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

by Rhaina Cohen

Scott, then stationed in Pearl Harbor, had suffered a heart attack while out on a run. He was just thirty-seven years old. Scott had requested that if anything ever happened to him in the navy, the commanding officer should call Barb first. Sharing the news with Inez, Barb says, was “probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Later, Inez got a call from her ex, who said, “Well, Inez, I don’t know what to say.” “You know, that probably was the whole crux of the problem with our whole relationship. You never knew what to say,” Inez replied. He was distant at all the wrong times. He told her, “Have a good day,” and hung up.

Barb wondered, What’s going to happen to me? The question Barb asked herself is increasingly pressing for many Americans, who now live longer and frequently suffer from chronic illnesses that require years of caregiving.

“elder orphans,” “solo agers,” or “kinless.”

Sharing a house would allow them to live in the setting they preferred, which is hardly a given for older adults.

Silvernest,

Nesterly, teamed up with the City of Boston to run an intergenerational roommate matching service, connecting older adults who have extra space in their homes with younger people who need affordable rent.

The story followed five women who bought a big house together after their husbands died.

They called this community on the Llano River in Texas the “Llano exit strategy”; the press dubbed it “Bestie Row.”

In a video viewed nearly four million times, a group of Chinese friends show off the mansion they renovated to live in once they retire.

three Australian couples in their sixties who had a house built for them and called themselves “the Shedders.” One of the Shedders wrote in The Guardian, “We’ve made a long-term commitment to each other … Even though we are not biologically related, we have each other’s backs in the way a functional family does.”

Inez and Barb’s could be the “wave of the future” for two reasons: many older adults will need a form of support other than a nuclear family,

caregiving between friends has the appeal of being egalitarian, unlike a parent-child relationship, where the older person may feel like a burden.

“There you go again, back to poor Rick.” The implication was that Barb and Inez would weigh down family, but they wouldn’t feel like burdens if they took care of each other.

in the middle of the night, she called out for Barb in pain. Even though Inez left her door open when she slept and their bedrooms shared a wall, Barb didn’t hear her. The next day, they agreed that Inez would put a bell by her bed—the same bell her mom used to summon the family to dinner.

People may not jump to the conclusion that older friends are in a sexual relationship or scrutinize them for deprioritizing romance.

We weren’t in the lusty teens,” she says. (He died unexpectedly, so their relationship was brief.) “What I felt with him was the same that I felt with Barb. I always felt that we had an honesty in our relationship. And a kindness.” Theirs was a “peaceful relationship,” like her friendship with Barb.

Barb and Inez deliberately go to the same primary care doctor, someone who can make sure that the friends are aware of each other’s needs.

They’re neither annoyed nor bored by the familiarity they have for each other.

“Obviously, we know each other’s stories,” Barb said. She looked at Inez: “I know where you’re going.”

Ann was on the carpeted floor of her living room, curled in a fetal position and crying. Ann said she knew the doctor was going to tell her she had cancer. Barb and Inez were able to coax Ann into sitting up. Ann said she had no family whatsoever. No siblings or kids. She was divorced. Her parents weren’t alive, and they were both only children,

Barb and Inez hadn’t known any of this; before that day, they had only had a couple of lunch dates together. They promised Ann they wouldn’t let her go through treatment alone.

For the next three years, they fielded phone calls from Ann’s doctors, took her to her surgeries, and saw her through radiation treatment. They made sure she had the best quality of life possible.

When an administrator announced that Ann would have to move to a smaller room, she protested,

Inez pushed, and the administrator checked on the insurance policy. She came back and said Ann could stay in the room as long as she wanted to.

Around 9:00 p.m., Barb and Inez headed home, and two hours later, they got a call: Ann had quietly slipped away. Her fear that she would end life alone hadn’t come to pass.

By caring for Ann, Inez and Barb softened the edges of their friend’s illness and her upsetting confrontation with mortality. Barb and Inez’s willingness to care for each other and their friends initially struck me as exceptionally generous, but I discovered it is not that exceptional.

