From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. One of my preoccupations in the past couple of years, and this comes out of issues in my own life, it comes out of being a parent, it comes out of these larger social conversations about loneliness epidemics and friendship recessions is, I think uniting a lot of difficulties in the communal life of Americans, at least, is what I think of as the post-extended family era.
That for a huge amount of time in human history, who we married, how we raised children, who was around us, was structured, for worse sometimes, but also often for better or just for reliability, by the extended family, by a kin network.
There were always people, people who could make asks of, people who would make asks of you, who parents aged around, was decided, who would lend helping hands with kids, was known, who would help somebody find a romantic partner that was a solved problem, again, not for everybody, but we had a structure. And we're living through this wild experiment now. We're living through the end of the age, the after, the end of the age of the nuclear family.
As my colleague David Brooks's were in the nuclear family, was actually a pretty punctuated period of time when most people lived in that. Now the share of Americans between the ages of 25 and 54, who married, is dwindled from two thirds of the population in 1990 to barely half today. Today about 40% of children are born to unmarried parents. And what we're doing in my estimation is not working. People are lonely, they don't have enough friends.
It's incredibly hard to be a two parent, two job family raising children. It is unimaginably hard to be a single parent with a job raising children. You have a lot of people aging alone. And I don't think we look at this expansively enough. There's been a bunch of coverage recently of polyamory, which is like a wonderful thing to discuss. But polyamory doesn't solve aging, it doesn't necessarily solve or even have that much to say about parenting.
And it doesn't say that much about relationships that are non-romantic. And so I feel like I was a perfect audience for RANIC Cohen's forthcoming book, The other significant others, reimagining life with friendship at the center. Partially because I have one of these very intense friendships near the center of my life. And that's important to me. And it was part of why I'm moving across the country for me was a hard and difficult thing.
But also just because I think it is asking the right question, which is how do we open the relational apertures of our lives? How do we imagine many other possibilities for parenting, for aging, for intimacy, for friendship, for romance, then what we have right now? Because the idea that what we have right now is a working norm and everything else should be understood as some deviation is wrong. It is factually untrue. It is not a norm. It is a wild experiment in the history of human existence.
We have never done this before for any period of time. It's not how we've raised children. It is not how we've met each other. It is not how we've lived together. And it's not working for a lot of people. So this is an experiment and we should be trying more. And what Cohen's book is about is these experiments is looking at things people are already doing. And in a sense, making clear that there are more relationships happening right now in the world around you, more forms of relationship.
Then you could possibly imagine as always my email as your client show at nbytimes.com. Rainy Cohen, welcome to the show. Could not be happier to be here. So there's been this burst of coverage of polyamory recently. There was this New York magazine cover. There's this memoir. There was a Times piece in New Yorker piece of Wall Street Journal had this piece about how nobody on dating apps can find enough monogamous profiles. What do you make of all this? Is somebody who covers relationships?
Why this? Why now? I think there's a growing recognition that the way people have been approaching their romantic relationships is not working that well. I can tell you the number of people I've had repeat back to me. This now famous line from the psychotherapist Esther Perrell that we now expect of one person, what we used to expect of an entire village.
And as people are understanding that maybe it doesn't make sense to put everything on one person because you're going to compromise the stability of that relationship, then it opens the door to be thinking about, well, if it's not one person, then can you have multiple people? And I think it's becoming less taboo than it has been for a long time to think about the possibility of having multiple romantic partners. I find the conversation around this.
And particularly the emphasis on the multiple romantic partners. It sounds weird to say this about polyamory, but I find it weirdly conservative. People often frame this, I think, as just all about who you get to have sex with. But people open up their marriages, people who particularly do so polyamorously, which is what makes it different than just kinds of nonmenogamy, they're often looking for something more than sex. What else do you think they're looking for?
I think people are looking for connection. I mean, I just think even of the term an emotional affair, which is an indication that- Such a good term. So interesting. Yeah, I mean, so that means that there have been no physical lines crossed. And yet there's still a sense that someone is seeking something from another person that they're not getting in their partner, and that there was a breach of trust that happened by being that close to another person.
