Rhaina Cohen offers a take on friendship as the most enduring gold
In her book “The Other Significant Others,” Rhaina Cohen explores the power of platonic love, of friendship bonds that are often stronger and more lasting than marriages.
The idea came from Cohen’s own deep friendship with M., a non-romantic relationship that coexists with Cohen’s marriage and other social ties. “The friendship was causing me to look around in a new way and start to question the way that we think about the limitations of what friendship can be,” she says, especially “the hierarchy that places romantic love on top.”
It was once more common, Cohen points out, for people to express their deep love for their samesex, platonic friends. In past centuries, “a man sharing a bed with a man, or women sharing locks of hair,” didn’t attract attention or judgment.
“People in the past did not assume that in order to love someone you needed to lust after them,” she adds.
As marriage grew from a mostly pragmatic and financial arrangement to one in which we’re encouraged to seek our soulmates, Cohen says, it has tended to crowd out other deep relationships. As a result, “platonic love is limited and often diminished. There’s not that much room for friendship when marriage takes up such a large space.”
Cohen, an NPR podcast producer and editor, explored the idea by seeking out people whose friendships were a primary and crucial relationship in their lives. It took some digging to find them — “there’s no name for them, it’s sort of societally invisible” — and some effort to convince them to talk. “People felt that this very important relationship in their life was misunderstood, and that there were consequences to it being misunderstood,” she says.
Ultimately, though, people opened up because they felt their stories could help others. After all, in a world in which many marriages end in divorce and increasing numbers of adults marry late or not at all, “we need more kinds of models for how we find fulfillment,” Cohen says. And in a world in which we need all the love and connection we can get, she goes on, “I would like people to expand their imaginations for what’s possible for their own lives, and also what they find acceptable for other people’s lives.” Rhaina Cohen will be in conversation with Rebecca Traister at 7 p.m. Friday, March 15, at Harvard Book Store.
Kate Tuttle is a freelance writer and editor.