According to a study from 2010, LGBT baby boomers were more likely than the general population sample of baby boomers to have cared for a friend in the last six months, were twice as likely to have involved friends in discussions about their end-of-life preferences, were more likely to live with friends, and were four times as likely to have a friend as a caregiver.

queer friends have long become chosen family—often because they’ve been rejected by their families of origin. This sense of kinship was particularly evident during the AIDS epidemic.

One study found that one-third of chronically ill people being cared for by a friend had children who did not provide help.

During her hospital stay, Inez was diagnosed with critical heart failure.

Barb and Inez feel sure that Rick would step in if either friend dies before the other. But neither of them wanted to place caregiving entirely at his feet, consigning him to spend the prime of his life taking care of them. Barb and Inez looked into assisted-living options.

Over the years, friends of Inez and Barb’s, especially single women, have said that they would have liked to have a similar arrangement; one friend expressed regret that she didn’t have a friend she trusted enough to live with.

After COVID began, these notes of envy became a chorus. Widowed and divorced friends confined to compact assisted-living apartments told Barb and Inez that they longed for companionship.

she and Barb “realized how important it is to share a home with someone who will take care of you and doesn’t find that a burden.”

They can talk openly about how they’re feeling. They each know that the other will gladly deliver a heating pad and hot tea to her bedside.

Now Barb will check whether she’s okay doing it herself or wants help. Barb, whose instinctive reaction to recipes is “blah blah blah,” now cooks alongside Inez; her chopping job, Inez raves, is better than what a Cuisinart can do. Barb reminds Inez to turn off the hose if she forgets, and Inez reminds Barb to take her medication. Barb has told Inez, “Help me with this, but don’t help me too much, because what if the day comes, you’re not here, and I need to be responsible for myself, too.” Until that day comes, they plan to continue enjoying a life, together, in their hermitage.

My desire for touch feels insatiable. Maybe I didn’t know what I was missing—in the same way that my sex drive was abstract until I had actually experienced sex—but now I know how good it feels.” Forced to live without M’s copious physical affection, I understood that our friendship had brought me a form of fullness I’d never had before. I also understood that, with us living so far apart, I was unlikely to feel that fullness anytime soon.

I scaled back the frequency of my contact to match hers because I didn’t want to bother her.

It was such a departure from the period in our friendship when it was clear that we completely fascinated each other.

That was one of the things I most appreciated about being so close to M: the knowledge that someone who I thought the world of always wanted to be with me or talk to me—and never feeling like I was asking for more than she wanted to give.

I had wanted her to assure me that we could make decisions to return to that earlier way of life. I thought we could prioritize each other by living close by or scheduling regular time to be together. If we didn’t do so, it felt like we were admitting that we weren’t all that important to each other.

I was coming to terms with the possibility that we weren’t going to have the sort of lives where we made impromptu visits to each other’s houses, where I knew her thoughts so intimately that she was a shadow mind, handing me ideas even when she wasn’t in the room.

romantic breakups are devastating because you lose at least two things at the same time: an existing intimate relationship and a joint future you had imagined.

As I interviewed friends who remained committed to each other for years or decades, who regularly went on vacations together and scheduled “date nights,” I knew that my current friendship with M didn’t belong to the same genre as theirs.

evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, the inner ring of our social circles usually contains five “shoulder-to-cry-on friendships,” but a romantic relationship takes up “two rations,”

“Well, it’s like in life—you have the variables and you have the invariables, and you want to use them all, but you work around the invariables. I thought you were an invariable—and then you left without saying a word.”

But I also wanted the permission to be effusive, the feeling of being chosen, the access to someone with a dazzling mind.

What I felt wasn’t so different from what my brother described in the aftermath of a yearslong romantic relationship. He missed his partner in particular, but he also missed everyday pleasures like waking up next to someone—the infrastructure of a romantic relationship. My friendship with M had shown me a new form of intimacy and altered my expectations for what constitutes a full life.

The Friend Who Got Away write that compared to romantic relationships, “friendship is supposed to be made of sturdier stuff, a less complicated, more enduring relationship.