So the existence of this term shows that people are not just looking for sex and physical connection. They maybe want to be understood. Maybe they don't share some of the same interests and hobbies with somebody that they met 20 years ago, or just simply have more facets to them than one person can answer.
And I don't know that I would say that it's conservative that people are focusing on the sex piece, but it feels like less imaginative, maybe, and that there's this real narrow attention on the role that a sexual partner can play when we really look for different things from so many people in our lives beyond a physical connection of that kind. Well, this is my somewhat canned way of getting to your book, because I found your book much more radical than a lot of where this conversation goes.
Because I think we're used to the idea that we can love and be dependent on people we have a romantic attachment to. In a way, that's why polyamory is so threatening in a way that people often I think don't find friendships threatening. But this book is all about how we can love and be dependent on people we don't have romantic attachments to. So tell me a bit about why you got interested in that.
I think of the social scientist term of me search, like I kind of got here from a personal place, which is I have a friendship where particularly in the first couple of years of our friendship, it felt like it really scrambled the definition of what friendship could be because of the level of closeness that we had. For the first couple of years, we lived a five minute walk from each other. So most days of the week became really integrated into each other's lives.
Like we would BCC each other on emails to colleagues and all sorts of people. Every time when you wrote about that, I found that terrifying. I mean, you're writing a work email and maybe you get the BCC feel wrong. Yeah, no, that is dangerous. But anyway, we were very integrated into each other's lives to the point where the term best friend didn't feel like it cut it.
Not just that it didn't kind of rise to the level of what the relationship was, but also that it had a kind of juvenile form to it. And it opened up so many questions for me, like if this is such a significant relationship in my life, why is there no term for it? Are there other people like us out there? What would it mean if we saw the possibility that friendship could be this close? So it was catalyzed.
Like this whole project was catalyzed from a personal place of discovering a friendship that went beyond what I was told a friendship could be. I was interested in your focus in the book on the lack of language for relationships like this because sort of similarly to why you wrote the book, one of my interests in the book is I have a relationship like this. I have a best friend. I've been friends with him since I was 16.
And it's very much a kind of life partnership when I move from a software he lives to New York where I live. Now, one of the great griefs of that move was being separated from him and his family. And it was hard to talk about with people because if I said I was moving away from my wife, that something had happened. And now we had to be across the country from each other because of our work or whatever. I think the misery of that would be legible. People would really come to me.
I think with a lot of sympathy. But moving away from this other important partnership, like, oh, that's sad. But you don't make decisions about where you live based on your friends or your best friends. And it was interesting to me how difficult that experience was to convey. It made me think a lot about how few gradations we have in the language for people we love. I mean, we have spouses and partners and friends and best friends. It's like four categories.
And there's a lot of human experience not captured in that. And you were telling people about moving away like, what was the language that you used? I still use best friend. I mean, now sometimes we'll say that there's like a platonic life partnership dimension to that. I don't really love that term. It's just very clinical. And also, I don't think people want to be assaulted by your endless, rapsodizing or description of your own interior relationships. So you know, you kind of just move on.
Yeah. And then the kind of language issue came up again and again where people would come up with a term like platonic life partner, platonic soul made to non-romantic life partner, whatever and it would maybe be accurate. But like people didn't get what it was. So was the language really doing anything?
And then on the flip side, you know, there were situations that I write about in the book where people are in the hospital and then they like refer to their friend as their sister or as their wife because they're like, well, the thing that matters is that people get the connotation right, even if the particularities aren't right.
And I think it's a terrible thing to not be able to communicate what one of the most important people in your life means to you and to have to hang on language that really might not do justice to the relationship or give people the wrong impression about it. So it feels like a big gap to fill in right now. To use a nerdy term for this, there's a kind of countercyclical dimension to this book because you're talking about these unusually deep friendships, these unusually deep partnerships.
