A lot of the language we use to describe the crucial phases of friendship is borrowed from romantic relationships: friend “crush,” for example, or friend “break up.” A friend can stick around longer than a spouse and be the key to your daily sanity, and still lack a satisfying title. “Best friend”? “Buddy”? “BFF”? All of those fail to convey the weightiness such a relationship deserves. And what if you do “break up” with a best friend? Where do you put your grief? What are the rituals of mourning?
In her new book, The Other Significant Others, Rhaina Cohen imagines how life would be different if we centered it on friends. She explains the extremes of friendship—situations in which pairs describe each other as “soulmates” and make major life decisions in tandem. We talk with Cohen about the lost history of friendship and why she cringes when couples at the altar describe each other as their “best friend.”
Listen to the conversation here:
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The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin When you told people you were writing a book about friendship, what were some of the responses you got?
Rhaina Cohen: You know, often people would not quite remember what the book was about. I had a boss at one point write in an email to other people that I was writing a book about the power of female friendship. And I was like, Well, it’s not all about women. And also that framing, “the power of female friendship,” it’s just like, Ugh.
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Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin, and that was Rhaina Cohen, who wrote a book called The Other Significant Others.
Cohen: You know, I was trying to write a book that is a piece of narrative reporting, that is cultural criticism, that has a lot of research in it—and that kind of framing just seemed a little bit, like, powder pink and like a how-to book, which was not what I was doing.
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Rosin: Rhaina’s book answers an immense question that no one really bothers to ask: What even is a friend?
Friends are so central and important in our lives and yet—unlike our romantic relationships—we have no rituals for when they begin or end.
So in her book, Rhaina looks at the deepest of platonic friendships. I think of them as extreme friends. And by the way, this is not friends with benefits. This is a no-sex equation.
But these are friends who follow each other’s lead for the most major of life decisions.
Cohen: So some of the things these friends have done together are buy homes together, move states together, go on very long vacations together, raise kids together. They’re in each other’s wills. They have medical and legal power of attorney rights to each other. Kind of the list goes on.
Rosin: And yet we don’t really have adequate terms for this kind of relationship.
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Rosin: And also, the crux of the problem, is the way that people can’t take seriously, they don’t have quite the language for friendship. They don’t know what it is. It has no contours. It has no hardness to it. So people hear the word friendship and they think it’s a soft subject, and they think it’s a subject for the ladies’ pages or something, which is, I think, the exact reason your book exists.
Cohen: Oh, totally. I think I would often find myself to be a little surprised when I was talking to, like, more intellectual types and be a little squeamish about, like, I’m writing this book about people who have a friendship as the central relationship in their life and not sure if they would get it. And then they would totally get it, and then I’d be like, Okay. Great.
But I’ve had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder that I consider myself a serious person. And to a lot of people, if they’re just thinking about the topic or they just see the kind of headline, they wouldn’t know that this is a serious subject.
Rosin: I’m gonna start by reading a sentence that I feel like captures the essence of the book perfectly. This is from the introduction. “This is a book about friends who have become a we, despite having no scripts, no ceremonies, and precious few models to guide them toward long-term platonic commitment.”
I love that. Why did you feel like you had to write it? Like, what happened in your own life, or what did you see around you that made you think, Okay, this book needs to exist?
Cohen: Came from a personal place. When I moved to D.C., I fell into a friendship with someone who I discovered lived a five-minute walk from me, which meant that we could just be part of each other’s daily lives. We would see each other four or five times a week. I would stop at her house on the way to the metro when we would just have breakfast together. I would go to her office parties. Like, she knew everybody at the office.
And I just remember her holding my hand—actually, at one point I told my friend, like, “You can’t do that. I wouldn’t even do that with my husband.” But that kind of was a signal of how affectionate we were, that it was just totally normal for her to just grab my hand, even in the middle of an office. And, basically, it felt like the term best friend didn’t really cut it for how I would describe our relationship. And we played around. Like, you know, are we partners?
