Book summary “The Other Significant Others”: summary

Introduction

You live in a society that treats romantic love as the ultimate pinnacle of human connection. Amatonormativity and compulsory coupledom teach you that a spouse must fulfill every single need for intimacy, housing, and emotional security. Relying on one person places an unsustainable burden on a single relationship and leaves you vulnerable when romance ends or falters.

Deep platonic partnerships can rival romantic relationships in intimacy and support, offering a vital model for a fulfilling life beyond conventional coupledom.

Rhaina Cohen explores how people forge life-altering bonds with friends that challenge the supremacy of the nuclear family. The book examines the history of platonic commitment, the biology of attachment, the social barriers men face, and the legal structures that penalize non-romantic households.

• What does it take to build a life-long partnership with a friend?
• How do you restructure legal, financial, and housing arrangements without a marriage certificate?
• Why do friendships that rival marriage remain invisible to society?

1. Defining the Relationship

You might meet someone and build an intense bond that mirrors the emotional security of falling in love. This connection can provide deep support and shared daily presence far beyond standard friendship norms.

Meeting a profoundly influential platonic friend can replicate the exhilaration and psychological security of falling in love without sexual desire.

Rhaina Cohen formed a close bond with a woman named M after moving to Washington, D.C., in 2017 and entering a relationship with Marco two and a half years prior. Four months after they met, M first said I love you, establishing a platonic partnership built on daily voice memos and shared gatherings.

Historical Precedents

History shows that intensely committed platonic relationships between people of the same sex have frequently received public, ritual, and spiritual recognition. You can look to medieval European tombs or Byzantine rites to see formal bonds that matched the weight of marriage.

John Bloxham and John Whytton met around 1364 at Merton College in Oxford and maintained a twenty-year friendship. When Bloxham died in 1387, Whytton funded a ten-foot-long brass monument marking their joint crypt.

Monks in late antiquity participated in adelphopoiesis or brother-making rituals. Similar arrangements included:

• wedded brotherhoods;
• French affrèrement;
• Chinese sworn brotherhoods.

The Quest for Nomenclature

In earlier centuries, passionate declarations of love and physical intimacy between friends did not automatically imply sexual desire. People frequently shared beds and used romantic language without modern assumptions about sexuality.

In 1809, printer Thomas B. Wait wrote an ardent letter to George Thatcher assuring him that his heart's last pulsations would vibrate for him.

Students at Vassar and Wellesley engaged in romantic friendships known as smashing or raving. As women gained educational and professional opportunities, lifelong cohabitating unions emerged.

Lucy Diggs Slowe, a dean at Howard University, and Mary Burrill, a teacher and playwright, purchased a Queen Anne house on a hill in Washington, D.C., in 1922. They lived together for about fifteen years as partners until Slowe's death in 1937.

Distinguishing between sexual desire and erotic energy broadens how you interpret past and present feelings. Audre Lorde defines the erotic as a force that strengthens resolve and fosters aliveness.

You often struggle to find shared language for intense platonic partnerships despite their profound significance. Oprah Winfrey expressed deep devotion to Gayle King during an interview, describing her as the mother she never had and the sister everyone deserves.

2. Other Significant Others

Distributing emotional and practical needs across a diverse portfolio of relationships reduces stress and strengthens romantic partnerships.

For centuries, marriage functioned as an economic or political alliance where love was merely a bonus. Novelist Jane Austen wrote about the grim dilemma women faced when choosing between financial security and affection, noting that single women had a dreadful propensity for poverty.

Psychologist Eli Finkel describes recent decades as the era of the self-expressive marriage. You now expect a spouse to act as a sculptor revealing your best inner self. While top-tier marriages reach historic heights, average marriages suffer under this all-or-nothing model.

Sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian found that married Americans socialize less with neighbors and call relatives less. Marriage acts as a greedy institution that crowds out external social ties and support networks.

The Relationship Portfolio

Relying on other significant others, or OSOs, creates a safety net so that the end of a single romantic relationship does not mean losing your entire support system.

A 2015 study led by psychologist Elaine Cheung found that people who disperse emotional needs across multiple relationships are happier. A 2018 study measured cortisol levels in married people and found those with satisfying outside social support experienced less physiological stress.

Kami West and Tilly Tillotson maintain a deep platonic partnership where Tilly acts as a primary confidant and co-parenting support. This arrangement allows Kami to vent daily frustrations before her romantic partner Rawley comes home.

Framily Networks

Tilly and Kami coined the term framily to describe their expanded network of care. In 2022, Tilly moved into Kami's house in Broken Arrow.

Ziraya and her children lived with Kami and Tilly for nine or so months. Tilly printed vote for Tilly flyers to insert into unexpected places like school textbooks as part of an ongoing family draft joke with the children.