At the same time that the dominant discourse is about loneliness epidemic is about what gets called a friendship recession. So I want to open into some of that too. What is the thing that people call the friendship recession? So this came out of work by a survey researcher named Daniel Cox who has done some of the, I think, best work on friendship recently where he ended up tracking in a survey from 2021, just this precipitous decline in the number of close friends that Americans have.
And this is quite connected to loneliness. I mean, he found that Americans who had three or fewer close friends are much more likely to say that they were lonely in the last week than people who have 10 or more close friends.
So the loneliness epidemic is this term that has, I think, become ubiquitous because of the surgeon general and what this research on the decline in friendship shows is that the withdrawal that a lot of people have had from their friendships, I mean, particularly American men, has really harmed people's emotional lives and their sense of connectedness writ large. One is zoom in on that question of American men because we seem to be doing particularly badly on this.
So another stat that's in your book that caught my eye is that in 1990, more than half of men reported having at least six close friends. In 2021, only about a quarter of men could say the same. 15% of men report having no close friendships, a fivefold increase in the number saying that from 1990. So 1990 to 2020, we're talking about 30 years here. It's not 300 years, it's not 3000 years. And there's been a pretty precipitous drop in the quantity and depth of male friendship.
Why do we suck at this? One of the things that actually comes up in this survey and in other research is how men really expect to get their emotional needs fulfilled from their female partners. But they're not necessarily expecting to go to their male friends.
And I mean, I think some of the things that I've heard from men is like they're not developing these skills essentially and that they're waiting to the point at which they're like dating to develop the kind of communication and emotional skills and are not necessarily applying that to their friendships. But some of this goes to like Robert Putnam bowling alone, things around the ways that men especially might have communed previously in larger group settings have fallen away.
And they might end up sort of fearing being perceived as gay if they have close relationships. And we have a less homophobic society than we did previously, but not so much that people don't fear that they're going to be misread if they have that kind of intimacy with another man.
I am not pretending my personal life is representative sample, but my gay male friends are so much better at friendship and have such a delightful, deep friendship community compared to virtually anybody else I know, but particularly the straight man I know that it's really striking to me. I can imagine reasons it might be, but the emphasis placed in friendship there seems really quite different than what I see elsewhere.
Well, I would think particularly in the queer communities, there are so much emphasis on friendship partly because people can't necessarily rely on their families of origin to be the people who are going to kind of ride through life with them because they might have rejected them because of their sexuality. So there's this long history of friends being chosen families. So it really makes sense in the context of gay men.
But I even think about like as a kid, the way that girls treated friendships as these entities to celebrate and to talk about like we would exchange friendship bracelets, we would kind of honor the friendship. And that's a thing that can kind of fall away to some extent, I think, in adulthood.
In general, we don't treat friendship as this thing that we are supposed to work toward, being better at or achieving or that it's a mark of like a successful adulthood, but I think for men, there's even less emphasis than there is for women on having that as a big piece of their life. Tell me a bit about the Stray of Art and Nick. Yeah, I mean, Art and Nick are pretty remarkable.
Guys, they met in a Christian college together training to be youth pastors, both raised to be in conservative congregations. And over time, Art fully came to terms with the fact that he's gay, which created a real conflict for him because in his reading of the Bible, which he literally sat down and read to try to interpret what it was saying, he did not believe it was okay for him to engage in same sex, same sex romantic relationship.
So he decided that in order to reconcile his faith, which was so important to him and a sexuality that he was going to be celibate. And he said that celibacy was the worst thing he could possibly imagine, not because of the giving up sex part, but because of not having a person to come home to at the end of the day, someone to hand him a warm mug of tea.
And he had this friend Nick from college, who was his best friend, who was a straight man and came from this conservative background where he's very kind of concerned with doing what everybody else does. But he was like, this is not your problem, this is our problem. I want to help you figure out how to make this work and suggested that they live together.