And I had seen some examples in pop culture of this, like in the TV show Broad City, and I knew a little bit about the history of what are called romantic friendships—so really close, same-sex, intimate friendships—and I thought, If I’m experiencing this, if there are these little examples that I’m seeing elsewhere, why doesn’t anybody else know about this? And if this is one of the most important relationships in my life, and I’m sure it is for other people, wouldn’t it help to actually understand what they are?
Rosin: Yeah, because if I saw two people holding hands, I have one construct for that: They’re married or they’re partners. And I guess the way society is set up, there is marriage, and then friends are a supporting cast to the central play, which is marriage. What’s wrong with that way of seeing the world?
Cohen: It unnecessarily puts friendship into this really narrow place where it can’t play the many kinds of roles it might fit in a person’s life.
I mean, when you’re talking about the analogy of the supporting cast, I think of the TV show Friends and how it ends because, like, some of the characters get married and move off to the suburbs, and at one point Monica kicks out her best friend to live with her fiancé. So even in popular-cultural depictions of friends, they are treated as peripheral and, you know, you’re waiting for the spouse to come along.
Friendship can step in to play these roles. And I think it’s especially important at a time when a lot of people aren’t getting married, or they’re getting married later in life, or they outlive their spouse. I mean, what do we do with that? Friendship is a kind of relationship that can provide a lot of the fulfillment that we think of as only being for romantic relationships, and that I think is just too limiting.
Rosin: Yeah, I did think of that—that when fewer people are married and a lot more people are lonely, maybe that has something to do with the fact that we can’t think of other alternatives to be very fulfilling. So if you’re not married and you’re alone—I don’t know. No other option. I’m all out of ideas. And so then you just end up feeling really lonely.
So you profiled a series of couples who were not romantic couples, and I felt like they were people from a possible alternative future. They were people who had made choices to be in what I would think of as extreme friendships. So can you talk about some of the choices they made in service of friendship that some people would find unusual?
Cohen: I think even just making decisions as a unit is something that people make with their spouses, and they do not necessarily expect to make with their friends.
The example that comes to mind are these two men who are in their 30s and they’re kind of developing their professional careers as physicists. And one made a decision to move to a school across the country, in part to be able to be close to his friend, who he has known for 15 years. They have lived together. They have started a company together. They are not afterthoughts in the major decisions in each other’s lives. And, in fact, when they have tried dating women, they’ve had trouble getting the women to feel satisfied that these romantic partners want to take up more space in their lives.
And I think one answer to that for some people would be like, Well, I’m just gonna kind of subordinate the friendship because I really want a romantic partner, and that’s more important.
And for them, they decided to change how they were dating and present themselves as nonmonogamous, with this platonic partner as their primary partner, and that they wanted to date women who were okay with nonmonogamy, even if they had no interest in having another romantic partner themselves.
So, you know, in that case, they are moving across the country together; they are deciding to share a space together and negotiate conflict. When that happens, they are building and looking toward a future together. They are willing to put the friendship first.
Rosin: What about some of the terms they used? You quote some of these friends saying things that, if people didn’t know, they’d only have the association of those terms with romantic relationships.
Cohen: Yeah, I mean, “soulmate” came up a lot. I’ve heard “platonic soulmate,” “platonic soul friend,” just “soulmate” period, “platonic life partner.”
I think the bigger point here is that everybody has to come up with their own language, and they are often borrowing or modifying language that we associate with family or with romantic partners, because the term friend doesn’t really mean a whole lot, or it would not signal the level of commitment that these friends have. And they’re searching for something that would validate it.
Rosin: And in almost all of these examples, there comes a moment when either the people, themselves, parents, friends mistake it for a sexual relationship. Like, they just can’t get their heads around it, so they wonder, like, Oh, it’s okay if you’re gay. I’m a good mom. It’s fine if you’re gay. Or they might get jealous. What were those kinds of things that you saw?
