's, again, part of this hierarchy, that there are certain things that are reserved for the most important relationship, which is a romantic one, and that it muddies the waters in people's minds to do those same things with a friend.
It's like, well, what makes our relationship special if you are curling up on the couch, like cuddling with a friend? I do think some fear of being perceived as gay, is part of the hesitation that a lot of people feel in same-sex friendships, and maybe opposite-sex straight friendships, that they fear that people will think that there's something romantic at play, and are less concerned about the sexual orientation and more concerned about if the other people or the friend is romantically involved, or if they are, then partners might not be happy.
Jase: For sure. I just want to echo so many of the things that you just said. I've had so many of those experiences, and I think I've talked about most of these on the show in the past. In middle school, sitting with a male friend of mine, and had my arm around him and put my head on his shoulder at some point, and then my parents later talking to me about, "Well, okay, so we love you no matter what, but we don't think God really wants you to do that." That Christian baggage about homosexuality and things like that, through to, just those struggles with how much touch is okay. Does this mean something?
I remember in college, I took a contact improv dance class, and something that our professor talked about in that class was the importance of touch for humans, and how as we grow up in this society where touch is reserved for sex and romance, that we can go to these weird other lengths to try to get touch. Her theory is, this is why boys are violent with each other and will hit each other and push each other and fight and wrestle or whatever is because they want to get that touch somehow, and this is the only socially acceptable way for them to do it.
Then also things like then later I became a hairstylist, and we would talk about how you're going to be touching this person in a way that they're not really touched very often. Most people don't touch your head unless they're kissing you, I guess, or something like that. Talking about how you ease people into that and how it's really important to shake their hand first or maybe put your hand on their shoulder before you touch their head. Just things to build comfort. It's not just the shock, which it can be for some people.
I guess what I'm getting at with all this is I find that stuff fascinating and have for a very long time. I think it brings us also to that question of, do you feel like you've noticed in researching this that there are changes in those trends, especially among boys? I feel like I've seen some of that, but then sometimes it seems like it's going backward again in terms of touch being a little more acceptable.
Dedeker: Or friendship in general. I know there's so much media coverage right now about, I mean, not just the loneliness epidemic for everybody, but there's so much hand-wringing around men not having friends.
Rhaina: I don't know that I have empirical answers about any of this, but certainly, as somebody who has been interested in friendship and social connection, has been following this, there's just way more conversation, as you're saying, about these topics and I think a growing recognition that the way that we have been told to relate to each other, especially boys and men, is not really adding up to enough for what we need as human beings, and that in straight relationships, like a woman, it cannot be enough to be everything to a man in a way that is often lopsided. At least women are expected to maintain some female friendships and still have that closeness.
I also think that there are pop cultural depictions that show some more male closeness. There is some interesting small studies on romances, which is very hard to know how much that tells us anything broadly, but I definitely just do see more men who are able to-- it's a package of things, like speak more about their emotions, are able to realize that friendship is important, and that might be reinforced by the romantic partner as opposed to seen as a problem with declining rates of homophobia, then men have become, it seems, less fearful of being perceived as gay, which is one of the obstacles to that kind of closeness.
I feel optimistic, but I also was back at my college campus or where I went to college a couple of weeks ago and went on a long walk with a sophomore there, and she told me how Greek life is just so alive and well. It seems like absolutely nothing has changed since I've been there with the gender dynamics, which I found a little bit shocking because when I was there, feminism was not a cool word, and now it feels taken for granted, or at least in certain spaces.
I don't know how much has radically reformed, but I do think that you can actually talk about this stuff and not be-- my friends would say no homo when I was in college. There's behavior that I think people would now feel embarrassed about and actively value friendships instead.
Emily: I do want to pivot a bit and talk about some of the ways that you discuss how friendship can make our romantic relationships stronger, because with some of the women that you talk about, you discuss how they really think about how strong their friendships are and how incredible what they're getting from their friendships is. Therefore, a man or a partner, a romantic partner, needs to live up to that in some way. It really makes them reevaluate their own values in terms of what it is that they want in a romantic partnership. Can you just talk about some of the ways in which friendship can ultimately make our romantic relationship stronger?
Rhaina: It can make a relationship stronger in, first, the sense that we've talked about, I think from the beginning here, about diversifying your portfolio or not put all your eggs in one basket, to use another cliché, that put so much pressure on a romantic relationship to expect that one person to fulfill every need. That can undermine a romantic relationship because those expectations are setting you up to fail. It helps to have more than one really close relationship.