They'd already talked about each other as being brothers to each other, that's how they conceived of each other and wanted to live as a family. And that Nick expected to get married to a woman at some point and that art would be part of that family that he would either live next to or with them.
So they've had extraordinarily explicit conversations about the role that they are playing in each other's lives and as it's evolved, and at this point, they lived together, they recently moved to be closer to Nick's girlfriend, who, you know, they're very serious. And it's a very unconventional relationship that they have had to navigate all on their own.
What was so striking about their story to me is that they felt to me to be multiple pieces of having to fight against both expectations and interpretations that would be put on you. These are two men in question, pastoral circles, right, and for art, he's already in a sort of amount of conflict with a lot of the world of his faith for Nick, right, to be living now with a professed gay man.
That I'm sure creates a sort of a friction to be meeting women and saying that, you know, if you're going to be in relationship with me and a way you're also going to be in relationship with art, how do they navigate that pressure? They've run into a lot of misinterpretations and have faced really concrete consequences for people's misunderstanding of their relationship and judgment of it.
Nick has tried dating women before the woman he's with now, who have been concerned that it is actually a sexual relationship or that there's too much room for flirtation and also want, you know, more of Nick's presence in their life. Nick also grew up in an environment where even having any kind of physical or emotional intimacy with another man was out of bounds for him. And in fact, like there was a point where he wondered if he was gay because he liked to hug art and missed him.
And he had to go on his kind of own process to figure out, okay, if I'm not comfortable with art putting his arm on my shoulder, is that because I actually don't like it or is it because I've been programmed to believe that this is not acceptable? And am I just afraid that people are going to assume that I'm gay? So there is a lot of like deep programming that Nick had to do and that art kind of helped through the process because he comes from such a different vantage point.
There have been professional consequences to their relationship because some people cannot seem to believe that it is a friendship.
They've just sort of determined over time that it's worth making the sacrifices of, you know, maybe Nick not finding a romantic partner though it seems like it has now worked out and aren't having to change professions really because of the way that people on the internet and the evangelical internet, people in his denomination found it unacceptable that two men one of whom is gay would live together. I understand how friendships that start early in your life escalate to this very high level.
You just have so much shared history and it was so much easier to become really close to somebody when at least for me when I was young and you could spend this atmospheric time playing Tony Hawk after school and just like wandering around. But if you're somebody who does want deeper, closer friendships, put aside these platonic life partner friendships, just you want to be on the relationship escalator with friendships. Romantic relationships have this very structured way of doing it.
I mean, there's this question eventually of do we move in together? Do we get married? Right? Do you believe a toothbrush at my house? There's also a lot of space for having that conversation. What are we conversation? What are we doing here? How do people escalate a friendship? Right? If you want to turn something that's like warm and close and has some chemistry to it, to something more central, I think that's mysterious to people. What have you learned about that?
So I talked to a researcher named Lisa Diamond, who's a psychologist and one of the things that she told me is that for any kind of attachment relationship, who doesn't have to be romantic, that there are three magic ingredients and those are time, togetherness, and touch.
So what you're describing there of spending boundless time playing Tony Hawk or whatever, and maybe there's some kind of rough housing that as kids are in these environments like summer camp or in dorms, we are really naturally getting those ingredients to become really close to another person. So I think I would start from a place of figuring out how do you get more of each of those things.
And one way to do it is to change your environment, and that could be a bigger project like with this sort of co-living setup or living within a neighborhood with friends where it's very easy to come by time and togetherness with another person.
The other kind of thing that comes to mind comes from somebody that I interviewed art, who said that this really close friendship that he has with Nick made him start to think about what his other friendships could be and he would ask himself what is the fullest version of this friendship.
And for any given friendship that did not mean that he wanted to have like a partnership level friendship, I mean there's, you know, love is infinite and time is not as the saying goes, like that wasn't going to be possible, but he would think about and talk with friends about in a given friendship, you know, what would make it a richer friendship.