Cohen: With the two men who I mentioned earlier—two straight men who, you know, interrogate their emotions, and if they were not straight, they would happily share that—I mean, it’s not anything that they’re hiding.
But the mother of one of them just could not wrap her mind around the idea that her son had a partner who was not romantic. I mean, she basically said that and had asked at different points. And I think it was hard for her for reasons that would be hard for a lot of people to comprehend this kind of friendship. Because people think that a partnership is synonymous with a romantic partnership.
I have a lot of questions about why that is the case, but we’re not usually confronted with an alternative kind of partnership that would throw those questions at us. Like, well, how do we define it in the first place? And what role does sex play?
Rosin: Right. Right. And in your own relationship with a friend that you mentioned, how did you start to make these distinctions? Did you think, at one point, Oh, I’m in love with this person? How did you make sense of your own feelings as they developed?
Cohen: It was relatively uncomplicated to me. It did feel like I was falling in love. I wrote about that in my journal at the time. I just remembered it feeling very similar to what I had felt with my now husband, but I didn’t have any—
Rosin: Which—wait—which means what? Like, intensity, or what do you mean by that?
Cohen: Infatuation. You know, the kind of endless desire to be around her, to learn from her, to just kind of absorb her being. There’s a sort of radiance about being in this friend’s presence. But I didn’t have sexual attraction, and both of us are interested in women, so I think it would’ve been relatively uncomplicated to figure out at some point if that was part of what was going on. But it really felt like a different kind of attraction.
Rosin: Now, you had a partner, a male partner, at the time—
Cohen: Yes.
Rosin: Who was, I suppose, your boyfriend then. How did that work out? Were there any issues there? There’s an image I remember from your book where you talked about you holding hands with both your partner and this friend of yours, and I just wonder how you all reached that point?
Cohen: Yeah, pretty uncomplicated. I think one thing that maybe made it easier was that my now husband—who I refer to as Marco—he and I were long distance. He was six hours away, so we saw each other every other weekend. And with my friend, Em, we just had a lot of daily life together.
So there weren’t a lot of, I guess, opportunities for, I don’t know, a sense of competition, because I had plenty of time that was for both of them. And the two of them have an independent friendship. I mean, we all hang out together. But also they developed their own close friendship.
So to me, it was just a bonus, and I think also to my husband, who is on the same page as me, where he doesn’t want either of us to be everything to each other and to put that kind of pressure on each other. We’re pretty independent people who didn’t want a kind of hermetically sealed relationship in the first place, so it was all positive.
Rosin: So you’ve crossed over to the other side. It sounds like your partner’s crossed over to the other side, by which I mean: You get it. You fully understand the depth and importance of these kinds of friendships.
What is the problem with them not being recognized? Did you see some pain there, like, for people who are in these relationships, but nobody around them is kind of getting it?
Cohen: I think one answer to this is to say, like, imagine the closest person in your life, which might be a spouse or a sibling or anybody else. But what would it feel like to have the most important person in your life be invisible by society? Where you have to defend yourself constantly and explain what the nature of their relationship is? Where maybe you’re the subject of gossip?
You know, it’s like these two men I talked about earlier. I mean, their former boss had asked his colleagues whether the two men were in a romantic relationship. So to have the kind of closest relationship in your life misunderstood, and maybe even denigrated, I think is a terrible thing to have to deal with emotionally.
There are a lot of practical problems that come up. I write about a woman who took care of her best friend during a six-year battle with ovarian cancer. She lied to the hospital staff to say that she was her friend’s spouse, because she was afraid she would get kicked out as someone who wasn’t related. She wasn’t entitled to family medical leave, because, again, she was basically a legal stranger. She wasn’t entitled to bereavement leave after her friend died. And then, after that, her other friends and family in her life didn’t quite understand the depth of the grief that she was feeling.
