Rhaina Cohen was at a party one night when, on the other side of the room, she saw another woman she found magnetic. “In her pastel sleeveless blouse and snug pencil skirt, she had the posture of a dancer, if that dancer was also running a boardroom meeting,” she writes in her book, The Other Significant Others.
Soon after they parted that night, she and the woman she refers to only as M began exchanging messages. “Between us was a blizzard of ideas toggling easily between the interpersonal, emotional and intellectual. It took us little time to introduce each other to the people and spaces that mattered to us. We dropped by each other’s homes with the effortless frequency that before then had only seemed possible on sitcoms.”
So far, so romcom. But Cohen – a producer at NPR who had only moved to Washington DC, where the meet-cute happened, five months earlier – was happily ensconced with a man who is now her husband. The flurry of excitement she describes was merely the beginning of a beautiful friendship. That dismissive word “merely” is at the heart of her book’s premise: why are romantic relationships viewed by society as superior to friendships?
Cohen is preoccupied by two ideas: that strong platonic ties are beneficial for your romantic partnership; and that an enduring friendship can offer the same level of support as a spouse.
“This assumption that you can only love someone if you want to sleep with them is pretty bizarre and specific to our time,” says Cohen, speaking on a video call from a friend’s spare room in California, where she is on a book tour. “It comes up again and again, this question of how you can be committed to someone if you’re not having sex with them.”
By anyone’s measure, her friendship with M is intense: “She cared for me as no other friend had before, blending the ebullience of a fairy godmother with the occasional eat-your-vegetables entreaty of an actual mother.
“More than once, when I had a cold, she came over to my house with a tote bag filled with lemons, fresh ginger and black tea, which she turned into a concoction on my stove. She talked me through family difficulties, sent me emails reminding me to find a therapist and reduced the self-consciousness I felt when talking about sex.”
When M was having a hard time, Cohen went over to her house and held her, overheating underneath a faux-shearling blanket. Perhaps most egregiously of all, they regularly copied each other in on vexing work emails.
However, although she was having a great time with her new friend, she struggled to come up with a label for what they had, feeling that “best friend” was inadequate. The term “platonic life partner” was more accurate, given she felt the same level of intensity towards her friend as her spouse, albeit without the sex. Cohen, who says that her husband is not the jealous type, found herself wondering how many other people had a life-defining friendship like hers and how they labelled them.
This is where the idea for the book originated. “I wanted to talk to people whose platonic relationships had endured over the long haul. Could we learn something from them? What are these other people doing and what does the friendship help them to understand?”
Yet despite being a high-flying producer, Cohen, 31, was anxious that there might not be much interest in the topic. As a test run, she pitched the idea to the Atlantic magazine. After the article was published in October 2020, she received such a large response from readers that she had the confidence to write the book.
The Other Significant Others is an eloquent collection of stories from different pairs of friends, spanning the gamut of age, sexual orientation and social class. Reading about them, you get the impression that such relationships are hijacking territory traditionally occupied by romantic couples. Her interviewees have variously set up home together, co-parented, opened joint bank accounts and given legal and medical power of attorney to each other.
They include Barb and Inez, women in their 80s, who have been best friends for more than 50 years after meeting at work. When Inez left her husband, taking her two children with her, Barb ended up being an additional parent. In retirement, they moved in together. For 25 years, they have shared a home, a bank account and even an email address. Their platonic commitment has outlasted many people’s marriages.
Others in the book include Andrew and Toly, two scientists who met at university. In order to explain the significance of the friendship to girlfriends (they are both straight men), they now refer to themselves as seeking non-monogamous partners, even though neither has any interest in having more than one romantic partner at a time. The question of whether they are romantically involved has exercised the minds of their colleagues and families, despite this not being the case.
Then there is Joy, who spent six years caring for a friend who had ovarian cancer. When the friend died, Joy did not get leave from her employer, as a friend’s death did not qualify for compassionate leave.
The book takes its title from the work of the social psychologist Eli J Finkel. In The All-Or-Nothing Marriage, he explored ways that couples might take the emotional and practical pressure off a marriage by leaning more heavily on what he called OSOs (other significant others). His idea of “outsourcing” some of our needs outside a romantic partnership is backed up by previous research. A 2015 study led by Elaine Cheung found that people who disperse their emotional needs across multiple relationships are happier than those who concentrate their needs in fewer.
