What If We Placed Friendship at the Center of Our World?

Here at the Better Life Lab, we love nothing more than diving into policy and organizational solutions that would meaningfully improve gender equality and family life in America. But there are lots of concrete ways we can address making our experience of work and family richer and more rewarding that don’t require systemic policy changes. Don’t worry; I’m not going to suggest that the key to work-family justice is getting up at 5 a.m. every morning, learning a complex bullet journal method for productivity, or being rich enough to outsource all your domestic tasks. The solutions I’m personally most interested in right now are around building community, fostering adult friendships, and envisioning a world outside of the nuclear family.

This is why I was so excited to talk to Rhaina Cohen, the author of the new book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. The book is full of vivid case studies about people creating powerful relationships, for which she settles on the term 'platonic partnerships,' which center care and commitment outside of romance or family ties. I loved hearing an update on Natasha and Lynda, who co-parent their son Elaan in Canada, and who I profiled in a 2019 Double Shift podcast episode. They are legal trailblazers in their province in getting new definitions of family recognized for two parents who aren’t and have never been in a romantic relationship with each other. I was also very moved by the story of Barb and Inez described in the book, and their decades-long friendship that has involved Barb helping to raise Inez’s kids when Inez was a single mom, a couple of cross-country moves, and now helping care for each other so they can age together, with dignity, at home.

Cohen’s book also asks profound questions about what our culture of marriage supremacy costs other relationships, how few models and forms of support we have for strengthening friendships, and what a different world might look like. Cohen also incorporates some of her own life experiences into the book. Towards the beginning, she shares about an intense friendship with a woman she calls M, where the label "best friends" felt inadequate, and how their relationship evolved. Towards the end of the book and during our interview, she shares her nearly three-year experience of living with another couple in a Washington, D.C. townhouse. Cohen and her husband don’t have kids, and their friends now have two.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Katherine Goldstein: You have so many really rich stories about people building platonic life partnerships in your book. But one thing I've been thinking about a lot is that if people want to find and build close friendships, there aren't a lot of models for how to do that.

With romantic relationships, we have, as you mention in the book, 'relationship escalators.' You can meet on a dating site. You get to know each other for X number of years. You move in together. You get engaged, etc. We don't have established 'relationship escalators' for friends, especially ones that presume a sustained level of care or have financial implications.

If you could create a 'relationship escalator' for friendship, what would it look like?

Rhaina Cohen: I probably wouldn't create an escalator. I would have a set of different stairs so that you have options. The whole point of an escalator is that it pulls people along without them really choosing or noticing. And you can't get off to move directions. It's all just going in one direction or you get off completely.

I think that there are actually things that friendships can learn from romantic relationships in terms of getting some of the benefits of having some kind of structure. Romantic relationships can also learn from friendships, which have to be carried out with a lot of intentionality. You can't sleepwalk your way through it.

I would want opportunities when people are climbing the stairs of friendship when they reach a metaphorical landing, for it to be on the table so that they can choose whether or not to have certain conversations, like, 'How do we want to be involved in each other's lives? How often do we want to see each other? In what ways are we compatible to really ride through life together?'

And are there roles that we've been told from the time we were kids that can only go to a spouse or we can only maybe rely on our relatives for, that actually we would be well positioned to do for each other? And at different landings, there would be checking in on the kind of decisions that people have made. And do we want to put each other in our wills? Would they be the godparent or take care of my child in case anything happened? Do we want to live together? Do we want to live next door to each other? Do we want to make major decisions around each other? I would want people to have a book of questions that they could manage and somebody standing in the wings who could counsel them if they were dealing with complicated decisions or conflict because right now it's just like everybody for themselves. Right now, the default is just to not ask, to let things go unsaid, and to expect that the friendship is not going to be a relationship that you can put that kind of work into.

In the book, you describe how the institution of marriage creates a kind of relationship supremacy that jettisons other kinds of relationships, legally, culturally, and within public policy. You also detail in the book how efforts to push for marriage equality for queer people is a significant form of victory, but it's also a step back for some legal recognitions of other kinds of forms of family. So from a policy perspective, what are some initiatives that are exciting to you that are helping create legal structures for other kinds of relationships that you're seeing at the state or local level?

