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

by Rhaina Cohen

The richest relationships are often those that don’t fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives—the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse … We then must either stretch ourselves to create new slots shaped after these singular relationships, enduring the growing pains of self-expansion, or petrify. —MARIA POPOVA

compulsory coupledom: the notion that a long-term monogamous romantic relationship is necessary for a normal, successful adulthood.

“When we channel all our intimate needs into one person,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel writes, “we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.” Such totalizing expectations for romantic relationships can leave us with no shock absorber if a partner falls short in even one area. While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.

It can be confusing to live in the gulf between the life you have and the life you believe you’re supposed to be living.

It’s uncontroversial to argue that many Americans need a thicker web of relationships. And yet, the cultural ideal continues to treat a single romantic relationship as the key to fulfillment.

From our first encounter with Disney movies and rom-coms, we’re taught to fantasize about finding our soulmate, who, in psychologist Bella DePaulo’s words, we also expect to be our sole mate. A 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. Whereas, in the past, the overlapping features of marriage and friendship equalized different types of relationships, the spouse-is-my-best-friend phenomenon feels like hoarding; spouses, who are already in a place of honor, get to claim the top title in another relationship category. This privileging of romantic relationships can make them feel compulsory. Singleness might not carry the same stigma as it did just decades ago, especially for women. And yet, like Paula from the introduction, we may have internalized the message that we’re missing something fundamental if we’re not in a romantic relationship. Language like my other half suggests that you only graduate to being a full human once you have a romantic partner. At the same time, the one-stop-shopping ideal sets unrealistic standards, setting the stage for disappointment. (Dating apps probably don’t help, as they give the impression that someone better is only a swipe away.) These two relationship ideals can push in opposite directions: the urge to find our “other half” can lead us to jump into romantic relationships while the one-s...

On the whole, a diverse relationship portfolio makes for more satisfying romantic relationships. A 2015 study led by psychologist Elaine Cheung found that people who disperse their emotional needs across multiple relationships are happier than those who concentrate their needs in fewer.

In this setup, prospective partners must sidestep the typical trajectory for romantic relationships—what’s been called “the relationship escalator.” This term refers to the expectation that a couple in a “serious” relationship should ramp up their commitment and entwinement, becoming exclusive and accumulating roles of confidant, roommate, co-homeowner, co-parent, caregiver, default plus-one. Like an escalator, these expectations have a momentum of their own.

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,” as Lisa called them, were far more likely than conventional friendships to include thoughts and behaviors associated with romantic relationships, including inseparability, cuddling, hand-holding, and preoccupation. For some of the women, the friendships were laced with sexual desire. But for a lot of them—as in Lisa’s case—the friendship dwelled in what Lisa describes as an “in-between world”: it was too involved to be a standard friendship, but their passion couldn’t be explained by suppressed sexual longing.

In a study from 1979, 61 percent of women and 35 percent of men reported having experienced love without a desire for sex. Thirty years later, 76 percent of the people who responded to a survey agreed with the statement that “true love can exist without a radiant/active sex life.” A study from the 1980s of young people likewise found that infatuation—often understood as a key part of romantic love—need not involve sexual desire. If they were inextricable, children who haven’t gone through puberty shouldn’t be able to experience infatuation.

That is what all humans want, is to feel that someone else puts them first. And although in our modern context, that’s usually a sexual partner, the attachment system doesn’t give a flying fig” about sex.

She thought there was another conclusion to draw: Look at all my people. I have so much love in my life. When her friend asked her how she could have room for a romantic partner, Grace said, “I don’t know, but I’m happy. Isn’t that the main goal?”

To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight. —E. E. CUMMINGS

American men still, by and large, aren’t supposed to get too cozy with other men if they want to fit in. By adolescence, boys learn that their repertoire for physical affection with each other is limited to back slaps and side hugs. They’re trained to act competitively within their male friendships, and they’re expected to bond over activities, not shared intimacies. Working on this book, I saw how men’s friendships get scrutinized differently from women’s.

“Just because I’m uncomfortable doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

“Ivy plants will always follow whatever trellis you give them,” he says. “But if they don’t have a trellis, they look for light.” He continues, “I think that a lot of us follow a societal trellis that is not actually ideal for who we are and what helps us thrive … Because there was no trellis, we got to create a relationship and a life that is really uniquely beautiful for us.

At a certain point in life, you’re not only freed of others’ judgment but of your own.

According to an earlier AARP survey, the number of adults age fifty and older who share their homes grew from 2 percent in 2014 to 16 percent in 2018. Among the people I’ve interviewed, affordability—along with a desire for companionship—drove older friends to live together.

Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Boston University, says that living arrangements like 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, and there is a persistent paid-caregiver shortage in the United States. (Low pay and difficult working conditions for nursing assistants and home health aides contribute to the high turnover in those fields.) She also points out that caregiving between friends has the appeal of being egalitarian, unlike a parent-child relationship, where the older person may feel like a burden.

