A Conversation with Rhaina Cohen: Author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship

In The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, Rhaina Cohen explores the power that deeply committed friendships have in the lives of people who prioritize platonic love over romantic relationships.

John Dalton, VP of Research at FCAT, had a chance to catch up with Rhaina and learn more about how these friendships inform people’s social and financial lives.

1. Why did you write this book?

This book grew out of questions I encountered in my personal life: I’d become extraordinarily close to a new friend and felt at a loss for words to describe who we were to each other. “Best friend” felt inadequate. At the same time, I was familiar with a period in history when same-sex friendships were more affectionate and emotionally intimate than they are now. So, I knew that what my friend and I were experiencing wasn’t unprecedented. But that raised the question, why were devoted, life-defining friendships confusing to us now? What had changed? What were the consequences of that change? How do our expectations of romantic relationships affect our beliefs about friendship, and vice versa? As you can see, I quickly ran into big societal questions, and they felt worthy to explore.

2. A thread running through your analysis is how difficult it is for people to define the intense, platonic friendships they have. Why has it become so hard for us to talk about these friendships?

Think about the language we often use when talking about friendship. We call people who are in a platonic relationship “just friends.” But if people are in a romantic relationship, we say they’re “more than friends.” This kind of language reflects and reinforces the common view that friendship is a peripheral relationship.

This idea that friendship is a lesser relationship certainly hasn’t always been true. In ancient Rome, a person might describe a friend with terms we’d now use for a spouse, like “half of my soul” or “the greater part of my soul.” Friendship used to be publicly celebrated.

But around the turn of the 20th century, same-sex friendships became suspect. That’s when the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality as distinct identities came into popular consciousness. Behavior that had previously been innocent could now mark you with the stigmatized label of “homosexual.” Some of this homophobia spills over today and creates barriers to intimacy, especially in friendships between men. And Americans’ rising expectations of marriage also contribute to the hollowing out of friendship. Your spouse is supposed to be your best friend…which doesn’t leave a lot of room for friends. A close friend could even be seen as a rival to a spouse, because a spouse is supposed to be #1.

3. You note that “we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much from them.” That not only spells trouble for those marriages and partnerships, but doesn’t it also hollow out community institutions, forcing couples to function simultaneously as economic, childcare and emotional support systems all at once?

Yes! Sociologists have a term that captures what’s going on here: they say marriage is a “greedy institution.” And research has shown that married people are less engaged in various parts of social and civic life than single people are.

In the US, we’ve come to expect the nuclear family to basically be a mini welfare state, despite how challenging it is for two adults (at max) to fulfill so many different, crucial needs. I find people in platonic partnerships so valuable to look at because they show some of the costs of this way of approaching romantic relationships and family. The people I’ve spoken to who lean heavily on friends — not expecting their romantic partner to be everything to them — say they have more energy to be the kinds of partners and parents that they want to be. They have a safety net when things go south—from having a friend drive a 3-year-old to preschool after their car has broken down to having a friend attend every single chemotherapy treatment.

4. At Fidelity we think a lot about household economics. In the course of your research, did you see financial advantages stemming from these deep friendships that traditional marriages might not provide?

Yes. Let me offer a few examples:

• Friends pooled resources in ways that allowed them to afford a standard of living they couldn’t have attained on their own. For instance, a couple of women who, at that point, had been best friends for 25 years, co-bought a house together because they couldn’t afford to buy separate homes. I’ve spoke n to people who share cars and other items that can be major expenses.
• A pair of women I interviewed have a 20-year age gap. The older woman is a photographer and activist and, as a result, doesn’t exactly have a bursting retirement fund. Her friend inherited money from her family and saw how elders in her community were ending up destitute. She offered to create a retirement fund of sorts for her friend, which has made a huge difference to the older friend’s financial security and peace of mind.
• Reducing the cost of caregiving: I recently wrote about parents who are raising their kids alongside friends. Because they have someone next door, a couple can go off on a date night without hiring a babysitter. The savings of having a childcare backstop next door add up quickly.

5. What innovative financial instruments, legal structures or policy changes should we consider to help the economic foundations these relationships provide?

I love this question! Some ideas:

• Make it easier for unrelated people to finance a home: buying a home with several people gets complicated quickly! Often the simplest method is to have a rich friend (no big deal) who can buy a house and then you rent from them. Or you go a more complicated route and create an LLC, but that typically has tax disadvantages.
• Make it easier for unrelated people to live in a home together: I’m currently searching for a rental with friends and someone leading the group around said we’d have to apply to become a boarding house with the number of people involved. (We’re still sussing out the veracity of that comment, but it is true that my city, Washington DC, like others, has restrictions on the number of unrelated people who can live together).
• Housing stock: people want homes with a blend of shared space and private space but they’re rare to find. Single-family zoning and other restrictions on density and occupancy don’t help.
• Legal alternatives to marriage: people who aren’t married are often without core protections and rights, like being allowed to make decisions for a loved one who’s in the hospital. But in most US states, there’s no option for legal protection other than marriage (unless you want to spend thousands on a bespoke contract that may or not ultimately be honored). An example of an alternative is a designated beneficiary law that currently exists in Colorado — which doesn’t restrict eligibility to people who are in a romantic relationship, and which allows people to exchange some key financial, health and end-of-life rights. It’s a simple, short, and cheap form.

The opinions provided are those of the author and not necessarily those of Fidelity Investments or its affiliates. Fidelity does not assume any duty to update any of the information. Fidelity and any other third parties mentioned are independent entities and not affiliated. Mentioning them does not suggest a recommendation or endorsement by Fidelity.

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