There's a specific story that illustrates the dynamic that you're describing, Emily, where one of the women I profile, Cami, had experiences in not-very-good romantic relationships. In one case, a romantic partner was quite possessive and controlling, but that was, I guess, a little bit of what she was used to, and she became extremely close to her friend, Tilly, who was involved in taking care of Cami's child and was just a supportive, reliable, upbeat, supportive presence.
Cami, at one point, realized that didn't have to put up with what she was putting up with, with men in her life, and that she could set her sights higher, and that Tilly really demonstrated what it would look like to have a partner who wanted to be there for Cami's kids and would be good to her. The man she's been with, I think from everything that I can tell from the two of them, really fulfills that.
The friendship, in that case, raised the bar. Interestingly, I think there's another way to say that it lowers the bar because if you're not expecting everything from one person, you don't need to have all the same hobbies and complementary skill sets on every single thing. In my mind, what these friendships can do for romantic relationships is make people's criteria more precise to figure out what really matters, because what are you already getting in the close relationships in your life or the communities that you're part of? What do you really want in this particular person or persons that you can not just expect every single box, whether or not you actually need it to be checked?
Dedeker: I would love to hear a little bit of your personal experience with this. In your interview that you did on The Ezra Klein Show, you shared about how you and your romantic partner live with close friends, another couple, and they have children as well, and that it's been this very intimate, close, co-living, maybe not a full co-parenting situation, but definitely sharing childcare labor and things like that. First of all, I'm curious to hear more about just your experience with that in general, but also, were there ways that you found having that little intimate community supported your romantic relationship as well?
Rhaina: Yes. I've lived with these friends for three years, and we are actually recording this on the day that they moved out. It was a very sad day. We knew from the outset that this would be a minimum of two years, somewhere between two and four years. That happened because my friends were academics. If you know anything about academia, it is very hard for two people in academia to get jobs in the same place, and they could end up anywhere in the country, so they did not end up in DC.
My husband and I already have trips planned in the next several weeks to visit. Actually, one of the friends who moved out is going to be staying back at our house next week because she has a conference. We'll be just continually involved in each other's lives. Yes, it's been, I think, a family-like dynamic, and there's an ease that all of us have. I was talking to my husband today about the difference between how the kids in our house react to us versus the child of my closest friend who lives a five-minute walk away, that she had been saying for days up to this party that we had last week that she was going to get to see me and my husband, me and-- she calls him Coco. The kids call him Coco.
Then when she saw, she got him really shy, which I think shows that there's not total familiarity, versus the kids that we live with just will turn to us and ask for help, or the one who can talk, or just will do what my housemate has called the love swat, where the one-year-old just makes points or looks like he's swatting a fly, but he's in your direction in a very loving way and just smiles when one of us walks in the room. I don't know what to compare that to.
Maybe a very close aunt-uncle kind of relationship or we've been into grandparents. We just get to skip to the fun, low-responsibility phase. That's where the kids, and then with the friends, you just learn so much about people when you live with them. We've spent time with each of our parents. We know what has formed us and what we're obsessed with and what the victories are and the things that we're struggling with and the state of our friend's kids' diapers and all the stuff.
I think in terms of how it's affected my relationship with my husband, I've gotten to see parts of him that I wouldn't have, certainly with the kids, that I wouldn't have ordinarily seen. He loves children. There's a particular giggle that I only really hear when he's around children, so I get to see that kind of joy. Our friends who are living here are also Jewish and observant, and so a lot of our shared time together would revolve around Jewish life, like hosting Shabbat dinners together or observing the holidays.
He really loved that and read translation of most of the Hebrew Bible. I got to see this voracious learning, curious, open mind inside of him which I know is there, but I got to see it in a new way. I don't know, I'm going on for a long time. There are a lot of things that it's done to affect our relationship, to make us present with each other, and to see somebody else's relationship up close and use that as a bit of a mirror for our own. I think it's all been really positive.
Jase: Something that makes me think of, to go back to what we were talking about with the relationship of the three of us, where I will find there's this big difference between people in my life, like family members or friends that I maybe only talk to a few times a year, where there's the ones who ask about Emily, too, as just like they would ask about your family members or your spouse or partner or whoever.
