Why do we place romantic partnership on a pedestal? What do we lose when we expect one person to meet all our needs? And what can we learn about commitment, love, and family from people who put deep friendship at the center of their lives?
In The Other Significant Others, NPR's Rhaina Cohen invites us into the lives of people who have defied convention by choosing a friend as a life partner. Their riveting stories unsettle widespread assumptions about relationships, including the idea that sex is a defining feature of partnership and that people who raise kids together should be in a romantic relationship. Platonic partners from different walks of life—spanning age and religion, gender and sexuality and more—reveal the freedom and challenges of embracing a relationship model that society doesn't recognize. And they show that orienting your world around friends isn't just the stuff of daydreams and episodes of …
Why do we place romantic partnership on a pedestal? What do we lose when we expect one person to meet all our needs? And what can we learn about commitment, love, and family from people who put deep friendship at the center of their lives?
In The Other Significant Others, NPR's Rhaina Cohen invites us into the lives of people who have defied convention by choosing a friend as a life partner. Their riveting stories unsettle widespread assumptions about relationships, including the idea that sex is a defining feature of partnership and that people who raise kids together should be in a romantic relationship. Platonic partners from different walks of life—spanning age and religion, gender and sexuality and more—reveal the freedom and challenges of embracing a relationship model that society doesn't recognize. And they show that orienting your world around friends isn't just the stuff of daydreams and episodes of The Golden Girls, but possible in real life.
Based on years of original reporting and drawing on striking social science research, Cohen argues that we make romantic relationships more fragile by expecting too much of them, while we undermine friendships by expecting too little of them. She traces how, throughout history, our society hasn’t always fixated on marriage as the greatest source of meaning, or even love. At a time when many Americans are spending large stretches of their lives single, widowed or divorced, or feeling the effects of the "loneliness epidemic," Cohen makes the case that one model of a flourishing adulthood—lifelong romantic partnership—isn't enough. A rousing and incisive book, The Other Significant Others 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.
Not the book I thought it would be, but still an interesting and worthwhile read. Cohen explores several sets of friends whose bonds are close without passing over into romantic love. Her work illustrates how impoverished our language, legal structures, and social norms are when it comes to describing and honoring these types of bonds. The stories she tells demonstrate that deep friendship is possible and valuable, and just how hard people have worked to make it work. The payoff, in an enriched life that others may never fully understand, seems entirely worth it to all the people involved. The book may lead you to question some of the conventions which limit how we let others into our lives.
Marvelous personal stories of deep friendships that challenge and enliven how we think about care, intimacy, and partnership. "We weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them." Covers a lot of varied ground from these accounts, from growing old, to disentangling masculinity's sexualization and stigmatizing of intimacy, to friend family and co-parenting, to the grief and pain of loss of platonic love without the artificial finality of "a break-up", to the monopolization of legal rights afforded to marriage.