So it’s really often in these hardest moments that it is extremely painful to have no societal or formal recognition for the relationship that mattered most to you.
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Rosin: After the break: the pressure of your romantic partner also being your best friend, and the history of deep, deep platonic friendship—like, buried-together deep.
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Rosin: I think even outside these dedicated or extreme friendships, for people who choose to live a life among friends and, say, not get married, I’ve heard a lot of them complain that everyone looks at them as if there’s some other life they’re supposed to be leading—that they failed, in some way, because they’re not married, because they put their friends first. I’ve seen that’s a great pain for people who choose to live with closeness to friends but don’t want to be married.
Cohen: Well, you know, one woman wrote to me after I published this piece in The Atlantic in 2020 that was a kind of precursor to the book and was about these sorts of really close friendships, and she told me that the article was a welcome slap in the face because as a divorced woman, she had thought that there, by definition, had to be a hole in her life that she needed to fill.
So she was trying to date, and it had never really occurred to her that she might actually be happy as is. And she already had the kind of friendship that I was describing but hadn’t really been able to put words to it or see it as legitimate. And by having other models, she was kind of free to not see herself as a failure that needed to go out and fix herself or see herself as incomplete and needing a man to fill it.
Rosin: Right. And what about people who are married but who tend to let their friendships fade? What’s the problem with that? What’s the pressure that that puts on a marriage? Because I think that’s all also very common.
You know, you see many people at the altar say, This is my best friend. I’m marrying my best friend. There’s a lot of best-friend language around marriage that’s been analyzed, so what have you found about that?
Cohen: I’m laughing because that’s a place where I open the book.
Rosin: Do you want to tell that story?
Cohen: Oh, yeah. Well, there was just a season in 2022 where I had a string of weddings. And at several of these weddings, people during the vows talked about how this person is their best friend.
And there was one particular wedding for friends that I adore, where the officiant said, you know, Now you’re going to hold the hands of your best friend, you know, as they’re about to do their vows. And then say, I promise to my best friend. And I was like, Yo, the best friend of the groom is right there. And I remember, they were college roommates, and their relationship is longer than the romantic relationship.
I mean, not to downplay how important this romantic relationship was, but I just didn’t really understand why, when you already are going to assume the title of husband or wife, why you also need to have “best friend” on top of it. It just seems a little bit like hoarding or kind of ill-advised. Why do you want all that?
And I can say in my personal life, I became pretty determined to not fall into this when I saw a family member of mine, who’s a kind of serial monogamist, be in these four- or five-year relationships, and that person was everything to him, and then the relationship would unravel, and then he didn’t have anybody left.
Rosin: Yeah, I mean, one thing I learned in your book was that the public recognition of friendship is almost like a provocation to the centrality of marriage, that history has moved in such a way that we’ve elevated marriage and kind of downplayed friendship in a public way.
And I want to talk about that because in other cultures—Middle Eastern cultures, in Italy—people do hold hands. There is a kind of way that you publicly acknowledge friends. It’s not that uncommon.
So I want to think for a minute about what that used to look like in Western culture and why it faded away. So you did tell the story of sworn brotherhood in medieval times. Can you talk a little bit about what you discovered about the centrality—the public centrality—of friendship in different eras?
Cohen: Yeah. I mean, now friendship is very much a private relationship, that you go off and you get coffee or drinks or whatever. And there’s just this long history of friendships being something that people would have ceremonies around.
So with sworn brotherhoods in England—there are versions of them in the Mediterranean, in China, in the Middle East—but men would enter into a church, and they would put their hands on a Bible, and they would be bound together in life as brothers. And they were expected to support each other, you know, in some cases expected to support financially, to protect the person in case of conflict, in case of violence.
And a couple of the men who I write about were in, like, the 1300s buried together in a chapel in Oxford. And there are a number of these joint crypts for men who appear to have been sworn brothers, sometimes buried together instead of with a wife, even though the person was married. So it goes back a long time. Essentially in the medieval period, you’re going to see a lot of this, and before.
