Here are my favorite quotes from Rhaina Cohen’s 2024 book, The Other Significant Others.
It’s a long, dense, and fairly academic read—not one I’d recommend to most casual readers—but it’s punctuated by brilliant observations and summaries.
Compulsory coupledom
Challenging these social norms is not new, nor are platonic partners the only dissidents. People who are feminists, queer, trans, of color, non-monogamous, 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.”
One-stop shopping
One man I interviewed observed that many people he knows have a “one-stop shopping” approach to romantic relationships: get your sexual partner, confidant, co-parent, housemate, and more, all in the same person. Prominent experts have recognized this pattern and are concerned about it. “When we channel all our intimate needs into one person,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel writes, “we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.” Such totalizing expectations for romantic relationships can leave us with no shock absorber if a partner falls short in even one area. While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.
A different kind of “erotic”
[Slowe & Burrill’s] house, where they lived together for about fifteen years, was a hub for students, educators, politicians, and activists. Grinnell College professor Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant, who wrote a biography of Slowe, believes Slowe and Burrill had an erotic relationship in Audre Lorde’s understanding of the term: one that strengthens your resolve, feeds creativity, and gives you energy to change the world around you. Like many other women in these arrangements, theirs was a female universe, built around the intellectual and emotional lives of other women—in Slowe’s and Burrill’s cases, the lives of Black women.
Marriage as “hard work”
Some of these higher expectations are a welcome change from a time when wives had disconcertingly low standards. When Coontz interviewed women in the 1950s and ’60s, they made remarks like, “Oh, it’s a good enough marriage—he doesn’t hit me.” The bar is not that low these days, but expectations may have swung too far in the other direction, so extensive that they’re hard for one person to satisfy. That doesn’t stop spouses from trying. Having heard the relatively recent maxim that “marriage is hard work,” spouses put in effort to maintain a successful relationship. In an essay analyzing prominent on-screen depictions of marriage, the New York Times cultural critic A. O. Scott writes, “In film and television, work and wedded bliss are now synonymous: the harder marriage is, the more romantic it seems.”
The downside of soulmates
The all-encompassing expectations for marriage can compromise relationships that sit outside matrimony’s cocoon. The sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian write that the common goal of finding a “soulmate,” which is an aspiration that few people declared only decades ago, “means turning inward—pushing aside other relationships.” Partners who see each other as soulmates pour their energy into each other, and that’s time lost on friends and neighbors. In an analysis of large national surveys from the 1990s and early 2000s, Gerstel and Sarkisian found that married Americans were less likely than unmarried or divorced Americans to live with, visit, or call relatives. Married Americans socialized with neighbors or friends less than unmarried Americans, were far less likely to take care of aging parents than unmarried adult children, and were less politically involved. Gerstel and Sarkisian conclude that marriage, instead of being the cornerstone of community, as many politicians and experts claim, often strains community ties. Other researchers found that when wives believed that marriage is a relationship between soulmates—rather than a loving relationship that is also about forming a financial partnership and raising children—both the husband and wife were less likely to spend time volunteering. All this undivided attention that marriage demands, sociologists say, makes it a “greedy institution.”
A diverse relationship portfolio
Whether or not a romantic partnership has been formalized through marriage, the effect is the same: people who feel dissatisfied in their relationship may find it easier to blame themselves or their partner rather than faulty expectations. Even if the thought of deepening connections with friends or family members crosses their mind, it might not feel like a way to strengthen the marriage but instead like settling.
These standards don’t just harm people who are actively dissatisfied. People who are currently in a rewarding romantic relationship may find, at some point, that having more than one person to lean on would enrich their lives. It’s a safety net: if one person is your everything and the relationship ends, you stand to lose it all your confidant, best friend, sexual partner, professional coach, and more all at once.
[. . .]
On the whole, a diverse relationship portfolio makes for more satisfying romantic relationships. A 2015 study led by psychologist Elaine Cheung found that people who disperse their emotional needs across multiple relationships are happier than those who concentrate their needs in fewer.
