Do you put friendship at the centre of your life?

It's a question posed by Rhaina Cohen, a producer and editor at NPR. In her book The Other Significant Other, published this week, she asks us to imagine if we did.

Life is busy – a statement as self-aggrandising as it is permissive of poor behaviour. Pret A Manger are in receipt of more of my salary than I’m proud of, I’m back on three Americanos a day and my social life was last seen in 2023. I’m not bragging about being busy (it’s not the noughties). I’m not complaining about it, either. It’s a privileged kind of chaos, the kind that’s of my own making. But it isn’t without consequence.

An invisible circle has been drawn around my social life, confining my connected hours to those who fall within it. There’s my husband, who’s getting on with his life from the same four rooms as I am, and the colleagues who I see on office days. A persistent few have inserted themselves into my makeshift social bubble; fed up with her calls going unreturned, my sister came round for a sleepover on Friday. But most of the time, right now, it’s me and my husband – a social set-up that can come with the territory of centring your life around a romantic relationship.

House mates

If I’m busy, Rhaina Cohen is slammed. When I spoke to the producer, editor and journalist on Friday afternoon - three days after her book, The Other Significant, was published in the US - she was at the tail-end of a week of back-to-back press interviews. That her social health remained intact despite the schedule is a perk she owes to the subtitle of her book: re-imagining life with friendship at the centre. It’s a concept she both practises and preaches. Rhaina lives with her husband and two of their friends, along with their friends’ two children - a set-up that’s ‘transformed’ their friendships.

‘Before I lived with Naomi and Daniel, I put them on a pedestal,’ she tells me. Naomi’s presence is almost regal, Daniel’s knowledge encyclopaedic - and the awe she felt for both of them had a distancing effect. ‘But in the two and a half years we’ve lived together, we’ve seen each other when we’ve just rolled out of bed, when the kids are running around and when our parents are here. We've seen each other in so many contexts, under so many different forms of pressure - but also in joy. I just know them so much more fully than I ever did before.’

It isn’t the first time Rhaina has experienced this kind of platonic intimacy. She was in her twenties when she met the woman she refers to in her book as ‘M’. ‘It felt like: Why not hang out when we're having breakfast in the morning before work? Why not read alongside each other on the sofa? Why not just be in each other's company all the time?’ she recalls, of the heady early days of their friendship. In the months and years that followed, their bond would go on to expand her understanding of what a platonic relationship could be. It would inspire first an article, published in the Atlantic, later a book; the central question at the heart of both: what could our friendships look like without limits?

Significant others

Across 300 pages, Rhaina pens portraits of people whose closeness transcends the laws of friendship as most of us understand them. Described by psychology professor Eli Finkel as ‘other significant others’, they’re friends who, as Rhaina puts it, have ‘become a “we”, despite having no scripts, ceremonies or role models to guide them toward long-term platonic commitment.’ And from the woman who fought to become a legal guardian to her friend’s child to the women who cared for her friend through her cancer diagnosis until her death, their stories have one thing in common: it’s a platonic relationship, rather than a romantic one, that takes pole position.

If this arrangement sounds radical, it wasn’t always. ‘Historically, friendship used to be much more significant, partly because people didn’t expect that much from their spouses,’ Rhaina tells me, referring to that other kind of mate expectation. She likens marriage to a man spreader on a train, taking up more and more of the relational space with each passing stop. ‘If you go back 150 years, marriage was much more pragmatic; almost an economic contract. By the mid-nineteenth century, love got added to the mix and by the mid-twentieth century, even love and companionship were no longer enough. Now, we’re in a position where your spouse is supposed to be your best friend.’

It was hearing this sentiment being thrown around while attending the weddings of her friends that led Rhaina to start questioning it. ‘I don’t want to come across as judgemental and it clearly shows a level of connectedness that could be wonderful,’ she tells me, with a practised caution. ‘But I found it curious that we’re saying this is a good thing. You have this one person who is already expected to be the highest ranked person in your life, which is already worth questioning. But they’re also supposed to take the highest rank in a different category. Is that serving the relationship? Or would it be better for both parties if there were other deep relationships that were considered equal to the romantic relationship?’

Open book

Of course, unlearning the social conditioning of a lifetime isn’t quick work. Rhaina had been talking about living in a commune with friends since she was a teenager. But it took reaching her thirties for her to turn that aspiration into a reality. What helped was realising that it didn’t have to be all or nothing. ‘I remember reading about the legal and financial arrangements of this co-living community called Radish and thinking: “Wow, this is a tonne of work”. But it made me realise that I didn’t have to do something that involved in order to live with my friends. If they could do this really hard thing, surely I could do a version of it.’ It’s this gap, she believes, that a lot of us get stuck in; while the desire to take a more intentional approach to connection is there, it feels too far removed from our current lives to be achievable. ‘But when you realise that if you approach this desire a bit differently, you might actually be able to make it happen, it’s exciting.’

If you don’t need to move to a commune in order to begin the work of centring friendship, nor do you need a candidate lined up for the role of ‘other significant other’. When I ask Rhaina what spending so many hours, weeks and months inside some of the closest of friendships taught her about staying connected, she doesn’t miss a beat. ‘There’s a level of open communication among these friends that I think is quite extraordinary. They’re putting themselves out there without knowing if the other person will want to be as involved in their life. And offering to take a step like becoming co-parents or moving to a different city demonstrates a level of openness and vulnerability and communication that I think anyone who wants to deepen their friendships can learn from.’

This isn’t just an observation. In one of the most moving passages of her book, Rhaina lays bare the pain she felt after sensing that M was withdrawing from the friendship. The sense of loss felt so acute she describes it as an ‘intrapsychic grief’ - the clinical term for mourning a lost future with someone. After a period of ‘pattern matching’ her friend’s behaviour, she decided to broach it with her. It was precisely the kind of uncomfortable conversation that friends don’t have a script for. But one made possible, Rhaina believes, by the raised expectations that their relationship had enabled.

A few years on, they remain close friends, albeit without the intimacy they shared at the start of their friendship; Rhaina likens their connection to a dimmer switch, which can be turned both up and down. As painful as it must have been to write about, she wanted to normalise the idea that intimacy ebbs and flows in friendship - and give people the tools to make platonic love last. She already has. My heavily-highlighted copy is currently making its way to one of my best friends. Pictures of passages fill my WhatsApp threads and my Saturday morning was spent role-playing a difficult conversation my sister is preparing to have with a friend. The stuff of a rowdy social life, it isn’t; but it might just be the stuff of lasting love.