The relationship escalator dictates that serious relationships must follow a predetermined path toward exclusivity. Because society struggles to comprehend deep platonic bonds, friends like Andrew Bergman and Toly Rinberg adopted the framework of ethical non-monogamy in dating to communicate the immense priority of their friendship.

In 2019, Toly spoke openly about Andrew while dating. In February 2020, Andrew worried about discussing non-monogamy with Nevena. By 2021, Toly explained his friendship using updated terms on a date.

Andrew and Toly made major life decisions together, such as transferring to the same university and leaving graduate school to start a government transparency nonprofit in Washington, D.C. This intense bond repeatedly caused misunderstandings with their romantic partners.

You can build a resilient support system by applying these practical steps:

• Make a list of what you want in a partner and what you will not put up with.
• Distribute emotional and practical needs across multiple trusted relationships.

3. What is Sex Got to Do with It?

Society usually defines the shift from friendship to romance through sex. You might assume that romantic relationships are simply friendships plus sex.

When you try to separate deep platonic bonds from romance, sex appears as the dividing line. The author found that the only difference between her relationships with Marco and M was that she had sex with Marco.

Passionate Friendships

Many individuals experience intense platonic friendships that rival romantic relationships in emotional depth, affection, and physical closeness without involving sexual longing.

Psychologist Lisa Diamond studied eighty lesbian, bisexual, or unlabeled women in 2000. She found that seventy out of eighty women in Lisa Diamond's study reported having a platonic friendship as emotionally intense as a romantic relationship. These passionate friendships involved inseparability and cuddling in an in-between world.

Lust and love run on distinct biological pathways and serve different evolutionary functions. Androgens and estrogens drive sexual desire. Love triggers oxytocin and dopamine to create lasting attachment bonds originally evolved for infant survival.

In a 1979 study, 61 percent of women and 35 percent of men reported having experienced love without a desire for sex. Thirty years later, 76 percent of respondents in a survey agreed true love can exist without a radiant or active sex life.

The 19th century in the West shaped sex into a core component of individual identity and moral worth. You may still view sex as the ultimate path to liberation. Yet romantic relationships fit Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of a family resemblance rather than a single essence.

Queerplatonic Partnerships

The core value of a privileged relationship is having a reliable long-term teammate for daily life. Andrew noted that while he adores his childhood friends, those bonds lack partnership because they do not glide easily between mundane logistics and deep feelings.

Asexuality allows you to explore queerplatonic partnerships. These are committed relationships lacking conventional sexual and romantic trappings.

Stacey and Grace envisioned building a future together as primary partners through these practices:

• considering co-parenting;
• living together;
• holding a friend-wedding despite incompatible sexual orientations.

4. Be Your Own Man

The fear of being perceived as gay heavily restricts American men from expressing physical and emotional intimacy with other male friends.

Sociologist Eric Anderson notes that high homophobia combined with a belief that homosexuality is prevalent leads men to adjust their behavior to avoid homophobic social consequences. Consequently, American men are discouraged from physical affection and deep emotional sharing, forcing them to rely almost exclusively on romantic partners for emotional support. In 2021, a survey showed men were about half as likely as women to report having recently received emotional support from a friend.

Nick Galluccio initially avoided going on a free vacation to Hawaii using Art's credit card points and worried about public perception of his close friendship with Art, fearing others would assume they were romantic partners.

Modern American men suffer from an acute impoverishment of close friendships, leading to heightened risks of loneliness, depression, and suicide compared to women. In 1990, more than half of men reported having at least six close friends. By 2021, only about a quarter of men reported having at least six close friends. In 2021, 15 percent of men reported having no close friendships, representing a fivefold increase from 1990.

The Crisis of Male Loneliness

Physical and emotional intimacy between male friends was historically common, expected, and considered a measure of strong character in Western society. In 1851, an engineer named James Blake described weeping and laying his head on a friend's bosom. Studies of photographs from the 1850s to 1950s by John Ibson show ordinary men routinely sitting on each other's laps and holding hands.

Men can overcome internal discomfort with platonic intimacy by utilizing a three-part framework to separate moral rules from cultural conditioning and personal preferences. Art and Nick developed a cognitive framework to diagnose why physical or emotional closeness feels uncomfortable.

• Ask what is moral regarding the behavior.
• Ask what is cultural regarding the behavior.
• Ask what is personal regarding the behavior.

The Terrace Cohabitation Model

Adult friends can successfully commit to cohabiting and functioning as a primary household unit, providing mutual support and companionship outside traditional nuclear family structures. Art and Nick formalized their bond by moving into a two-floor apartment they named The Terrace. Over the course of two years, Art hosted six hundred tea dates on his dorm room floor. Author Andrew Reiner interviewed about two hundred boys and men about masculinity and friendship.