Rosin: The interesting thing is that later, historians would wonder whether they were gay and we had overlooked that. But then, you know, skip one era ahead, and it’s like, no, they weren’t gay. There was a different acknowledgement for friendship.
Did it work differently for women? Because I feel like a lot of the older examples—was this a privilege for men only, or was there a way in which female friendships work differently throughout history?
Cohen: From the history I’ve read, there are some examples of women, but I think they’re far harder to find. It seems a little bit more speculative, from what I’ve read, in terms of how common it was for women.
Rosin: Although the affection does show up. The extreme affection does show up in journals and other places, like exchanging locks of hair and just, like, deep, deep infatuation.
Cohen: Oh, totally. When I’m saying that women seem to have been, at least on the record, less likely to have these friendships—which is, you know, a complicated historical question of who ends up in the record—I’m talking, like, 1300s and before.
But certainly when it comes to romantic friendships, which is the kind of same-sex, intimate friendships that I alluded to earlier that I had some sense of, and that set me off on the book, lots of women had those in the 1700s, 1800s, early 1900s.
You see these really gushing letters between women, as you’re saying, exchanging locks of hair. There’s terminology to talk about this at women’s colleges to young women who kind of became attached at the hip, who were called “smashed,” or in the U.K. it was called having a rave. So it was just so normalized to have this kind of real infatuation for a friend.
Rosin: And then what happened? I mean, I know we’re flattening complicated, you know, human history and broad swaths of time. But I was curious, what happened? Like why was there a time when you could write, talk, feel about friends, and everybody would understand what you were talking about, and now it’s kind of a silence?
Cohen: Two big things: Our ideas about sexuality changed a lot around the turn of the 20th century, and also expectations for marriage changed.
So before the turn of the 20th century, it was really read as innocent to express that kind of love for a same-sex friend. This went for both men and women. Basically, prior to the turn of the 20th century, there was not the category of homosexuality and heterosexuality as we know it now. So a lot of behaviors that we now code as being sexual, like sharing a bed or writing effusive letters, were not going to be read as queer and be stigmatized.
Because at the time, you know, when we’re talking early 1900s, it was not an okay thing to have same-sex sexual desire. You know, we have people who were really concerned about any kind of same-sex desire. So suddenly becoming “smashed” to another girl at your women’s college or expressing that kind of affection becomes a danger, and a danger to marriage.
So prior to the turn of the 20th century, it was actually seen as a good thing, often, to have this kind of intimate, same-sex relationship. Especially for women, it was kind of a training ground for marriage.
And then the other thing that I mentioned is that marriage expectations changed. For a long time, marriage was really an economic contract, but then it turned into something where you’re supposed to love your spouse. That was, you know, as historian Stephanie Coontz said, that was a bonus, not the basis of marriage.
And now we’re in an era where not only do you have to be in love with your spouse, you also have to have your spouse be your best friend. So the kind of expectations have so changed that it’s crowded out space for friends.
Rosin: Right, so it becomes even harder to distinguish between what’s the nature of a friendship and what’s the nature of a spouse or a partner, whereas that used to be very clear. There was no expectation that you would have those same range of feelings and intimacies with your spouse. It would be perfectly natural to have them with somebody else.
Cohen: And I’ve seen kind of contemporary versions of this. Like, I remember talking to a friend of mine whose mother was in an arranged marriage, as were the other women in their community, and the women’s closest intimacies were with each other. They didn’t really expect that with their husbands, because they had arranged marriages where there were really practical purposes assigned to the relationship.
So this is still going on today, but it’s not kind of in mainstream American (probably especially) white culture.
Rosin: So you’ve talked throughout this conversation about the lack of scripts and ceremonies. Now I want to talk about what happens when friendships fade.
