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

by Rhaina Cohen

the idealized romantic relationship rests on shaky ground. That instability comes, at least in part, from modern expectations of romantic partnerships. One man I interviewed observed that many people he knows have a “one-stop shopping” approach to romantic relationships: get your sexual partner, confidant, co-parent, housemate, and more, all in the same person.

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.

Far from being less capable than parents of conventional families, “those who have children against the odds become highly involved and committed parents,” she writes. To the extent children suffer harm, it tends to come from outside their family: the stigma against them. That’s a social failing, not one inherent to the family structure. “Children are most likely to flourish in warm, supportive, stable families, whatever their structure,” she writes in her book We Are Family, “and are most likely to experience emotional and behavioral problems in hostile, unsupportive and unstable families, whatever their structures.”

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.

“What does this loss mean to you?” Had I been asked or asked myself that question, I might have cited a scene from the novel How Should a Person Be?, when two characters who are best friends are repairing their relationship. In the book, Margaux tells Sheila, “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.” Sheila thinks, “Very deep inside, something began to vibrate. I was an invariable. An invariable. No word had ever sounded to me more like love.”

when a platonic relationship folds, a particular breed of shame can set in. The editors of an anthology called 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. Because of this, the story of a breakup with a friend often feels far more revealing than that of a failed romance, as if it exposes our worst failings and weaknesses.” 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. The writer Patti Miller describes friend breakups as “shameful; it is certainly not something to talk about with other friends. I’ve been found unworthy by one friend—why would I advertise the fact to another? Somewhere in all the neural pathways of memory, or perhaps further back in the DNA of our survival, there is the dark sliver of fear of being cast out of the tribe. I must not talk about the rupture in case it spreads.” That isn’t an outlandish concern. One woman told me that when she says she “used to be friends” with someone, people are aghast. “Used to?” they ask with disapproval, as if she must have done something wrong—a judgment they probably wouldn’t have leaped to if she had referred to an ex-boyfri...

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.”

Although legalized same-sex marriage would have made co-parenting easier for her and Licia, she says, “I didn’t necessarily think it was going to be the panacea that everyone thought it was going to be.” People in nonmarital relationships still wouldn’t have medical, legal, and financial rights to the most important people in their lives.

Ettelbrick warned that making same-sex marriage a priority “would set an agenda of gaining rights for a few, but would do nothing to correct the power imbalances between those who are married (whether gay or straight) and those who are not.”

Instead of concentrating on marriage, Ettelbrick endorsed a different approach that she believed aligned with the central goals of the lesbian and gay rights movement. She advocated for a legal agenda that expanded options for more types of relationships, and in doing so, narrowed the rights gap between the married and unmarried. She saw domestic partnerships as an important legal tool to advance equality, one that gay and lesbian activists had successfully passed at the state and local levels. Because domestic partnerships weren’t limited to sexual or romantic relationships, Ettelbrick said they were part of “the groundwork for revolutionizing society’s views of family.” But things did not play out as she’d hoped. Decades after Ettelbrick’s proposal, marriage is still the only legal partnership available in most US states, leaving many committed relationships without protection under the law.

Within that decade, Amelie and Licia’s relationship had shifted. Once rooted in romance, it now centered on co-parenting. Amelie moved out, and Licia had a new partner, Tamara. But the law wouldn’t let them divorce. Massachusetts required at least one spouse to reside in the state, but Amelie and Licia had kids enrolled in Maryland schools and jobs that bound them there. Maryland didn’t acknowledge the marriage in the first place, so they couldn’t file for divorce in their home state. Until they divorced, Licia couldn’t marry Tamara. They were all in marriage purgatory.

only ten states plus Washington, D.C., allow residents to enter some type of nonmarital legal partnership. Domestic partnerships vary so widely across states and localities that many people aren’t aware they exist or what benefits they provide. Most Americans, if they want to formalize a relationship, have marriage as a take-it-or-leave-it choice.

