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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rhaina Cohen
Read between
July 22 - November 9, 2024
A friend could electrify my life.
Andrew’s friendship defied two widely held beliefs: that a partnership is, by definition, a romantic relationship, and that without a long-term romantic relationship, life is incomplete.
Doctors who worked with older patients told me that frequently the person at a dying patient’s bedside is not a spouse or relative but a longtime, dear friend.
compulsory coupledom: the notion that a long-term monogamous romantic relationship is necessary for a normal, successful adulthood.
compulsory coupledom ignores the large number of people who aren’t in a romantic unit.
Americans are forgoing more than marriage; many don’t come home to a romantic partner at the end of the day. According to 2019 data from Pew, 38 percent of American adults are neither married nor cohabiting with a partner, up from 29 percent in 1990.
“When we channel all our intimate needs into one person,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel writes, “we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.”
While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.
many of us are spending a large part of our lives outside of marriage.
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.
The question is whether people can pursue the relationships that matter to them with dignity and recognition by their society and legal system.
“Every time you begin a new project, personal or professional, you should start by asking, Who could help me with this?”
Europeans in earlier centuries had a different conception of friendship from our own. Friendship was not a private relationship, as it’s now understood to be, but one of public significance, regularly honored in churches.
adelphopoiesis—literally, the making of brothers. For centuries in the East, these rituals took place in Christian churches: two friends would enter a church, place their hands on the Gospel, one on top of the other, and the priest would say prayers over them. After embracing, the men would be seen as “brothers” for the rest of their lives.
Though men could enter into these relationships for instrumental reasons, such as to secure a strategic alliance between families, many men were driven to become brothers out of deep fondness for one another. Sworn brotherhood could exist alongside marriage. Sometimes men chose to be buried with their sworn brothers rather than their wives.
This kind of relationship blurred the lines between friend and kin.
Though sworn brotherhood used the language of family, it resembled marriage. Both relationships involved rituals that created kin by promise rather than biology, publicly tying families together.
In earlier centuries, it was understood that women could feel just as deeply for their same-sex friends as for their husbands.
The possibility that a relationship with another woman could replace wedlock emerged in the late nineteenth century, when clerical jobs opened to women, as did coed universities and some prestige professions like medicine, creating more options for women to strike out on their own. During this time, pairs of women—typically well-off or well educated—lived together and supported each other in what were known as Boston marriages. The historian Susan Freeman describes these long-term relationships between two unmarried women as “a kind of cousin of romantic friendships.”
One risk of assuming that passion always translates into sexual attraction or consummation is that we can fail to see relationships for what they were.
Marriage doesn’t have to rank above friendship. Love doesn’t automatically involve lust. Romantic and platonic feelings aren’t always easy to distinguish.
Marcus explains that women could speak in rapturous terms about other women without interpreting their desire as sexual,
Once M entered the picture, it took me little time to realize that it could be a boon to have deep relationships with more than one person.
I had two temperaments and life experiences to learn from, two main tributaries flowing into my mind.
Whatever the cause, marriage evolved from being a union designed to acquire useful in-laws or money to a private relationship between two people. The ideal of a “companionate marriage” became easier to achieve as women gained autonomy.
Gerstel and Sarkisian conclude that marriage, instead of being the cornerstone of community, as many politicians and experts claim, often strains community ties.
People who are currently in a rewarding romantic relationship may find, at some point, that having more than one person to lean on would enrich their lives.
Kami and Tilly maintain two ideas that appear to be at odds: that their friendship raises their bar for relationships but also makes them ask less of a romantic partner.
On the whole, a diverse relationship portfolio makes for more satisfying romantic relationships.
The word partner, originally meant for others, reminds them that they can expect a lot from each other.
“Romantic friendships,” “smashes,” and the like had lost their innocence. The draining of intimacy from same-sex friendships coincided with rising expectations for emotional connection in marriage.
the friendship makes them more patient, and steadier in their romantic relationships.
Prominent psychologists argue that lust and love serve different evolutionary functions: that lust drives us to reproduce and, in doing so, continue the onward march of our genes, whereas love encourages us to cultivate a lasting bond that feels safe and rewarding—what’s called an “attachment” relationship.
Lisa calls time, togetherness, and touch the “magic ingredients” of attachment.
Partnerships rely on the intermingling of the mundane and the intimate; it’s both by knowing the ordinary and private details that partners can have an up-to-date, high-definition picture of the other’s life.
romantic relationships have overlapping qualities but don’t need to tick all the same boxes to belong to the same category.
New Relationship Energy, or NRE. NRE describes the ecstatic early days of a relationship, when a new partner is captivating and the world seems aglow.
A partner is someone who is there for all of it, for the long term.
One writer called the tendency for straight men to hoist all their emotional needs on their female romantic partners “emotional gold digging.”
“This social relationship,” the judges wrote, “is much more important, to the child at least, than a biological relationship of actual paternity.”
What she thinks makes romantic partners great co-parents is “more of that core of what we have—that core of mutual respect and love and compatibility. Alignment in your values.”
The reality on the ground is that when the curtain opens on parenthood, romance often exits the stage.
Women who survive their spouses often live alone and need social and practical support.
Life’s later years are a time when the rewards of platonic partnership can be most potent and effortless.
Marriage isn’t even a guarantee of companionship at the end of life. Many of those who have been married will reach old age without their spouse,
That peacefulness arises from their willingness to accommodate each other.
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.
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.
“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;