There have been efforts on the local level to create domestic partnerships that would not be limited to romantic partners and could have more than two people sign up. So there are a couple of those in Massachusetts. There have been a couple that were proposed in California. I think that you get more benefits if you're operating on the state level rather than the local level, but the symbolic importance of showing that marriage is not the only kind of legal structure that people either want or need to ensure basic rights is an exciting development.

I grew up being really excited about the push for marriage equality and thought that was the point of arrival, to have same-sex marriage. I was completely unaware of the desire of many gay and lesbian legal activists to recognize more types of families. Looking at legal alternatives to marriage I think is really promising, and there are also existing legal structures. I write about one in the book from Colorado that’s particularly interesting because it's not one size fits all. One of the issues with marriage is that people don't even know what they're signing up for, and they entangle themselves in various ways. Colorado has two-page 'designated beneficiary agreement.' You just check off which rights you want to give or receive with another person, and many legal scholars are interested in having that be a kind of template that could be used elsewhere. And I think it would be really desirable for a lot of people, because a lot of Americans don't get wills and they don't assign these sorts of legal rights. Especially if you are not married, who is going to be the person who is making medical decisions on your behalf or will be making end-of-life decisions? And you could just spend very little money to have these rights. You don't necessarily have to go through the expensive legal process of going to a lawyer. This already exists, so you don't have to start from scratch to invent these things as a policymaker.

For friendship and community in general, a hugely important factor is proximity. And several of the friends you profile moved cities together or they changed jobs to move to be with a friend or they bought houses on the same street.

And while many people wouldn't question making real estate or career decisions around a spouse, it is much more unusual, as you just mentioned, to hear that from friends. Why don't we talk about the importance of proximity and relationship building and how can we get people to talk about it more as a quality of life enhancer?

I think people understand that proximity matters when they're making decisions as you described in your own life, moving to be closer to family to have to have that kind of support, And people deal with long-distance relationships. It's not that we don't understand proximity, it's that we’ve decided that only certain relationships are worth making sacrifices for to get the benefits of proximity. And I get it. It's hard enough to find a place to live where it's near your work, where the commuting distance isn't terrible, that you can afford. if you want to be close to family to have that be in the picture and if you're in a romantic partnership that you all can agree upon. There are already a lot of moving parts. Some people don't have those factors in the first place, and yet we still don't tell people, 'When you're deciding where to live, think about friendship.'

What I have seen work first for people is to get to spend time living really close to their friends to live out the benefits of it. A couple of the people I've talked to who run co-living communities have used this as a strategy to get their friends to move. So they'll help them find a cheap place to stay in the community or close by for a month. And because it's so theoretical to people, they don't understand what it means when you run into a friend at breakfast or you can go on an easy walk or your loneliness is not that big of an issue if you're surrounded by people, or having friends pass Children's Tylenol over the balcony when you need it. It's really hard to think about in a really specific granular day-to-day way, both the practical and emotional implications of living really close to your friends.

I love the idea that people can understand it theoretically, but then they need to experience it to be willing to make choices and sacrifices or compromises to make it happen. Also thinking about ways that you can try it out and understand what a future could look like and getting out of our set notions about how we make decisions can be helpful.

Another thing is, we are making real sacrifices by not doing this. Especially if you have people in your life who you feel like you could be compatible with, and this would be wonderful. I think we're not even aware of things that we are giving up.

There's so much focus on what you gain by having your nice home that's really spacious with the trees out front and new appliances. No one’s telling you, ‘In exchange for this, you're going to be really isolated.’ There might be some comments about you having a longer commute or whatever but it's just taken as par for the course that this is a [reasonable] decision that you’d make. If you tell people, ‘I'm going to move next door to my friends,' you might hear, 'But do you want to live in that neighborhood? Is that the layout of the house you want? Is that too small? What are all the things you're giving up?’

People over-weigh all the negatives of making an unusual decision, and they overlook the negatives of a conventional decision.