Then there's the people that, when I randomly talk about Emily in a conversation, they're a little confused at first about why are we talking about her in the same way that you're talking about partners or whatever. I do really appreciate the ones who get that's an important relationship and one I should ask about. I hope that you experience the same thing, that you've got people in your life who will also ask that about these friends, too, and realize they're still an important part of your life, even if you're not roommates right now.
Rhaina: I think especially the people who have been to our house, who have been there for Shabbat dinners or for parties or whatever, that they've gotten some glimpse of what it means to coexist together and why they're important. I think a general recommendation I have for people is, when you're catching up with somebody, don't just ask about their romantic partner. You can ask about a friend as if they're significant potentially, and not use these strict categories as a way to assume what matters most in someone's life.
Emily: I want to bring it back to the parenting piece and the child rearing piece, because I think that in our culture right now, I see this push pull from many different directions. Of course, there's the very traditional nuclear family, two parents in the household, that's the way it's supposed to be, that's the healthiest setup for a child.
At the same time, many people who are actually parents saying this is really difficult to do, to have only two parents, especially if both people are out of the house working full time, like this feels impossible, this feels so hard especially if you don't have the money to pay for childcare, or for a nanny or something like that. Then we're often in the non-monogamous community where people are trying things like co-parenting with multiple partners, for instance. Then there's also the push-pull against that of, how dare you bring total strangers into your child's life. Isn't that so disorienting?
I imagine that there would probably be the same arguments against people who are doing these very non traditional parenting things as well. Whether it's friends who are co-parenting together, choosing to raise a child together, or two romantic partners who are also choosing to co-parent along with a friend-- Have you seen that same argument where people are like, "No, no, no, that's way too unstable for a child," even though we have the adage about how it takes a village and all that.
Rhaina: I'm actively working on an article about this.
Emily: Okay. Great.
Rhaina: Friends raising their kids in some collective fashion. One reaction that I've heard, and actually that I got a version of from my own household, was that people assumed that if it's two couples or a friend with a couple, that there must be a romantic relationship. Like this woman I spoke to this weekend who lives in a house with her husband, her two kids, her friend, the friend's husband, and their two kids, so four kids, two couples. When people were talking about them without the couples present, they were like, "Oh, are they swingers?" That made more sense to them and now got a similar response for our household. That somehow as stigmatized as non-monogamy is, that makes more sense to people than friends wanting to raise children collectively.
Emily: So funny, but it makes sense.
Rhaina: I think the kinds of things that I've heard, if people are occupying the same house in particular, is fears of instability. There are just too many variables, what if the house breaks up, this is a bad idea. I've seen much more positive reactions if people still have separate units, so living in a duplex or living in a co-living community where people have their private space and some shared space. I think that there's something to people about sharing a kitchen and truly sharing a home that they can find unsettling.
I think it varies and it really depends on the exposure. Once you get into, oh, there's somebody that you can go to if your childcare falls through, or to pick up extra cereal that you've run out of, or who has extra Tylenol, or. Also, it's much more pleasant for the parents that they can hang out with each other if they're sharing space together, or they can swap responsibilities and somebody can go out for the night. I think that there are ways that people actually really do see the benefit of it but it seems like the line at which people start to get more uncomfortable than positive is if people are all sharing one property together.
Emily: Interesting. Do you think that comes down to just American individualism of, this is my little space and it belongs to me and how dare you come in and I shouldn't have to share? Do you think it's just that.
Rhaina: I think that's a big part of it. I think there probably are more things that you have to negotiate if you're sharing space together than if it's you do have some division. It's a big financial investment, particularly if people are buying a home together. I can understand why people would be concerned, but I just think that there's a tendency that a lot of people have when they see something unconventional and then jump to all the things that they think can go wrong, but they don't do that same thing for the conventional decision.
They really overweight all of the negatives of the unconventional option and really underweight the negatives of the conventional choice. That, to me, is maybe the thing worth examining. Are people so worried about the conflict because they're actually is more conflict that's likely to arise, or because they are first imagining everything that can go wrong and can't see the positives, or at least weigh them next to each other in a thoughtful fashion?
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Dedeker: I do want to talk, before we wrap up here about relationship transitions, because that is something that happened to you within the central relationship, the catalyst, it felt like for you writing the book, which was your relationship with Em, and that relationship shifted over time in terms of, it felt like the intensity of it and just the shape of it, it did change, and there was a mourning for the relationship and how it had been and a feeling of loss to a degree and a feeling of grief.
