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

by Rhaina Cohen

Self-flogging is par for the course after a romantic relationship ends, too, but when a platonic relationship folds, a particular breed of shame can set in.

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?

Stigma feeds on shame and silence, and friend breakups are nothing if not shrouded with shame and silence.

In the penthouse is enfranchised grief; most people understand that losing a spouse, parent, or child can raze even a flourishing life. In the basement is what bereavement expert Kenneth Doka has termed disenfranchised grief—grief that isn’t or can’t be openly acknowledged or mourned or supported by others.

When grief is avowed, those around the mourner know what to do: send flowers, sit shiva, drop off meals. There is no playbook for someone who wants to help a loved one who has lost a friend.

When mourners don’t have support, they can suffer even more. Disenfranchised grief is a risk factor for complicated grief—a form of grieving that’s so long-lasting and severe that it’s debilitating.

Even when people try to offer support after the loss of a friendship like Joy’s, they may cause more pain with their misunderstanding.

grief strikes in oscillations that are spaced farther apart over time but still can pummel when they arrive.

Grief is something we live with, not something we complete.

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.”

Losing someone you love always means losing a particular person who can’t be traded for another.

there’s a fierce debate among researchers about the relative importance of poverty, family structure, and family stability on children’s well-being.

Instead of focusing on the form a relationship takes, many legal scholars suggest looking at the function it serves.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There is an abundance of ways to live well.

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

platonic partners tend to be deliberate about keeping their friendship from becoming too encompassing.

It can feel like a blessing to land in the supportive embrace of a platonic partnership. But the costs include being exiled from the realm of popular comprehension and being forced to come up with your own solutions to challenges.

But the law won’t change cultural norms on its own.

It also wouldn’t hurt if our culture encouraged us to build skills to discern and communicate to others what we want—a change that could benefit relationships of all kinds.

The expectations we have for different kinds of relationships can affect our behavior, which, in turn, affects the shape that those relationships take.

But when we’re getting to know a new friend, we’re not taught to extrapolate to a shared future.

We can create the conditions for intimacy by allowing friendships to take up more room in our lives. Platonic partnerships show that there’s little a friend cannot do. These friendships can also help us to spot which relationships have potential to grow.

platonic partnerships: they are a case study in resisting defaults. Whether you’re in one or you simply take time to understand them, these friendships take us off autopilot.