The Other Significant Others Quotes

“There is freedom in the unfamiliar, when the kind of relationship you have exists outside of well-worn categories.”
― Rhaina Cohen, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

“I began to see how these unusual relationships can also be a provocation—unsettling the set of societal tenets that circumscribe our intimate lives: That the central and most important person in one’s life should be a romantic partner, and friends are the supporting cast. That romantic love is the real thing, and if people claim they feel strong platonic love, it must not really be platonic. That adults who raise kids together should be having sex with each other, and marriage deserves special treatment by the state.”
― Rhaina Cohen, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

“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.”
― Rhaina Cohen, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

“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.”
― Rhaina Cohen, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

“But it’s more than an absence of spouses that complicates caregiving and companionship later in life. People are having fewer children, if they have children at all. This, in combination with marriage trends, has increased the number of older adults with no close family ties—a group of people whom sociologists call “elder orphans,” “solo agers,” or “kinless.” Researchers estimate that one in five older adults is an “elder orphan” or at risk of becoming one, a figure that is likely to grow in coming years. Like marriage, having children isn’t a surefire insurance policy for caregiving. Adult children might not live close to their parents, or their kids might not have the capacity to help. Daughters, historically the country’s default caregivers of aging parents, can’t be taken for granted as a source of uncompensated caregiving these days. Far more women are in the paid labor force and would jeopardize their economic security or their family’s if they quit their jobs to take care of their parents. (Nevertheless, on average, daughters spend far more time caring for their aging parents than sons do.) Because Americans are having kids later in life, it’s common for children with aging parents to be raising children of their own at the same time; these are members of the so-called sandwich generation. Unable to manage both forms of care, these adults may focus on their kids and outsource care for their parents.”
― Rhaina Cohen, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center

“The belief, in the West, that same-sex intimacy necessarily involves sexual desire gained traction a couple of centuries ago. A pamphlet titled Satan’s Harvest Home, published in 1749 in London, claimed that men who greeted each other with a kiss—at that point, still a ubiquitous greeting—were set on the path to Sodom. Disgust toward sodomy in eighteenth-century England swelled, and authorities rounded up accused sodomites in mass arrests and executions. With the specter of sex now hanging over men’s physical interactions, it made sense for them to withdraw from one another. By the late 1780s in England, kissing had been replaced by the handshake.”
― Rhaina Cohen, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center