You talk a lot about grief in the book and things like disenfranchised grief and ambiguous loss, all of that. I'm curious because we discuss on the show a lot, many different types of relationship changes and how that is okay, and it's fine for relationships to change, and in fact, sometimes they can become stronger through that change. Can you just touch a little bit on that? Maybe if there were other people who you interviewed who had relationship changes within their friendships and what that meant for them and how they continued those friendships in a different fashion.
Rhaina: I think relationship changes are both maybe likely and tricky in the kinds of friendships that I was writing about and that I had experienced that was this close, because you can have a total falling out, and that's one devastating thing that can happen, but also you can just become less close but still look like you have a very close relationship.
What I found was really difficult was, how do I talk to people about what it is that I've lost? Because we didn't have a falling out, there was not necessarily a categorical change. It was a change in degree. To the extent that there was a categorical change, people didn't recognize the first category in the first place because they just weren't familiar with it, really. I found it hard to imagine that anybody would be able to relate to what the loss was. It's not that comparable to romantic relationships, because in monogamous romantic relationships, the way things tend to go for people is that there's an on off switch.
It's like either you are planning to be life partners or you never see each other at all. That there's this disbelief, I think, especially among people who are straight, that you can't truly be close to somebody, can't be in between. I think some of that's coming from a place of, you might need some distance after a point where you've broken up. It just felt like you couldn't even map on romantic relationship protocols to what I was dealing with because we were leveling down, we weren't turning the off switch. What I found with people who have had transitions in these sorts of friendships, particularly the falling out or the leveling down as opposed to the death of a friend, where there isn't any culpability, I guess, that could be assigned to you, is that people felt a lot of shame about the friendship and started interrogating what was wrong with them, which I think can happen at the end of a romantic relationship too. Some of the people who have written quite eloquently about changes in friendship have said that there is an even deeper shame because it's like that you're admitting something that's wrong with you in a way that might not be true in a romantic relationship where it's just this was incompatible with us, that I didn't want you to be the most important person in my life.
I think for friendships it can feel like, "I didn't want you to be even anywhere close to me." There's just a level of shame around it and then also we don't have rituals or any recognition that the loss of a friendship can be devastating and therefore require support, so then people are navigating that kind of loss on their own. It's just multiple factors that lead to this dissolution of a friendship or the downgrade of a friendship is being way harder than is recognized and is supported. It's rough to think about.
Emily: I have to say that I was really struck in listening to interviews with you and reading segments of your book that I often found myself on the edge of tears quite often. I found the subject very emotional, I was really trying to inquire why. Why is this so emotional for me because I don't feel like someone who's lonely, who has a lack of friends, if anything, I think in my 30s have gotten a lot better at prioritizing my friendships and caring for my friendships.
I think that the best answer I could come up with is that it feels like the emotion comes from this deep culturally connected feeling of deprivation, I think. Almost a feeling of impoverishment around, I don't know, I guess how our culture just really doesn't set us up right now for this wide, wide variety of deep sustaining human relationships.
I think it's great that like you said, the conversation is changing and things like your article and your book are also helping to push forward that conversation, helping people to talk more about these things and think more about these things. I don't know, I just feel like there's a certain amount of sorrow that maybe all of us can feel into or many of us can feel into knowing that we probably evolved a nervous system that was meant to have this network supporting us and then realizing that it's not there. I don't know if that's completely out of left field for me or if you've gotten that response to your work before.
Rhaina: The comparison that comes to mind for me is feeling like adults lied to you as a kid, realizing that the tooth fairy isn't real or Santa Claus or whatever, or something that's more dramatic than that, like realizing how unequal the world is, how unfair the world is, that it's like we have been fooled into thinking that there is one way to be and that's not serving us or that we've been swindled out of what's possible within friendship and we're just reproducing the things that we are told that we should do.
Even if you yourself have managed to not be affected by those messages, those imperatives, the parent who tells you, don't put your hand on the boy's shoulder, you know that there are so many other people who are lonely or who have friendships that are nowhere near as deep as they could be, that they don't have the skills to have close friendships. I've certainly seen that where people really want friendships, but really just don't know how to do it. Certain things are much more subtle than dating is, as hard as dating is.