5. Functional Families

Historically, the nuclear model of the 1950s was an anomaly rather than an ancient standard. Anthropologically, humans evolved through alloparenting, where non-biological figures helped raise dependent children. Legal systems and social norms are slowly recognizing that behavior, intent, and love matter more than blood ties.

Biology and marriage are not necessary conditions for kinship or parenthood, as human history and modern sociology show that cooperative child-rearing has always been the norm.

In 2020, 70 percent of children lived with two parents of any marital status in the United States, down from 85 percent in 1968. In Canada, 20 percent of children younger than fifteen live in a single-parent household. Legal definitions of parenthood shifted over time from strict reliance on marriage to acknowledging intent and conduct.

Platonic Coparenting

Platonic friends can form highly stable, effective co-parenting units that thrive without the romantic or sexual dynamics traditionally deemed essential. Scholars and real-world examples prove that mutual respect, shared values, and deep emotional commitment make a co-parenting relationship work. Platonic partners often avoid the gender role traps that plague traditional couples.

Natasha Bakht had a child via anonymous donor sperm and raised him with the help of her platonic friend Lynda Collins. Lynda eventually legally adopted him despite lacking any biological or romantic connection, securing a declaration of parentage in Ontario.

Multiparent Households

Expanding a household to include three or more parents introduces scheduling complexity but provides massive advantages in resources, skill sets, and emotional support. More parents mean multiple income sources and shared labor, protecting against burnout.

Natasha, Lynda, and Justine formed a three-parent household in Ottawa to care for Natasha's son Elaan, who has cerebral palsy. The adults rotated night shifts at the hospital during Elaan's eight-hour hip surgery and his two and a half months in a rehabilitation hospital.

Limited cultural imagination restricts the life choices you contemplate. Organizations like Family Story run surveys revealing that a majority of unmarried mothers would consider raising children outside of a traditional spouse or romantic partnership.

6. The Long Haul

As people age, close friendships become more predictive of health and longevity than marriage, providing essential mutual care and companionship.

Demographic shifts create a swelling population of kinless older adults. The US Census projects life expectancy will increase to 85.6 by 2060. One in five older adults is an elder orphan or at risk of becoming one. The number of seventy-five-year-olds without a living spouse is projected to grow from 875,000 in 2010 to 1.8 million in 2030.

Older women face higher rates of widowhood and lower median incomes. Above age sixty-five, 47 percent of women are married compared to 69 percent of men. Widows number more than three times widowers. Poverty rates for older Black women are two and a half times those of older white men.

While people under sixty face higher early mortality risks if unmarried, close relationships with friends have more sway on survival after sixty. Friendships ward off the negative physical and mental health consequences of loneliness.

Shared Living Arrangements

Growing numbers of older adults share homes with friends to secure companionship and manage financial constraints. An AARP survey showed adults age fifty and older who share homes grew from 2 percent in 2014 to 16 percent in 2018. Meanwhile, 27 percent of Americans age sixty-five and older now live alone.

Barb Buettner and Inez Conrad bought a ranch-style house together in Kirkwood, Missouri, in 1998. They shared household chores, expenses, and daily routines as a true partnership. A group of eight friends in Texas built a tiny house compound dubbed Bestie Row to secure mutual support in their later years.

Platonic Caregiving

Platonic partners successfully function as mutual caregivers during medical crises. LGBTQ older adults are four times as likely to have a friend as a caregiver. This stems from forming chosen families after family rejection or lacking traditional children.

Barb and Inez supported their friend Ann through a cancer diagnosis, surgery, and hospice care for three years after discovering she had no living family members. Platonic partners establish legal powers of attorney and deliver continuous care without feeling like a burden.

7. Give Them Grief

Losses in friendship without a definitive end, such as a slow drift or fading away, create ambiguous loss and frozen grief. Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss for situations lacking a well-defined conclusion like death or divorce. Mourners struggle because they may not realize there is something to grieve.

The author experienced a slow fade in her deep friendship with M after physical distance, busy schedules, and parallel lives created emotional distance.

Grief over the death of a close friend is often disenfranchised because societal institutions do not recognize non-family bonds.

Kenneth Doka defined disenfranchised grief as grief that cannot be openly acknowledged, mourned, or supported by others. You face workplace policies that deny bereavement leave and hospital rules that bar friends from caregiving or being present. Cultural and legal norms establish a rigid hierarchy of grief that privileges nuclear family and romantic partnerships over platonic ones.

Joy Loughry could not take bereavement leave or Family and Medical Leave Act time off when her best friend Hannah died of ovarian cancer because they were not related by blood or marriage. Hannah fought ovarian cancer for 6 years before entering hospice. Joy returned to work 3 days after Hannah died because she lacked bereavement leave. Joy had to pretend to be Hannah's wife in hospital rooms to avoid getting kicked out.

