Books › The Other Significant Others
The Other Significant Others
Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center
320 pages
A thoughtful, paradigm-shifting exploration of how centering platonic love can fundamentally reshape our lives and communities.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like having a deep, late-night conversation with a brilliant friend who suddenly makes you see the world differently. It moves at a steady, engaging pace, seamlessly weaving intimate personal narratives with rigorous sociological research. The mood is warm, reflective, and profoundly validating, offering a hopeful antidote to the modern loneliness epidemic. The prose is clear and journalistic, yet deeply empathetic, guiding the reader through a paradigm-shifting exploration of what it means to build a life around platonic love. It is a deeply comforting and intellectually stimulating experience, perfect for anyone who has ever felt constrained by traditional relationship escalators and yearns to reimagine the boundaries of commitment, family, and connection.
- Mood
- intimate
- hopeful
- reflective
- warm
- Tone
- thoughtful
- empathetic
- analytical
- inquisitive
- validating
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- redefining partnership · the power of platonic love · challenging societal norms · combating loneliness · chosen family
- The writing
- Clear, journalistic, and deeply empathetic, blending rigorous social science with intimate personal narratives.
- The arc
- Moves from questioning deeply ingrained societal assumptions to finding profound validation and hope in alternative models of connection.
- Who it's for
- Readers seeking to expand their understanding of love, community, and commitment beyond traditional romantic paradigms.
Content notes
- discussions of loneliness
- societal alienation
About the book
Why do we place romantic partnership on a pedestal? What do we lose when we expect one person to meet all our needs? And what can we learn about commitment, love, and family from people who put deep friendship at the center of their lives?
In The Other Significant Others, NPR's Rhaina Cohen invites us into the lives of people who have defied convention by choosing a friend as a life partner. Their riveting stories unsettle widespread assumptions about relationships, including the idea that sex is a defining feature of partnership and that people who raise kids together should be in a romantic relationship. Platonic partners from different walks of life—spanning age and religion, gender and sexuality and more—reveal the freedom and challenges of embracing a relationship model that society doesn't recognize. And they show that orienting your world around friends isn't just the stuff of daydreams and episodes of The Golden Girls, but possible in real life.
Based on years of original reporting and drawing on striking social science research, Cohen argues that we make romantic relationships more fragile by expecting too much of them, while we undermine friendships by expecting too little of them. She traces how, throughout history, our society hasn’t always fixated on marriage as the greatest source of meaning, or even love. At a time when many Americans are spending large stretches of their lives single, widowed or divorced, or feeling the effects of the "loneliness epidemic," Cohen makes the case that one model of a flourishing adulthood—lifelong romantic partnership—isn't enough. A rousing and incisive book, The Other Significant Others challenges us to ask what we want from our relationships—not just what we’re supposed to want—and transforms how we define a fulfilling life.
Description from Open Library.
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