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

by Rhaina Cohen

You can part ways with a monogamous romantic partner believing they’re a wonderful person, but you simply weren’t compatible enough to wake up next to each other for the rest of your lives; it’s more disheartening when someone drops you as one of their many friends, as if you’d failed to pass a much less demanding test.

Though Joy could see the end, Hannah never admitted that she was dying, never broached the topic of death with Joy, never signed a do-not-resuscitate order. Hannah had just bought an annual pass to the arboretum, thinking she’d get good use out of it. Joy would later see that Hannah’s reaction wasn’t so unusual; Joy’s father also never accepted that he was dying.

After the meeting, the nurse took Hannah’s mother and Joy into the hallway outside the apartment and said, “You do understand that Hannah is so sick she has maybe a few days left?” Yes, they said. “I felt like I was betraying Hannah because all I ever did was support her in every treatment option,” Joy says. “I didn’t want her to know that I believed she was close to death with zero realistic options to stop it.”

Joy thinks it’s unfair that she could have taken time off to attend the funeral of her dad’s brother, whom she’d never met, but not to mourn Hannah’s death.

“I’m sad because my human’s gone,” Joy says, her face reddened. “The person who chose to love me unconditionally isn’t here anymore. And I don’t think I’ll ever have that again for the rest of my life.” She brushes a tissue underneath each lens of her teal glasses. “I can’t believe the world still spins when she’s not here,” she says.

“I feel like I can’t let it go because if I do, I’m letting her go. I want to think about her every single day. I want to remember her every day and celebrate her every day.”

During Joy’s treatment, a college friend who was also close with Hannah sent Joy soap to ease her radiation burns and a card that read, “I know the person you want most to be here, especially through tough times, isn’t.” With that comment, Joy at least felt that someone understood the gravity of what she had lost.

If we stop expecting relationships to come to a decisive end, Barker explains in Rewriting the Rules: An Anti Self-Help Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships, “it becomes possible to change one of these aspects [housemate, sexual intimacy, supporters in times of crisis] without necessarily changing all of the others.

Unlike many romantic relationships that operate with an on-off switch—you’re either each other’s number one or absent from each other’s lives—our friendship is more like a dimmer that can easily be adjusted.

As I became less attached to the early years of our friendship, I found that my relationship with M has acted as a lighthouse, illuminating which friends I should try to become closer to.

Though I would readily return to seeing M most days of the week if it were possible, I’ve come to view the first couple of years of our friendship as a point in history to appreciate rather than long to revive,

Barker’s idea to think of exes “as the people we’ve reached the height of intimacy with … Perhaps we can view these people as the most valuable and precious relationships in our lives, instead of hating them or relegating them to the past.”

Being with M reacquaints me with the version of myself that I like best:

When I spend time with M, I can still feel a current of bittersweet feelings, like a draft invading a heated room.

Joy joked about the two of them having drinks together fifty years later, with blue wash in their hair. “I miss that future,”

Joy no longer takes for granted that she’s been chosen, a fundamental feeling so many of us seek in partnerships of any kind. “I just feel so much less special now,” Joy says. “I don’t have this human being who every day wanted to talk to me and smiled when they saw me.”

Soon enough, Amelie and Joan saw each other as chosen family. Joan already had known Amelie’s partner, Licia, for years. In 2000, Licia found Joan a house to buy on the same block as them.

When the divorce proceedings came around, Joan was Amelie’s obvious choice as the witness. Besides her long-standing role as a member of the family, Joan, Amelie says, had been a “huge source of support”

The judge asked Joan, “Is there no chance of reconciliation?” and Amelie silently balked because she took “reconciliation” to be a euphemism for resuming a sexual relationship—according to Maryland law, a separation is only valid if the spouses lived in separate homes without “sexual relations” for twelve months. The question felt paternalistic to her. “I get to have sex with my ex-partner if I want to,” Amelie says. “I mean, honestly. Why does the judge of the state of Maryland have to ask that question?”

The Obergefell ruling undeniably broadened popular definitions of family and fostered greater acceptance of LGBTQ Americans. But the Court’s opinion simultaneously entrenched the importance of marriage above all other relationships.

He worried the judge would tell him he’d broken the law. The ease of getting married, in contrast to the expense and intrusiveness of getting divorced, convinced Anne that “marriage is really about property.” It was also not the ideal legal structure for their friendship.

Terry said that by forming a family with Anne, “absolutely everything I dreamed of I got”

Barb’s discomfort reflects the dual nature of legal marriage: it is both a status and a contract.