Friendship plays a significant role in the mental and physical well-being of older adults, and several studies suggest that friendship plays a more significant role than marriage. A study from 1987 found that different types of relationships affect health differently depending on people’s ages. People under sixty were at greater risk of dying earlier if they weren’t married. But that wasn’t the case for people over sixty; close relationships with friends and relatives had more sway than marriage. A study published thirty years later, based on a survey of hundreds of thousands of people, similarly found that friendships become more predictive of mortality as people age and marriage relatively less so. People who valued friendship were healthier and happier across their lives, and those effects were particularly strong for older adults. By reducing loneliness, friendships ward off the host of negative physical and mental health effects that cascade from loneliness.

Friends make up a considerable portion of caregivers. A 2020 AARP survey found that 10 percent of caregivers for adults were providing care to a friend or neighbor. Caregiving between friends is especially common in LGBT circles. 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. The social scientists Anna Muraco and Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen interviewed lesbian, gay, and bisexual caregivers, who reported that they often viewed providing care as a natural extension of their friendship, not as an extraordinary act. There are several explanations for the disproportionate caregiving among queer friends: queer friends have long become chosen family

the kind of loss I was experiencing—one that had no definitive end—is, as a rule, difficult to manage. Pauline Boss, professor emerita at the University of Minnesota, coined a term for this: “ambiguous loss.” Ambiguity, rather than alleviating the sense of loss, can make the coping process more complicated. Without a well-defined conclusion like death or divorce, loved ones may not realize they should step in to help. The loss may not even be clear to the person who’s experienced it; a mourner needs to know there’s something to grieve before she can start the grieving process. Ambiguous loss can lead to “frozen grief”—Boss’s term for being ensnared in sadness.

Together, M and I had built a frame that marked the perimeter of our specific relationship, in an unconventional shape no one had told us we could make. We delighted in that discovery. When our friendship changed, I felt like I had lost the frame we had constructed and the person it contained. For a short while, I considered whether those losses were inextricable or if I could separate them. It was M I wanted: her incisive questions, her gentle voice singing jazz standards as she padded through the house. 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. Those expectations weren’t elastic that could be stretched and then contract back to their original shape.

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. Which ones aren’t working anymore? Which ones still are?” 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.

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, like treasuring a memory from a vacation without expecting to return to the spot years later and find everything intact. I would never use the term ex to describe M, but I nevertheless recognized my own experience in 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.” Valuable and precious is exactly how I think of my friendship with M. Just in the first couple of years of knowing her, she reshaped my understanding of platonic relationships and expanded my sense of who I could be.

I felt a blend of nostalgia for our early friendship, annoyance with myself for still pining for the past, and disappointment for what the future won’t hold. While working on the book, I learned there was a clinical term for this pain about a lost future: intrapsychic grief, which the hospital chaplain and writer J.S. Park describes as “grieving what could have been and will never be.” Like reading about romantic friendships and sworn brotherhoods from earlier centuries, seeing this term assured me that my reactions weren’t over-the-top. I’ve felt this form of grief, though with less intensity, when I’ve grown apart from childhood friends or friends who moved away.

American law codifies an imbalance between married and unmarried Americans. Among the more than one thousand federal rights and benefits afforded to married couples are: getting access to each other’s employer-provided health care; making a foreign-born spouse eligible for a green card; passing any amount of money or property on to each other tax-free; collecting unemployment upon leaving a job to join their spouse who’s been relocated; filing a lawsuit for their spouse’s wrongful death; and refusing to testify against their spouse in a criminal case. Serena Mayeri, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, calls the legal privileging of marriage and families formed by married couples “marital supremacy.”

platonic marriage as a symptom of our limited legal landscape: “That’s what’s going to happen if there’s only one thing”—marriage—“that has the name that gets this full panoply of rights and recognition.” Friends who opt for wedlock, hoping to remake it in their image, take a gamble.

Marriage also doesn’t help Americans who have a constellation of important people in their lives but not a single partnership. Many types of committed relationships simply don’t fit the mold of marriage.

In the mid-twentieth century, marital status determined eligibility for a growing slate of public benefits. The assumption was that husbands and wives were interdependent, and the state stepped in to encourage their mutual support or replace it once that support was gone. For instance, by offering widows Social Security benefits, the state effectively filled in for a lost breadwinner. In a society where matrimony was ubiquitous, marital status was an easy way to decide who got public assistance.

The 1996 act now known as “welfare reform” begins with these words: “The Congress makes the following findings: (1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” The law also makes an economic case for boosting marriage, explaining that a key reason for overhauling welfare policy is to “end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage.” More marriages mean fewer people on government rolls. These claims should give us pause. The idea that marriage will solve poverty has historically been fraught with racism; the infamous unmarried “welfare queen” invoked in politics and media was invariably a Black or Latina mother. The implication was that if only these women married—creating a private welfare state of two—they wouldn’t be poor, effectively absolving the government from assisting Americans who are economically disadvantaged or of color.

Instead of focusing on the form a relationship takes, many legal scholars suggest looking at the function it serves. Vivian Hamilton, a professor at William & Mary Law School, argues that the state has an interest in two core functions: caregiving and economic support. She asks, “Why should [the government] privilege one form of companionate relationship over others that may serve the same societal functions?” Hamilton says marriage is a “ham-handed” proxy for caregiving and economic dependence and calls on the state to support those functions directly.