“There is this prevailing idea of getting everything from one person, when creating more space and having more forms of support can make your romantic relationship stronger,” says Cohen. “It’s very similar to the financial advice to diversify your portfolio, because it’s risky to put all your money in one stock.”
She points out that, in practical terms, if you have more people you can turn to, you can build webs of mutual support: “I’ve talked to people who feel as if they are able to test things out with their friend before they bring their volatile selves to their romantic partner. Instead of going to them for every single thing, they have someone else to help them think through what they want to say in a difficult conversation, or to give them some perspective.”
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She is quick to correct me when I use the word “traditional” to refer to marriage partners being the front and centre of life. “Actually, that’s only true if you’re looking at the last century or, at the most, the past 150 years,” says Cohen. “If we are looking at the long sweep of history, it was not traditional to expect a spouse to be a confidant, co-parent, best friend and housemate. Marriage was a union that was very much not of equals – a practical arrangement rather than the most important emotional tie.
“If you look at historical letters between friends, they are extraordinarily effusive and can read a lot like love letters. People understood that you could have deep relationships without having to funnel everything into the spousal relationship, which just ends up making it more fragile.”
A challenge experienced by many of her interviewees is how to describe their relationship. Why is finding a label so important? “I think it’s critical for making sense of your experience and for external validation. I received a message from a married woman in her 50s who has this friendship she hasn’t been able explain to others. She said that reading the stories in my book was very validating and eye-opening. She has a term for her friend – they call each other ‘Sacred Other’.”
There are a plethora of such terms in the book, ranging from “non-romantic life partner” to “platonic soulmate” and “best soul friend”. “Friend is such a capacious word that it’s almost meaningless,” says Cohen. “One way round it is to denote that this is actually a different kind of friendship – a lot of this labelling is to get other people to perceive the friendship differently.”
In one case in the book, a woman announces that her friend is her “non-romantic life partner” and asks that this person be invited to anything to which other halves are usually invited; to treat them as a unit. “She’s saying: ‘Well, I have a person who is just as important to me as your spouse and who maybe doesn’t fit into the same box, but here’s a label that tells you how enduring and committed this friendship is.’”
To me – and I speak as a friendship enthusiast – this quest for descriptive labels is a tad earnest. If I referred to my best friend as “Sacred Other”, she would probably burst out laughing. However, the need to formalise certain types of friendship goes beyond social awkwardness.
Some countries are already beginning to rewrite laws to include friendship in definitions of partnership. In 2022, Sweden’s supreme court ruled that two friends who lived together on a farm counted as a couple for the purposes of the Cohabitees Act, making one friend eligible to inherit an insurance policy when her friend died. In Alberta, Canada, the legal status of an “adult interdependent relationship” allows two people who function as a domestic and economic unit to have rights that are similar to marriage. Germany’s federal ministry of justice is working on family law reform that would give friends, flatmates and even neighbours the same legal rights as married couples.
One of the most poignant passages in the book is the observation from a doctor that when people are on their deathbed, it is often a beloved friend rather than a spouse or child who is present. For Cohen, the need for legal rights is clear. “One of the consequences of not having a formal label for these sorts of friendships is that people get locked out of hospital visits and medical conversations or end up lying to gain admission, claiming to be the person’s wife or sister,” she says. “But if we do that, it ultimately perpetuates the thinking that friends can’t be a significant other.”
Cohen mentions that there are very few scripts in popular culture that place intense friendship at the centre of life. “Even in Friends, Rachel is forced to move out when Monica wants to move her boyfriend in,” she says. I agreed with Cohen about this when we spoke, but thinking about it afterwards, I wondered if this was true. There are many TV shows where friends form the dominant relational story rather than acting as a foil for finding love. Grace and Frankie, Broad City, Girls and The Big Bang Theory all have friendship at the core. Many TV crime shows – Broadchurch, Spiral, The Bridge – are about platonic partnerships.
The same applies to fiction: from Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan chronicles to Gabrielle Zevin’s bestseller Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, platonic relationships have provided rich terrain for contemporary novelists.
There is much to admire in Cohen’s rallying cry to take platonic partnerships more seriously. But surely one of the greatest joys of friendship is that it is almost the only obligation-free zone of life. Drawing up contracts and introducing vows and promises strikes me as unappealing, not to mention running the risk of disappointment. Friendship is voluntary, spontaneous and as flighty as a jewel-hued butterfly. We pin it down at our peril.
The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Cohen is published by St Martin’s Press (£24.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.