The Hierarchy of Grief

Romantic relationships often crowd out close friendships because of the social and emotional capacity they demand. According to evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, your inner social circle typically contains 5 inner ring shoulder-to-cry-on friendships in social circles, but a romantic relationship takes up 2 rations, usually knocking out two friends.

Journalist Rebecca Traister and her close friend Sara grew apart and experienced a profound loss of connection after Sara moved hundreds of miles away to live with her boyfriend.

Evolving Friendships

Friendship breakups and declines often trigger unrelatable loss and a unique breed of shame due to social stigma. Because society assumes friendships are sturdy and simple, the end of a platonic connection often makes you feel personally unworthy or fearful of being cast out of the tribe.

Patti Miller described friend breakups as shameful events that are rarely discussed with other friends due to the fear of being found unworthy.

Meg-John Barker suggests moving away from a decisive breakup model of relationships so that aspects like housing, intimacy, or crisis support can change without destroying the entire bond. You can view relationships as dynamic collages or dimmer switches rather than binary on-off agreements.

The author and M transitioned from platonic partners to professional counselors and voice-memo correspondents, later forming a close three-way friendship with a woman named Helen. Joy Loughry established a yearly ritual of baking a Mexican chocolate pepper cake on the anniversary of Hannah's death, using specific memories to keep her close.

8. Friends, with Benefits

American law enforces marital supremacy by granting over a thousand federal rights exclusively to married couples.

American law enforces a stark inequality between married and unmarried individuals by granting over a thousand federal rights exclusively to married couples.

Legal scholar Serena Mayeri terms the legal privileging of married couples marital supremacy. This creates a vast rights gap, leaving committed nonmarital relationships without protection in healthcare, taxes, and bereavement.

Amelie Zurn-Galinsky and her partner Licia faced extensive legal hurdles, home inspections, and adoption fees for their children because same-sex marriage was not yet legal, a rigor they would have entirely avoided under marriage rights.

Designated Beneficiaries

A flexible, à la carte legal registration model like Colorado's designated beneficiary agreement can provide essential rights without enforcing marriage.

Legal scholars propose moving away from a one-size-fits-all marriage model toward systems that allow any two adults to assign specific healthcare and financial rights independently, without requiring reciprocity or a romantic status.

Beginning in 2009, Colorado allowed adults to register a designated beneficiary agreement using a two-page form covering rights across sixteen categories. You can use similar tools when available to protect your chosen family:

• fill out a two-page form to register a designated beneficiary agreement;
• choose to grant or withhold each of the sixteen available health and financial rights à la carte.

Functional Legal Reforms

Legal reforms should focus on the actual functions of relationships, such as caregiving and economic support, rather than enforcing marital status.

Scholars like Vivian Hamilton suggest that instead of using marriage as a blunt proxy for support, the state should tailor laws to address specific functions like dependency or caregiving directly, thereby accommodating the 40 percent of adults who are unmarried.

Some states have based workers' compensation survivor benefits directly on financial dependency rather than the legal status of marriage. You can apply this functional lens to evaluate policies:

• audit existing laws that make marriage the dividing line for benefits;
• ask the purpose and underlying goal of each law;
• adjust the legal criteria to target the specific function like dependency instead of marital status.

10 Key Ideas

1. Amatonormativity and compulsory coupledom teach people that a spouse must fulfill every single need for intimacy, housing, and emotional security, placing an unsustainable burden on a single relationship.
2. Meeting a profoundly influential platonic friend can replicate the exhilaration and psychological security of falling in love without sexual desire.
3. Distributing emotional and practical needs across a diverse portfolio of relationships reduces stress and strengthens romantic partnerships.
4. Many individuals experience intense platonic friendships that rival romantic relationships in emotional depth, affection, and physical closeness without involving sexual longing.
5. The fear of being perceived as gay heavily restricts American men from expressing physical and emotional intimacy with other male friends.
6. Biology and marriage are not necessary conditions for kinship or parenthood, as human history and modern sociology show that cooperative child-rearing has always been the norm.
7. As people age, close friendships become more predictive of health and longevity than marriage, providing essential mutual care and companionship.
8. Grief over the death of a close friend is often disenfranchised because societal institutions do not recognize non-family bonds.
9. American law enforces a stark inequality between married and unmarried individuals by granting over a thousand federal rights exclusively to married couples.
10. A flexible, à la carte legal registration model like Colorado's designated beneficiary agreement can provide essential rights without enforcing marriage, while functional legal reforms should focus on the actual functions of relationships like caregiving and economic support.