There are two main approaches for reducing the current inequities between marital and nonmarital relationships: create a legal alternative to marriage and strip marriage down to its essentials.

In the late 2000s, Colorado state senator Pat Steadman wanted to design a legal structure that was more customizable than marriage and which extended rights to any two adults, regardless of the kind of relationship they had. Steadman said, “We didn’t want the designated beneficiary law to make the same discriminatory choices as the marriage code.” Beginning in 2009, Coloradans have been able to register for a designated beneficiary agreement by filling out a two-page form that lists rights in sixteen categories, mostly related to health and finances. Unlike marriage, the designated beneficiary agreement uses an à la carte model; the two people can choose to grant or withhold each of the rights, and rights don’t have to be assigned reciprocally. If a father and son were to register, the father could make his son his health care proxy, but the son doesn’t have to designate the father. It’s simple and inexpensive, covering many of the core rights that are part of a costly estate-planning process.

A legal alternative to marriage that carried important rights would likely tap into a significant, unmet need, including for couples in romantic relationships. California offers a preview because of what happened when it lifted restrictions on who could enter domestic partnerships—first, in 2002, opening up domestic partnerships to different-sex couples in which only one partner was over sixty-two, and then in 2020, allowing different-sex couples of any age. After each change, the number of people who filed for domestic partnerships spiked. Straight couples were among them.

Marital status determines whether Americans are eligible for an enormous range of benefits, and Polikoff suggests running an inventory. She says, “Ideally, I would take every single law that makes marriage the dividing line between who’s in and who’s out of the law, ask the question: Why does this law exist? What is its purpose? What is it trying to accomplish?” Then she would adjust the law so it achieves its purpose without using marriage as the deciding factor. “And you can do that for every single law,” she says. Polikoff rattled off a long list of relevant areas of the law, including zoning, rent control, taxes, house deeds, decisions about medical care and burial, and inheritance.

By giving rights to nonmarital relationships, the state could bolster their stability and offer people greater freedom in their private lives.

Nancy Cott, a history professor at Harvard University, writes in her book Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation that the legal institution of marriage defines “the realm of cognitive possibility for individuals.” Extending legal rights beyond a monogamous, conjugal relationship could make it easier for people to imagine finding companionship in other types of relationships. This expansion of possibilities could especially benefit Americans who aren’t married or living with a romantic partner and who constitute nearly 40 percent of Americans ages twenty-five to fifty-four.

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. Amid all this change, the solutions still have decades-old dust on them, waiting to be cleared off.

The expectations of modern romance risk narrowing the scope of our imaginations, making us believe that romantic relationships are our sole legitimate option, that we must find everything we need in one person, leaving little room to picture others as potential significant others. But romantic relationships are not the only unions that can shape our lives. Much like spouses, the friends featured in this book act as a unit. They share money, homes, and a private language of shorthand. They take care of each other without hesitation, relish each other’s brightest moments, and commemorate their friendship. They transform each other: Kami gained the confidence to expect more of a romantic partner and her life; Nick learned to parse his feelings and what mattered to him; Joan realized it was okay to depend on other people. These friends are each other’s invariables.

Like most one-size-fits-all items, the single model of romantic coupledom does not accommodate large numbers of people, who can’t find or don’t want a one-stop-shopping romantic relationship. And as long as we have only one option, we aren’t freely choosing romantic coupling. Even if everyone coupled up, marriage would not be the cure-all for America’s loneliness epidemic. We need other forms of close connection, too.

Right now, a feedback loop between the law and culture keeps friendships down: the invisibility of friendship in the law perpetuates the idea that friendships are less valuable than romantic relationships, which then justifies the absence of legal protection for friendships. Laws that acknowledge the potential for friendship to be devoted could interrupt this cycle.

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. We could spend an evening on opposite ends of M’s couch, legs stretched toward each other and noses buried in our own books, and it wouldn’t feel like we had wasted each other’s company. The casual time we spent together acquainted me with M’s everyday behaviors that, once known, added up to intimacy: how she heats water for sixty to ninety seconds (the duration depends on the microwave) to get it to her preferred temperature. How M moves each hand in the opposite direction—one hand clockwise, one hand counterclockwise—when she rubs shea butter into her hair. How, when we spot a rat skittering by us during a nighttime walk in D.C., she’ll trill, Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat! As neighbors, we quickly devoured what psychology professor Lisa Diamond calls the three “magic ingredients” of attachment: time, togetherness, and touch.

Experiencing a friendship like Andrew and Toly’s or witnessing one can sharpen our vision, allowing us to notice the trellis—as Art and Nick put it—that had been directing our path all along. An encounter with just one of these friendships can dislodge fixed ideas about who (and how many people) we can spend the rest of our lives with. The trellis may be ideally suited to some of us, its use by so many others a source of meaning and its preset structure reassuring. But for those who have doubts or are curious, these friendships can give us the nerve to detach from the trellis and grow toward the light.