Sure, friends could decide to enter a “platonic marriage.” But siblings who function as life partners cannot get married and call it a “sibling marriage”;

Essentially, marriage was a microcosmic welfare state, a unit where men and women exchanged not only wedding bands but caregiving and financial support. And as the sole acceptable venue for sex and procreation, both culturally and legally, marriage made sense for the state to encourage; otherwise, society might overflow with adulterers, “fornicators” (the term for people who engaged in the then illegal act of premarital sex), and “illegitimate” children.

“The stakes of marital supremacy are higher than ever as marriage becomes the province of the privileged.” That’s because the benefits heaped on married couples exacerbate the inequality between people who are married and those who are not.

Hamilton says marriage is a “ham-handed” proxy for caregiving and economic dependence and calls on the state to support those functions directly.

The courts that ruled in the parental rights cases outlined in chapter 5 used similar reasoning; they determined who a parent was not by the structure of the family but by the role the person played: Did the adult in question act as a parent? It’s the legal equivalent of deciding not to judge a book by its cover but by its content.

Amelie decided on the term “non-romantic life partner.”

Since then, they soured on the description “non-romantic” because it defines the relationship by what’s absent, and, besides, like Stacey in chapter 3, they see elements of romance in their friendship. They’ve opted for the term “friendship love.”

Polikoff, the law professor and advocate, suggests a simple way to provide legal protection to nonmarital relationships: create a registry to designate a default decision-maker, much like an emergency contact form. When people get a license or register to vote, they could mark down their designated person.

American law is an outdated map of the real-life landscape of relationships. We live in a time when sex doesn’t have to lead to procreation, procreation can happen without sex, and marriage is far less pervasive and permanent than it used to be.

But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option?”—these friendships offer an emphatic answer: absolutely not.

Maybe you’ll be mesmerized by someone standing across the room at a bar and, soon enough, learn that there are more forms of love than you’d been told about. One model of a fulfilling adulthood is not enough to accommodate the scene and character changes in the long drama of our lives.

“If we’re not careful, we do to friendship what other people do to romance: we idolize it, and we expect it to fill all our needs.” I often interviewed a pair of friends only to learn that there’s a third friend who is just as important or that the pair is embedded in a group of friends. Amelie emphasized her community because she didn’t want me to imply that she and Joan were all that mattered in each other’s lives, replacing one kind of privileged dyad with another.

Laws that focus on the function rather than the form of a relationship could equalize the rights of married and unmarried people.

We’d need movies and TV shows and books that are driven by a platonic—not romantic—plot, like on Insecure and Broad City and Booksmart,

The only kind of relationship available to a married person that had previously occurred to her was an affair. She has no interest in that kind of spark. Having learned that friendship once stretched far beyond our contemporary definition, this professor now knows that platonic relationships can offer the flash of excitement and depth of connection she craves.

We know it’s possible for someone to vault, in a matter of months, from being a stranger who sends us flirtatious emojis on a dating app to the first person we want to hold us when our eyes are swollen from crying. Though it may sound too dramatic to admit to, on a first date, many of us are tacitly evaluating whether we could fall in love with the person sitting across from us or imagine building a life with them.

But when we’re getting to know a new friend, we’re not taught to extrapolate to a shared future. We’re also not taught to expose as much of ourselves as we do in romantic relationships.

“If you’re talking about your friendship, you’re trying too hard.”

If we feel emotional distance in friendships, we may attribute those feelings to the limitations of friendship rather than ask whether our expectations got in the way.

When M and I lived a five-minute walk from each other, our friendship accelerated and intensified because it was so easy to live life side by side.

three “magic ingredients” of attachment: time, togetherness, and touch.

He asked me how much we cared about buying a home soon. Was it just a default next step? He pointed out how special an opportunity this was, to live with these particular friends at this stage of their child’s life.

had absorbed the idea that it’s worth making sacrifices to pursue a career and nurture certain relationships—romantic partners, parents, children—but I’d left friends off that list.

One owner declined to even show us his apartment because he didn’t think it was suitable for “two families.”

Over Shabbat lunch one Saturday, we discussed answers to a set of questions Marco had sent us, modeled off premarital counseling he and I had done with a rabbi. He included a “premortem” question—the opposite of a postmortem; we’d

And yet the space between my housemates and me has narrowed because I’ve witnessed their marriage in the mundane but intimate ways that we’re rarely privy to for relationships other than our own.

A few years ago, Naomi and Daniel had been sketches to me, and I to them. Now, we have detailed portraits.