This was something that came up for me. I got caught in this sort of societal thinking that what you should do at a certain point in your life is to try to buy a home. Even though this was not that important to me. When this opportunity came up to live with the friends that my husband and I now live with, I knew that it would mean that we would spend more on rent to live in a bigger space, and thought that was not a great decision financially, because it would mean we would not be able to buy a home as quickly, wouldn't be able to save as much. My husband said, 'Do we care about buying a home? What are our values?' Once we started talking about community and friendship, it was like, 'Oh, yes, of course, that is the value.' I just am imagining in my head all of the priorities reshuffling. So now, if the floor has a bunch of toys all over it because my housemates haven't had a chance to clean it up yet. I'm like, 'Yeah, I've given up some control over how my space looks, but what is it that I value? What am I getting from this? I'm getting a deep sense of connectedness, a closer relationship with my friends and with their kids, and it just puts in perspective for me the beauty. Some of the things that I have to give up a little bit. But I don't feel resentful over it because I made a decision that was really about my values.

So I was recently at a dinner party and I asked people if they would ever consider some kind of co-living or community communal situation with friends outside of the nuclear family structure.

Everyone at the dinner party was partnered and living in a nuclear family with kids. The feedback I got from people were that they are interested in it, but there is a sort of general sense that this is risky. It felt like it was scary because there aren't models for how you do it and how to even think about the questions to ask to make it work. What needs to happen to make these ideas feel more feasible and less intimidating to people?

I do think having models is really important. That's so much of what the book is about and why I wrote the book as a narrative. It's not was not the think piece equivalent of a book. I want people to be able to inhabit the stories and learn from people who are living this way.

[For an article I’m writing, I interviewed] a couple who now lives next door to two other couples who are their closest friends. I asked them about conflict in the six months that they've been together. They said, ‘Everybody asks about the conflict.’ people say,‘What if something happens? What if things fall apart?’And the couple responds, ‘What if things fall apart in a marriage?’

There are all sorts of relationships that can have a lot of strain, but that's not how people respond to you when you say you got married or you moved into a new house. [People don’t say to newlyweds,] ‘What happens if you break up?’ There's all sorts of potential for things to go south when you are living with or near friends. I think it's reasonable for people to be concerned that you have more people in the mix. Are there more conflicts that can arise, especially when there's no support? But you can also try to get ahead of some of it.

So in both their living setup and then in the one I have [of living with another family who has two children], we had early conversations that were open about what we worried about and what we wanted. One thing that we did in my house was we had a premortem question that we talked about: ‘Imagine it’s a year from now, and we decided this didn't work and we want to disband. Why? What is the most likely reason you think that this would happen?’ You can't operate in the space of thinking, ‘Oh, it's all gonna be so great.’ You have to think about what's going to go wrong, and what could go wrong, and talk it through. So I think there you need to be willing to have those sorts of conversations that are pretty vulnerable and it can be scary, but can surface pain points early on that you can then talk about it.

I think that there are risks inherent to having more people that you're negotiating with, but there are also risks to having fewer people, especially for people who have kids. So much shit happens in day-to-day life, especially when you're caring for multiple beings. They get pink eye, the babysitter gets sick. There are just so many things that happen. And the idea that two people are supposed to absorb all of the stuff that comes up is a really tall order. Having more people around might mean that you have to accommodate some of your differences and their needs, but it also means that they are here when the car breaks down. There is somebody who can drive your kid to school, which is an example that I've heard in two different families.

We don't have good data on any of this, so I can't say for sure what the cost benefit-analysis is, and I think it's going to be really dependent on the personalities of the people involved, how accommodating are they of differences, how able are they to navigate conflict. These are pretty similar to the kinds of skills that you would have in a romantic relationship

I just think that there are unrecognized risks of asking so much of so few adults for so many responsibilities. It's not working for a lot of people. It seems like it might be time to experiment with something different and to see what the pluses and minuses of that arrangement are.

I think you would get an ‘amen, this is not working’ from so many parents who are living in nuclear family situations. No, it's not working, but again, we choose the thing we feel is most comfortable, or we feel like we have the most models for it. We’re also making these personal choices against the backdrop of very little public policy that supports families, so it’s easy to feel trapped alone in the status quo.

It's the devil you know versus the devil you don't. I think that's what it comes down to in a lot of situations.