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

Rhaina Cohen's The Other Significant Others focuses on a unique type of relationship: “friends who have become a we, despite having no scripts, no ceremonies, and precious few models to guide them toward long-term platonic commitment” (6). Each chapter profiles a set of friends with this type of relationship and challenges deep-rooted social assumptions about meaningful relationships through their examples. Throughout the book, provocative questions frame that challenge: What do these friendships look like, and why are they so incomprehensible to other people and to the systems that govern US and Canadian society? What do relationships really require—is sex essential to partnership, a familial relationship to elder care, a romantic and sexual partnership to parenting? (13) Cohen argues that by understanding other significant others, we can better critically understand the meanings we assign to and structures we build around romance, sex, and commitment and conceptualize better alternatives, even for those with the “traditional” kind of significant other (12–13).Cohen's journalism background is evident throughout as she weaves interviews and observations of committed friendship with historical scholarship, social science research, and theory. History is a powerful tool in the book's project of denaturalizing romantic and sexual partnership. For example, in chapter 2, which focuses on the “other half” ideal of marriage and its deprecatory impact on friendship, she draws on histories of marriage to situate the all-encompassing nature of romantic married relationships as a modern invention and contend that “marriage doesn't have to rank above friendship” (40–42). She also makes a historiographical intervention in chapter 1, which focuses on the possibilities of platonic partnership. After summarizing the historiography of men's romantic friendships (22–24) and women's Boston marriages (28–31), which primarily place them in a modern framework of same-sex romantic and sexual partnerships, she notes a “risk of overcorrection”: “contemporary ideas about sex and intimacy aren't easily portable across time” and an attempt to place these relationships in a history of modern queer frameworks can obscure an equally longstanding history of committed friendship (31).Cohen also brings together strands of theory and research from across fields of study to help contextualize platonic relationships and their meanings. For example, “ambiguous loss,” which makes coping more complicated because it lacks a defined beginning and end point, is experienced by many when friendships dissolve (182). Chapter 6, about aging, demonstrates the further contribution of social science to the narrative. Cohen highlights AARP research showing that 10 percent of caregivers were friends or neighbors, not family, as is commonly assumed; this percentage is even higher among queer people (173). As a result, a stronger system to support platonic partnerships can help elders stay in their home and community and may also contribute to increased financial stability (164–65). This interdisciplinarity, along with the readable, engaging writing and thick description of the ways such partnerships play out in practice, result in a book with relevance and appeal to not only the general audience at which it is aimed, but also students and scholars with interests in kinship, relationships, or romance across disciplines.Although The Other Significant Others is not situated as a queer book, it engages with queerness in several ways. Although not universal, many of the friends who appear in the book identify as queer. In chapter 3, asexuality provides an important entry into unpacking one of the central tensions within social constructions of relationships: the close intertwining of sex and partnership, which all the other significant others undermine, regardless of their asexual or allosexual identity (84). Decentering sex allows asexual people to ask, “if sex isn't the thing that's going to be moving my life and my relationships forward, what is?” (86–87). Concepts from asexuality studies also pop up throughout the book—for example, Lisa Diamond's research on attraction (72–73) and the distinction between sexuality and eroticism, articulated by scholars like Sharon Marcus and Audre Lorde (33–34). It is interesting that the book does not engage at all with aromanticism, despite the diverse relationship practices of aromantic people that decenter sex and romance that have been researched and theorized by scholars such as Hannah Tessler, Canton Winer, C. Bougie, and yingchen and yingtong, authors of An Aromantic Manifesto (86). Even the brief inclusion of queerplatonic partnerships as a framework is divorced from aromanticism, instead linked only to asexuality. This oversight is one of the book's only real shortcomings.In addition, the book presents “other significant other” relationships as aligned with the broader definition of queer. As both the individual experiences and historical analysis show, these relationships resist easy categorization and hold immense potential to change relationship practices and norms broadly, through determined worldmaking that resists the limits of existing systems and structures (70). Chapter 5 tells the story of Natasha and Lynda, a pair of friends in Canada who were co-parenting Elaan, Natasha's biological child. They built a court case to secure Lynda's financial and legal parental rights not around Natasha and Lynda's relationship, but “the substance of the relationship between Lynda and Elaan” (136–38). Their case resulted in “the first time platonic co-parents were cognized in Canadian history,” a radical shift in the legal understanding of parenting (138).In doing so, these relationships undermine long-accepted and unexamined assumptions about relationships, gender, and sexuality (36). Consider, for example, the expectation that men only seek emotional and physical intimacy with romantic partners, which are unpacked in chapter 4 (106). This chapter, though strong in its analysis of gender, includes one of the book's other limitations, particularly when viewed through a queer lens. It profiles two Christian youth pastors: Art, who is gay and celibate, and his platonic partner Nick, who is straight and deals with underlying homophobia throughout much of their relationship (102). Cohen writes thoughtfully about the nuance and complexity of their relationship and beliefs, including Art's experience that progressive Christians treat him unfairly as “repressed or oppressed” (113). Although I do not intend to replicate that judgment on their individual beliefs or choices here, I believe that Cohen does not truly reckon with the implications of their positions as youth pastors who are inherently imparting ideas about how queerness should exist within the context of Christianity. The imposition of these ideas has the potential to harm young congregants.The book also explicitly discusses queer activist concerns, as chapter 8 addresses the same-sex marriage debate. Cohen profiles Amelie, a lesbian activist who rejected the idea of same-sex marriage as a “panacea” because it left out rights for people in nonmarital relationships, a limitation that she experienced firsthand as she tried to navigate caregiving and illness with a co-parent, their romantic partner, and her platonic partner (208–9). The complexity in Amelie's situation, as well as the issues faced by platonic couples who choose to marry, drives Cohen to argue that marriage can only be bent so far to new purposes. This leads Cohen into her proposed solution to the issues of recognition faced by nontraditional partners: a legal alternative to marriage that is highly customizable while still preserving the stability and freedom centered by existing marriage law (236–39).Underscoring the whole project is the concept and consequences of compulsory coupledom, coined by Eleanor Wilkinson: “the notion that a long-term monogamous romantic relationship is necessary for a normal, successful adulthood” (8). This is connected to compulsory heterosexuality, a similar assumption about the normalcy and normativity of male/female partnerships. It influences every anecdote in which a platonic partnership is not understood and it is the foundation for every legal limitation that platonic partners encounter. And it is important to note that it is the worldview that the other significant others have resisted and encourage others to deconstruct. In the conclusion, Cohen writes that these relationships “point toward a society that doesn't encourage a monoculture of monogamous romantic partnerships but instead recognizes a variety of profound connections,” undermining not just compulsory coupledom, but American individualism as well (242). Platonic partnerships are a source of resistance, joy, and freedom for those who engage in them, whether they have romantic relationships in their lives or not. This book represents an important step toward diversifying the kinds of relationships that we frame as important and, as a result, opening a new world of possibilities or a new language for platonic partnership.

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