Book Review: "The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center"

Rhaina Cohen's remarkable new book shows us the extraordinary power and joy that can emerge from truly deep friendships.

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A few months ago I attended the Annapolis Book Festival and, while there, I dropped in on a talk being given by Rhaina Cohen, who was speaking about her new book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. It was an exciting and thought-provoking talk, and it encouraged me to think about the nature of friendship and the role it plays in my own life. I’m one of those people who truly values my core group of friends, and I’m not ashamed to say that I rely on them to an extraordinary degree. I thus knew that I was going to have to read this book as soon as possible. 

When I finally sat down and started reading The Other Significant Others, I was immediately struck by its compelling argument and by the vision it offered of alternative ways of organizing our lives. Most of us have, to some degree, internalized the widespread idea that our romantic partners should be the most important relationship and bond in our lives. It’s why so many people announce that they have married their best friend. At the same time, there is also a pronounced loneliness epidemic that has afflicted Americans of every type. This makes this book all the more important and valuable to those of us who have already discovered why friends matter so much.

Indeed, as Cohen points out again and again, there’s a unique power to be had in friendship, particularly for those who center their lives around platonic rather than romantic bonds. In several chapters, she shines a fascinating light on a number of platonic couples who have reoriented their lives around a friend rather than a romantic partner. What is particularly striking about these pairings is just how diverse they are. In one chapter Cohen focuses on a celibate gay man and his straight best friend, who’ve gone so far as to move in with one another (even though the straight guy has also pursued a relationship with a woman). There are the two women who’ve been friends for decades and have now become inseparable parts of one another’s lives. 

Time and again, we see how friendship can be transformative and powerful and joyful, even as the closeness of such emotional bonds can often lead to devastating loss when one or the other passes away. As Cohen rightly points out, the challenge of these bonds is that our culture lacks the apparatuses to really cope with these bonds, to name them, or to provide the sort of support they need to really flourish, let alone to give us a vocabulary to express the intensity of the loss of such a bond. Americans really struggle to think outside of the monogamous marriage model when it comes to which relationships should matter the most and around which all of one’s life should be organized. This shortcoming is reflected in everything from the legal system–there are many, many benefits that married couples receive that unmarried one’s don’t–to the vocabularies that we use to describe the bonds in our lives. Despite the intensity of these friendships and partnerships, there’s very little in the way of support for those who enjoy them.

This is particularly problematic for older folks, many of whom are widowed and who are uniquely susceptible to the challenges posed by the loneliness epidemic. For those who don’t have a spouse or immediate family, a dear friend can literally be the difference between life and death, between living a life filled with emotional fulfillment and one characterized by emptiness. For such people, it can be very frustrating and at times debilitating to have their relationship delegitmized and shunted aside by those who simply can’t bring themselves to think outside of the marriage-as-all-important model. 

Though obviously Cohen is a journalist and draws in a number of facts and figures to highlight some of her key points, it’s really her power as a storyteller that allows this book to shine. She shows us the remarkable human beings who have privileged their platonic bonds over their romantic ones. Of particular note is Cohen’s own relationship with her dear friend M, and it’s really quite refreshing the extent to which she is willing to speak openly about their bond, its ups and downs, as well as the way it began to change as the years went by. Anyone who has ever had a friendship change around them will find much that resonates in Cohen’s account, and it’s precisely this emphasis on the personal details that makes this book such a remarkable mix of storytelling and journalistic reporting. 

Obviously not all of us will want to pursue the sort of platonic partnerships that Cohen analyzes, and we should all cultivate those kinds of friendships and bonds that will make us better people and allow us to find new ways of being in the world. However, as she reminds us again and again in The Other Significant Others, we are doing ourselves (and our romantic partners!) a disservice if we cling to the idea that there’s only one person in the world who should fulfill all of our emotional needs. If we force ourselves to think outside of the box that society continues to insist upon, there’s really almost no limit to the ways that our lives can be enriched and made fuller.

Some of us–particularly queer folks and fans of The Golden Girls–have long recognized that friendship has the power to reshape our lives and to give us something that romantic bonds cannot, but even so I still found The Other Significant Others to be something of a revelation. This book is truly one of those that challenges us to rethink what we’ve come to assume about the nature of human relationships and the roles that they have in our lives. We would all be well-advised to expand our circles, to tightly embrace our friends and those who enrich our lives and, most importantly of all, to build a better future for ourselves and our society.