You mentioned Abbi and Ilana. Well, you mentioned Broad City, but that’s Abbi and Ilana. You mentioned Friends. And you mentioned your own friendship, in your book, shifting as you both got older.
I think this is probably pretty common, that the kinds of friendships that you’re describing, a lot of people listening will think, Oh, well, yeah, sure. I had those friendships in my 20s. But then as I got to be 30 and older, and I got to prioritize my career or have children, they become really, really hard.
One of the things that’s been hard for me as an adult is understanding what you do when friendships fade or go away. Like, there really is no ceremony for that.
Cohen: It’s really rough. When I was grappling with watching my friendship change, even though I have thought so much about this, it was still really hard for me to put any language to what was going on and to talk about it with other people.
I think, particularly, if you have an especially close friendship and maybe other people in your life don’t have experience with it, if they didn’t know what you had in the first place—they can’t totally relate to it—then they’re certainly not going to be able to understand what the loss is like.
You know, in my case, it was like going from a partnership to best friends. It’s like, well, a lot of people don’t even have a best friend, so what is there to complain about? We don’t have collective rituals around this. If my friend has a romantic breakup, I know that there are certain things that might be helpful, which could be getting them dessert or going over to be by their side, or I have some sense of—
Rosin: Music! There’s particular music. Yes.
Cohen: There’s so much music. I will tell you that I have friends who have written a song inspired by the book, in part because they have written all these songs for people’s weddings, and I was talking to one of them about how we need more songs about friendship. And it was really striking to me hearing the culture critic Hua Hsu talk about what he did after his friend was murdered.
So he knows a lot about music, and he ended up listening to love songs or songs about heartbreak and romantic love, because there weren’t that many songs about friendship, and those that did exist didn’t really kind of capture the depth of the loss that he felt. And, I mean, lots of people deal with some kind of loss in friendship, and we don’t have music for that.
And when you think about somebody who’s coping with a breakup, like, what are they doing? They’re probably wallowing with Ben & Jerry’s and listening to some sad, whiny music that makes them feel seen. And we don’t really have that. I mean, I guess you can have Ben & Jerry’s still, but is someone gonna know that they should deliver that to your door or just that, like, Oh, I heard they had a falling out, and then that’s that.
Rosin: Right? It enters the realm of gossip. Even the term breakup, I’m thinking, is that the right term? Should there be a different term for what happens when a friendship dissolves or when you get older and you’re missing a friend? I don’t really know.
Cohen: I don’t. Yeah, I mean, because a lot of people will talk about a “friend breakup,” so you need to modify the term breakup to make clear what is happening. But also, anytime you’re using “friend” as a modifier, like “friend crush,” it sometimes feels like it’s diminishing, right? Like, it’s a version of what the real thing is.
Rosin: Yeah, I’m all on board with your manifesto. I think the best thing that can happen with the publication of this book is for people to elevate and publicly acknowledge friendship for the important thing that it is. I think that would help so many people.
Like, it would remove the shame of staying single. It would remove the kind of oppression of there being only one way to live a happy and successful life. And I think it would just unload people’s kind of self-consciousness or uncertainty about the feelings they have for people in their life who don’t have a title, who are, can we say, just a friend?
Cohen: Yeah, I hate the term just friends.
Rosin: Yeah.
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Rosin: Okay, well, first of all, all you listeners should read The Other Significant Others, which is a great title, by the way, Rhaina. I love that title. And second of all, any listeners out there who are musicians, send us either your best friendship breakup song or write one yourself. How about that? Does that sound good?
Cohen: Let’s make a Spotify playlist.
Rosin: Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you, Rhaina, for coming on.
Cohen: Thank you for having me.
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Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Yvonne Kim, and engineered by Rob Smierciak.
Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
If you do end up writing a song about friends or friend breakups, you can send it to us at radioatlantic@theatlantic.com. And you know what? Even if you just know a great friend song or a great friend breakup song, send it to us and we’ll compile a playlist.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening. And call your friends. They miss you.