And in one case, he decided with this couple that he was friends with that they were going to co-work once a week and he, that meant he would be in their space and he was sort of seeing how they interact more and with their kid. And if we could ask ourselves that kind of question and really approach friendships with more curiosity rather than these sort of hard and limits on what they can be, I think it is possible to move toward closer relationships.
When you offer those three ingredients, touch may be wonder if this isn't one of the difficulties for men at least in the United States and sort of peer countries. I'm pretty far out on the bell curve of intense close male friendships and I am not particularly comfortable with touch within those relationships.
And I always think of this moment in my childhood when I was pretty friendless when I was young and this kid had moved to town and we became very close friends, it was third grade, I think. And I remember my mom was taking us for ice cream and I held this kid's hand and she's like, oh boy, don't do that. You're good. And my mom, it was not, I mean, she was right, right? Like they don't do that here.
And as a kid who got teased all the time and bullied all the time, trying to hold boys hands at school would not have helped the situation. But that is always stuck with me. And not that many male relationships I know feature much touch whereas a lot of the female friendships I know touch is very normal like they'll cuddle together watching a movie on the couch.
If that is so important and I'd not heard that in terms of friendship before, that does strike me as a genuine disadvantage that men have in form and close relationships in this society where we've been socialized intensely against touch within these relationships. Your mom is just channeling the culture I'm trying to protect you probably.
I'm like a very physically affectionate person so the idea of being like raised as a man in this culture is like, I don't know who I would be if that were a form of communication that was cut off for me. Men do, are physical, they cuddle with their straight men cuddle with their female partners and yeah, it does feel like a disadvantage.
I think what is so moving to be about Nick's story is he undergoes this transformation because of his friendship with art who not only is gay and has different expectations around physical intimacy because of that but he's also Brazilian-American. So a lot of his norms are shaped by what he experienced in Brazil or among his friends from that part of the world where men kiss each other.
They are much more physically affectionate and this real linkage between masculinity and kind of stoicism and keeping space is not there. I remember Nick told me that he noticed that his dad wouldn't even sit right next to him on the couch. He needed to leave room and he couldn't remember the last time his dad hugged him.
So I mean, there are just like real cultural norms that you have to swim upstream for and my hope is that like reading some of the history and realizing that like this is so culturally and historically contingent the way that men interact with each other and are very cut
off and just seeing examples of men doing things differently at least can maybe open conversations because I suspect that like if three men were sitting in a row the way that I was with my two female friends that maybe some of them like would be interested on some level and physical affection but are like no but they're not so I'm not going to make an overture. So we track back to 1990 a minute ago but your book throws the ball backwards further.
You know why I appreciate because it's always on my mind as somebody who ends up for political reasons reading a lot of history from the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries and you'll have these male legislators professing their unbelievably ardent undying love to each other in completely been all letters right.
There'll be a bunch of things about how the farm is going that year and it's like and as a person who keeps the other half of my soul know that I think about you know it's really I mean Jefferson and Madison they really have a like a deep romance going on
and you talk about this going back I mean you talk about how in Rome people talked about their friends in ways we now talk about spouses they would call them the better half of my soul the better part of my soul the letters you read what happened to drain so much of
the the order out of friendship male friendship and female friendship alike but I think even more male friendship I mean I think it's still quite common for female friends to profess a kind of love to each other it's not that common for male friends.
Yeah I think seeing some of this history is kind of astonishing to a lot of people and often requires like a whole string of like context and caveats because it is so unfamiliar to our eyes and ears like one of the letters that I cite here as from the 1700s where this man was talking about his heart like his physical heart which is it was not in good condition and he was like however soon so ever my feeble heart shall stop its last pulsations shall vibrate for you.
