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

by Rhaina Cohen

She also cared for me as no other friend had, blending the ebullience of a fairy godmother with the occasional eat-your-vegetables entreaty of an actual mother.

I knew that I was her person, too. On a couple of nights when she was having a hard time, I went to her house and held her.

David, the future king of Israel, bound himself by covenant to his friend Jonathan “because he loved him as his own soul.”

Up until that point, M had been a bigger day-to-day presence in my life than Marco was. He was getting his Ph.D. at a school that’s a six-hour train ride away from D.C., and we saw each other every other weekend. Marco was glad I had found someone who quickly gave me a feeling of rootedness in my new city and whose company he enjoyed, too.

Marriage doesn’t have to rank above friendship. Love doesn’t automatically involve lust. Romantic and platonic feelings aren’t always easy to distinguish.

“And if you think at any point that this isn’t going to be my number one, you’re wrong.”

In the years since then, through relocations and romantic relationships and children and the pandemic, they’ve talked almost every day. “Tilly knows inside and out every detail, every secret, everything about me. Everything,” Kami says. Whether or not Tilly was in a romantic relationship, Tilly would first go to Kami to talk about something tough—“consulting with the Oracle,” as she calls it.

romantic partner is supposed to be the one-stop shop where we can meet the full spectrum of our practical and psychological needs. For a lot of people, that now includes the role of best friend.

Marriage hasn’t always been under this pressure. In past centuries, people did not expect their spouse to be their passionate lover and best friend, all in one package.

The term boot camp besties captures how the friendship started, but not how it had reached the level of intensity it now had. During those years in Oklahoma, the friendship entered a new category. Kami and Tilly were together constantly. Kami followed Tilly’s suggestion to switch to a college that was closer to her; they took all the same classes so that they could share textbooks and save money. Kami had recently ended her relationship with her controlling boyfriend,

“Our boyfriends, our significant others, and our husbands are supposed to be number one,” Kami told me. “Our worlds are backwards.” Eventually, she started dating a man, Rawley Brenton, who reacted differently.

Because they have each other, they don’t need to worry that if they’re not in a romantic relationship, no one will be involved in the intricacies of their lives. And because their friendship already provides so much, they don’t think it’s necessary to find everything in one partner.

Toly applied to transfer to Harvard, where he would be able to work in the same lab as Andrew.

They found an existing framework—non-monogamy—

“partner”—the same term Andrew and Nevena used for each other.

platonic life partner.

Toly will gladly answer questions people have about the friendship, he prefers not to volunteer information about it.

“The friendship isn’t based on whether or not I get something,” she said. “It’s more, does this feel right?”

“But for me it’s like, oh no, I just want to pour more in your cup because I have lots in my cup,” she said.

She thinks it’s too much to ask one person—whether a romantic partner or a friend—to meet every need.

Who were the three people you felt most attracted to in your life?

Of the eighty women she interviewed who were lesbian, bisexual, or didn’t label their sexual orientation, seventy said they’d had a platonic friendship as emotionally intense as a romantic relationship. These “passionate friendships,”

inseparability, cuddling, hand-holding, and preoccupation.

Some researchers see attachment as the second stage of romantic love, the first being infatuation,

They started to say they were the “same soul” or “same person.”

The image of those adjacent houses would become an emblem of the community of friends Stacey, Grace, and Caroline

“family resemblance.” Think of a family portrait where people don’t look identical

“As we sat there eating dumplings that night,” the groom said, “I could see a whole future for us together.” Stacey has stopped thinking of sex as the defining factor for who will make up the “us” when they picture their future.

The notion that marriage’s primary purpose is to build an intense romantic or emotional connection, he believes, leads to more instability in the relationship and therefore for children. Wilcox’s reason: spouses can justify dissolving the relationship if they don’t feel emotionally satisfied; it’s a relatively easy out.

Wilcox advocates for an older, “family-first” model, which, he writes, provides an environment that “will be stronger, more stable, and more likely to offer a secure harbor for children.” His motivation for reducing the significance of romantic love differs from Natasha and Lynda’s. A vocal proponent of the nuclear family, Wilcox hopes to encourage marriage and prevent divorce and single parenthood.

eros. She asserts that what should matter is a parent’s demonstration of agape—self-sacrificing love—for the child.

The court had declared Lynda Elaan’s parent, the first time platonic co-parents were recognized in Canadian history. Lynda fell to her knees.

Parenting was often handled by people other than biological parents, known as alloparents. The anthropologist Sarah Hrdy writes, “Without alloparents, there never would have been a human species.”

She bought the condo directly above Natasha’s, and she and Natasha called themselves “vertical neighbors.”

But she became concerned about a factor outside of her control: What would happen if Natasha ended up in a romantic relationship and wanted to move?

Natasha connected Lynda to a friend of a friend, Justine, who was moving to Ottawa from France and needed a place to live.

But they found that Justine enjoyed spending time with them and with Elaan.

Having three adults means not only three bodies and three incomes but three skill sets and temperaments, three approaches to vexing challenges.

Others had banked on raising kids with a romantic partner but didn’t end up in that kind of relationship. Tens of thousands of people have turned to sites like Modamily and CoParents that match them with other people who want to have a child with someone else but not necessarily be in a romantic relationship with them.

Many platonic partners say their relationship is stabler than a romantic relationship because they aren’t visited by the storms that accompany romance

Of the unmarried mothers who were surveyed, 58 percent reported that they would consider raising children with someone other than a spouse or romantic partner.

“I grew up thinking that … if somebody has a need, you fill that need,” Inez says. “There’s never a question, ‘Should I do this?’”

More than fifty years ago, Inez and Barb met each other after veering away from marriage, and their friendship has in turn helped them avoid some of that standard path’s pitfalls.

“It seems like when we’re younger, we’re searching,” Inez says. “We’re searching for ourselves and what our inner core is and what’s important to us. I think then as you get older, you’ve established those things.” Once you know yourself and what you need to be content, Inez thinks, it may be easier to share a home. And, Barb says, people are less judgmental as they age because “we’ve all seen enough, done enough,

Barb gravitated toward all the mothers at the office, noticing the warmth in their voices when they talked about their families and the interest they showed in each other’s children.

In 1971, a psychologist she knew there told her he had the perfect job for her, and not long after that, Barb drove down with her mom to look for a house.

In Phoenix, they moved into Barb’s house, a concrete box with a light green façade and surrounded by eight grapefruit trees. For months, Barb’s house was Inez’s home base as she assembled her family’s new life.

After staying with Barb for about six months, Inez and her kids moved into a house around the corner. It was a yellow house with a big backyard, and she christened it “the Mustard Seed.”

Even in separate homes, they continued to treat one another like family. While Barb recovered from a surgery, Inez brought her meals for several weeks. Barb would host the boys and shuttle them around the city when Inez had work trips. One spring, Barb came down with the stomach flu and was out of commission for weeks. Scott walked into her room, and Barb told him to call his mom because she was going to be sick. Instead, thirteen-year-old Scott found a dishpan in the bathroom and ran back to hold it by Barb’s bedside as she vomited. Then he wiped off Barb’s face with a washcloth. “People have to really love you when they do that, especially a young boy,” Barb told me.

Barb says she grew up understanding that “anybody can be family given the right circumstances.”