As part of the same Prop 8 decision in which judges referred to Jumbotron marriage proposals, they observed, “The designation of ‘marriage’ … is the principal manner in which the State attaches respect and dignity to the highest form of a committed relationship and to the individuals who have entered into it.’”

Nancy Polikoff, a law professor at American University—who was part of the biannual meetings of gay and lesbian lawyers dating back to the 1980s—sees 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.”

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.

the social critic Michael Warner: “It is always tempting to believe that marrying is simply something that two people do. Marriage, however, is never a private contract between two persons. It always involves the recognition of a third party—and not just a voluntary or neutral recognition, but an enforceable recognition.”

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. But the landscape has drastically changed. Marriage rates have plummeted, particularly among less advantaged socioeconomic classes. Mayeri, the UPenn law professor, writes, “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. For some people, inequality between married and unmarried people is a feature, not a bug, of marriage. Rather than adapt the law to reflect the reality of marriage’s waning relevance, they’d rather incentivize it.

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. 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.

Kaipo Matsumura, a professor at Loyola Law School, told me what Barb faced is “the burden of always traveling with a piece of paper that identifies your status” lest your rights not be believed. It’s a burden that married people don’t face.

Friends can explicitly ask for recognition, as Joan did from her community during the museum party, but there’s no guarantee people will grant it. Apart from declaring Amelie her “non-romantic life partner,” Joan specifically requested that any invitation to her also be extended to Amelie, a gesture that touched Amelie. Nevertheless, Joan had to keep reminding people to include Amelie as her plus-one when they sent invitations for backyard barbecues and birthdays. Since same-sex marriage became legal and same-sex spouses have become assumed plus-ones, Joan says “it’s a little worse” that her friendship with Amelie is overlooked. “Now that the state approves of [same-sex marriage]—and I hope it will continue to do so—then it becomes harder for the people who don’t have the government stamp of approval to assert what their relationship is,” Joan says. She had tried to convey the weight of their friendship in her speech, but “that doesn’t mean it lands forever in a way that [it does] if you have a huge party and wedding celebration.” Joan says, after a wedding, “people don’t tend to forget to invite your spouse.”

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. (In contrast, the remaining domestic partnership laws in the United States tend to offer few rights; Joan’s lawyer couldn’t recall ever recommending Maryland’s domestic partnership law to clients because she believed it offered too little to be worth it). There are advantages to getting a lawyer’s expertise to draw up legal documents and, with it, a prompt to have hard conversations with loved ones, as Joan did. But Colorado legislators knew that many people don’t or can’t afford to do so and, as a result, may end up with someone they wouldn’t have chosen making serious medical or end-of-life decisions on their behalf. Amelie and Joan know this, too—they emphasized to me that they have financial and educational privilege that allows them to access solutions that most people can’t. The designated beneficiary agreement at least ...

For administrative ease, the state would probably need to set some limit on the number of people given rights, but it’s not clear that one person needs to be the maximum. Already, those with the know-how and means can spread rights across multiple people in a will, as Joan did.

By giving rights to nonmarital relationships, the state could bolster their stability and offer people greater freedom in their private lives. In his Obergefell decision, Justice Kennedy links marriage to autonomy and liberty, but Matsumura, the law professor, says, “If we accept that autonomy and self-definition is an important part of what the law’s protecting through marriage, then giving [marriage] as the only option to people who don’t see their relationships that way is denying them that valuable aspect of the law.” More options would enable people to explore a wider set of possibilities for their lives.

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

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. They are part of the same approach Ettelbrick wrote about in 1989, and which Amelie, Joan, and countless others advocated for. If the law broadened its attention beyond marriage, it would, at last, validate the range of relationships that are the cornerstones of Americans’ lives.

Because friendships don’t have a prewritten script to follow, friends must decide everything for themselves.

The preset template of an exclusive romantic relationship meant they had never discussed their boundaries explicitly, giving them the illusion that they were on the same page.

Platonic partnerships and conventional romantic relationships diverge in another key way: platonic partners tend to be deliberate about keeping their friendship from becoming too encompassing. Art, the former youth pastor from chapter 4, warned viewers of his webinar, “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.

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.