I can imagine that that's where some of the grief comes from and it's certainly something that I feel. Part of what I find so upsetting about the reaction that some people have to those in these really close friendships that they have created something beautiful despite the odds, these are friends who care for each other through cancer treatments, through the end of life, through every joy and sorrow that you can imagine, and instead of being celebrated, they're denigrated. That, to me is an extra injustice on top of the collective injustice of being told that these relationships, these friendships don't matter in the first place.
Jase: I wanted to actually bring this back to something that you said at the very beginning of this episode when we were talking about pushback that you've seen. One of those reactions is this perception that it's a threat to marriage somehow. This is something that we've talked about before with non-monogamy, with polyamory as well, that there can be this feeling of threat when none is intended. It's not saying we think everyone should be polyamorous, but that we want this to be an option that people can do as well. I think in both cases, I think it's one of the reactions people can have to that injustice, to that everybody's lied to me my whole life, that Dr. Eli Sheff calls it the fear of the polyamorous possibility.
This idea that I've worked really hard to try to function in a monogamous relationship and to do it okay when that's been really difficult, and for you to tell me I didn't need to do all that work is like, no, I won't accept that. I've worked too hard to make this work for myself. I think that when it comes to friendship and marriage, I could see the same thing where it's like, I've worked so hard to try to get by not having these close friendships and relying on my spouse to be everything to me, and you're telling me I didn't need to do that. How dare you. It's a way of coping with how upsetting that knowledge can be.
Rhaina: I think certainly in the poly case that that might be more conscious for people. In fact, what you've described is the exact reaction that my friend's parents had. They were like, "We tried this in the 60s and we decided that it wasn't going to work. It wasn't that we wanted monogamy, it wasn't like we never wanted to have other partners, but this was the bargain we made, and you're telling us that that's not true?" I think that that is very much the case there. In the friendship one, I wonder the extent to which people are like, "Oh, I warded off friendships."
Jase: I don't think anyone's thinking this consciously in my example. I do want to be clear.
Rhaina: That you think it's subconscious.
Jase: The people I'm thinking of, even with non-monogamy, they're not saying that out loud. These are the people that can't even go there. They can't even think that.
Rhaina: My friend's parents were just able to actually get closer to articulating that, but I that probably-- I can give an example of how this played out and I don't know how conscious it was, but talking to a relative of mine who is very family-centric, and has had trouble with my book because she feels like it's denigrating a commitment to family. I would try to say I'm really not saying one thing is better than the other. I think the pluralism thing that I was telling you, I really genuinely do think that there are multiple ways to live well. I think for a lot of people, it is impossible to say that I want to do this one thing or I think it is good to do something that is different than what you are doing without attacking what they are doing.
It might be because in their mind there's only one right way to do things, so it's not possible to say that there are multiple. It was very interesting to me because maybe other people feel that way, but because this person is related to me, I'm able to have a deeper discussion about it. That was part of, at least, I think her reaction that you are either explicitly or implicitly telling me something that there's there's wrong with my life and she was like, "I don't have time for friends. I have a busy life and I have to take care of my family, and you're telling me that I need to go out and make friends." I'm like, "I'm sorry you see it that way. That's not what I'm arguing," but that tells me something about how people interact with this kind of elevation of friendship from where I see it as on the floor that it needs to be given it's due, particularly for the people who have these committed friendship and it's not recognized.
Jase: Some of us out there literally don't have access to family members or have been shunned by their family members for any number of reasons and their friends become their family. I've never prescribed to that idea that blood is thicker than water. I understand that some people do, but for those of us who that's not the case. It's so relatable, it's so understandable, it feels like coming home. I just so appreciate the opportunity to get to talk to you today. I very, very, very highly recommend this book. It's amazing. I'm moved by it.
Emily: I'm like, "How do we bring this home without all of us crying?" Rhaina, again, I feel like I could ask 600 more questions. This is such a deep and such a rich topic, but let us know where can people find more about you and your work?
Rhaina: I have an unusual enough name that you just got to Google me. It's R-H-A-I-N-A is my first name, Cohen, C-O-H-E-N. You can find my writing, work at NPR there. The book is The Other Significant Other: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, available where fine books are sold. Is that what you said, Jase?
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Yes.
Rhaina: Also, if you're an audiobook person, which you might be since you're listening to this, I narrate the audiobooks. If you have not been turned off by my voice for this last hour, you can spend about eight and half hours with my voice as I read aloud of the book.