[. . .]
The idea of distributing the load also underpins ethical non-monogamy-the practice of consensually forming nonexclusive romantic relationships. Some advocates of ethical non-monogamy argue that many people enjoy a better relationship with a primary partner when the pressures on that relationship are reduced by an outside one.
In this setup, prospective partners must sidestep the typical trajectory for romantic relationships—what’s been called “the relationship escalator.” This term refers to the expectation that a couple in a “serious” relationship should ramp up their commitment and entwinement, becoming exclusive and accumulating roles of confidant, roommate, co-homeowner, co-parent, caregiver, default plus-one. Like an escalator, these expectations have a momentum of their own.
Deep friendships as non-monoagamy
Though Andrew and Toly didn’t feel the need to define the friendship for themselves, they thought they should find a way to make the friendship more comprehensible to others. The breakup at the café was part of a pattern in which, three to six months into a romantic relationship, a woman would want to occupy a larger share of Andrew’s or Toly’s lives than either was willing to give. Andrew and Toly didn’t hide how important their friendship was and that it would continue to be their priority, and yet that idea took a long time for the women they dated to fully understand. It was like Andrew and Toly’s friendship was a UV light, not a color on the visible spectrum; no matter how much information their girlfriends had about it, they couldn’t see it and only started to grasp its power once they felt burned.
As averse as Toly was to the therapist’s marriage comparison, it at least put his friendship with Andrew on par with a romantic relationship, much like how I felt affirmed when my friend told me I was practicing polyamory with M and Marco. To avoid confusion with future romantic partners, Andrew and Toly needed to convey just this, that they were as devoted to each other as are people in long-term romantic relationships. They found an existing framework—non-monogamy—and tried on the label for size. Though neither of them felt drawn to having more than one romantic partner, they decided to tell potential dates that they were nonmonogamous, so that women wouldn’t be caught off guard by the friendship’s significance in their lives.
Men once touched each other
In Picturing Men, a study of thousands of ordinary photographs of men taken between the 1850s and 1950s, California State University, Fullerton professor John Ibson shows how men of all races, classes, and regions openly engaged in physical intimacy with other men. Common poses included sitting on each other’s laps, hold-ing hands, or resting their head on the other man’s shoulder. Physical closeness was once a prime feature of male friendship.
The legend of the nuclear family
With the help of economic prosperity and government programs that encouraged a male-breadwinner/female-caregiver family, the nuclear family thrived in 1950s America. “The legendary white middle-class family of the 1950s,” the historian Elaine Tyler May writes, “was not, as common wisdom tells us, the last gasp of ‘traditional’ family life with roots deep in the past. Rather, it was the first wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members’ personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life.” Despite being an anomaly, this period has become the source of so much contemporary nostalgia and the yardstick against which other families are now measured.
Leaving the “breakup model” of relationship
When I was navigating some major life changes that M had experienced firsthand, we returned to a steady cadence of exchanging voice memos, an indicator that our friendship can alter in intensity depending on what’s happening in our lives. We were inadvertently following Meg-John Barker’s proposal to move away from a breakup model of relationships. If we stop expecting relationships to come to a decisive end, Barker explains in Rewriting the Rules: An Anti Self-Help Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships, “it becomes possible to change one of these aspects [housemate, sexual intimacy, supporters in times of crisis] without necessarily changing all of the others. Which ones aren’t working anymore? Which ones still are?” Unlike many romantic relationships that operate with an on-off switch—you’re either each other’s number one or absent from each other’s lives—our friendship is more like a dimmer that can easily be adjusted. . . .
I would never use the term ex to describe M, but I nevertheless recognized my own experience in Barker’s idea to think of exes “as the people we’ve reached the height of intimacy with … Perhaps we can view these people as the most valuable and precious relationships in our lives, instead of hating them or relegating them to the past.” Valuable and precious is exactly how I think of my friendship with M. Just in the first couple of years of knowing her, she reshaped my understanding of platonic relationships and expanded my sense of who I could be.