Elevating Friendships
Our culture tends to acknowledge only certain types of coupled romantic partnerships, but deep friendships can be just as significant and important.
I’ve read lots of books about relationships. Books about nonmonogamy and polyamory. Books about the ins and outs of creating and maintaining relationships. Books about highly specific types of one-on-one relationships. Many of them were excellent. But a recent book struck me as delivering an incredibly important message. So, I want to highlight that book here.
The book is The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center (paid link) by Rhaina Cohen. I’ve read Cohen’s writing in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic (my favorite publication lately). I was already familiar with her writing. When I heard about her upcoming book, I pre-ordered it and immediately consumed it in its entirety when it landed on my Kindle app a few hours after publication.
What prompted me to buy the book was Maria Popova’s post on her The Marginalian blog, “The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom.” Popova’s site is my favorite blog and I consider Popova one of the most intellectually rich and skilled writers working today. When Popova writes about something, I take notice.
Cohen positions the content of the book this way in 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. These are friends who have moved together across states and continents. They’ve been their friend’s primary caregiver through organ transplants and chemotherapy. They’re co-parents, co-homeowners, and executors of each other’s wills. They belong to a club that has no name or membership form, often unaware that there are others like them. They fall under the umbrella of what Eli Finkel, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, calls “other significant others.” Having eschewed a more typical life setup, these friends confront hazards and make discoveries they wouldn’t have otherwise.
People who haven’t experienced a friendship like this firsthand may not even realize they’ve seen one before, although they’ve likely known others who’ve had one and can recognize it when it’s pointed out. It was common for friends and acquaintances I told about this book to recall, as if an aha thought bubble had bloomed above their heads, an aunt or a grandmother who shared a house with a friend until the end of life. Doctors who worked with older patients told me that frequently the person at a dying patient’s bedside is not a spouse or relative but a longtime, dear friend.
Of all the relationship books I've seen published in recent years, this feels to me to be among the most important. To the best of my knowledge, no one has so clearly called out how much we ignore the importance of friendships and how those friendships can serve as replacements for or supplements to the more commonly accepted one-on-one style of romantic partner or spouse our culture has historically elevated and championed.
As I described in a recent post, “How Many Relationships Do I Have?,” yes, I have a long-term partner. Yes, I date two other remarkable men. But I also have so many friends in my life who hold equally important places in my relationship sphere. I'm sexually intimate with some of them. With others I'm not. Whether I am or not doesn't relegate them to a higher or lower ranking of importance. Friendships are as coveted by me as are romantic partners.
My guess is that my experience as a kinky gay man having navigated for decades within both the queer and kink communities has given me a better foundation from which to understand the message of Cohen’s book. The same can be said of my lifelong nonmonogamous and polyamorous lifestyle.
Queer people have historically had to create and manage relationship structures and values outside of the heterosexual paradigm. Although same-sex marriage is now more commonplace, the recent rise of anti-LGBTQ sentiment from extremist right-wing political elements has illustrated yet again that in queer culture it’s a strong network of friends and intimates that will support us when general society will not.
Kinksters also exist on the periphery of acceptability and have their own created social and relationship structures to rely upon to identity and codify the kink-centered relationships important to them.
Polyamory has seen a recent spate of popularity in our culture and those who explore such relationship options already understand that we can form intimate and close bonds with more than one person and those relationships may or may not contain a sexual component. Those who embrace polyamory more naturally understand the vast array of options we can have when identifying significant others.
Indeed, in her post Popova references this passage from Cohen’s book to point out that along with queer people others who color outside of the sexual and relationship lines have questioned the compulsory coupledom ethos. While not specifically mentioned, I contend kinksters also belong in the company of those Cohen mentions since they too have often redefined how meaningful relationships look and function.
Challenging these social norms is not new, nor are platonic partners the only dissidents. People who are feminists, queer, trans, of color, nonmonogamous, single, asexual, aromantic, celibate, or who live communally have been questioning these ideas for decades, if not centuries. All have offered counterpoints to what Eleanor Wilkinson, a professor at the University of Southampton, calls compulsory coupledom: the notion that a long-term monogamous romantic relationship is necessary for a normal, successful adulthood. This is a riff on the feminist writer Adrienne Rich’s influential concept of “compulsory heterosexuality” — the idea, enforced through social pressure and practical incentives, that the only normal and acceptable romantic relationship is between a man and a woman. Some of the first stories we hear as children instill compulsory coupledom, equating characters finding their “one true love” with living “happily ever after.”
The audience for this newsletter is people who have beyond a cursory interest in sexuality and relationship options. While many people can have a perfectly happy and successful relationship and sexual life with one romantically-bonded person, others desire and seek alternative options.
I hope Cohen’s book sees a large readership. It's going to be a book I advocate be widely read because so many people I know or observe feel trapped by compulsory coupledom but don't know how to view relationships any other way. Cohen’s book shows another way.
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