That sounds like a love letter to a lot of us now but I don't actually think can textually we have any reason to believe that that was necessarily about like romantic or sexual love and that as different historians have put it it was not understood in the past
than in order to love someone you also had to lust after them and big factor that matters here is that there were not these categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality as we understand it now as these sort of fixed identities homosexuality being stigmatized so it was
very possible for men to say and do all sorts of things that we now code as sexual and it was seen as totally innocent so like when people speculate for instance about Lincoln being gay because he shared a bed with a man it was very common for men to share beds
for you know practical reasons like that in and of itself is not necessarily an indication of someone's desire so it really has to do with kind of the introduction of the stigmatized identity of homosexuality and concerns about sodomy that took away the innocence of what had been totally normal behavior among men. How much of it is also about the rise of marriages that are for love and not just for love but what I guess the sociologist is now called assortative.
It used to be I mean in a lot of culture still is that you married people who your family found for you approved for you there's obviously arranged marriages but there's also just the you married the person down the block right you married somebody who made sense you
married the first person that you wanted to sleep with when you were a age for that kind of thing you married somebody who your family could use like the the union with their family and so it wasn't expected that the person you married would always be your deepest intellectual
partner the person with whom your your soul would vibrate and so there was a reason like an obvious reason that you would look for that externally and that as marriage became that the side of love these friendships became competitive with it right I mean you're supposed to have one soulmate. So how much is that a dynamic here?
Yeah I mean I think you're you're describing the like other part of the twin trends here so you have the decline of friendship but also these changing expectations of what a good marriage was supposed to be and we went from marriage really being this pragmatic union
that was very much about like joining families to one where love was supposed to be the basis and then you know more recently what Eli Finkel who's a psychologist at Northwestern has called the self expressive marriage so you know he says basically like we want our spouse
to be the Michelangelo to our stone and unlock the best version within us and that is very different from a time where you have tons of sex segregation where you have inequality between the genders where when men own their wives like how much emotional and intellectual
connection are they really going to have I mean it makes a lot of sense under those circumstances to find greater intimacy with your same sex friends than you would with your partner to me or not and equal and you know as you mentioned there are still like lots of people
who have marriages along these lines that are arranged and I remember talking to a friend of mine whose mother had an arranged marriage in India and her mother and her female friends who had all had arranged marriages they didn't expect their husbands to be the most important
person who filled all these roles like to know to go back to your first question and their female friendships were so important and I'm sure kind of the same thing was the case for the men too so the marriage expectations really have crowded out the room for friendship
to be as significant as it once was so it feels like that would all be fine if we all had these super successful self expressive soulmate level marriages but the stats here are rough the divorce rate for first marriages it keeps hovering around 50% the rate for
second and third marriages is even higher than that the average divorced marriage less eight years for first marriages 40% of kids are born to unmarried people I'm a child of parents who eventually got divorced it doesn't seem to be working exactly I mean you just
had this big book by Melissa Kerney who's an economist making the point that stable marriages are really good for kids but I think that the weakness of that book because I buy the data in it is it she doesn't have nobody else has a theory or a program that seems effective
for what to do about this like even if you believe the marriage should be the central unit of society what to do about the fact that they seem to keep breaking up really feels to me like a deeply unsolved problem you have this lovely line in the book where you say
we both hold dual citizenship in the kingdom of the single and in the kingdom of the coupled and that that reality of people's lives that you might put everything you have in defining you know the single partner and then you get divorced or they die or something
happens that feels like a real issue here that marriages a wonderful institution but literally on the face of everything we know about it it doesn't survive it doesn't provide everything for most people yeah I mean really marriage is a temporary status of our adult lives and
just look at the kind of marriage trends people are getting married later so let's say you get married at 30 or 35 what do you do for 10 15 years of your adult life like who is your next of kin who's going to make decisions on your behalf and then yeah like as you pointed out how many
marriages dissolve but like let's say it's a great case and your marriage survives until one spouse passes away and if you're in a heterosexual relationship it's likely to be the woman who's outliving the man and the the stats are pretty startling like a third of women over 65 are
widowed and almost half of women over 65 are unpartnered so it is okay to say that marriage is meaningful but we also need to be thinking about these other periods of life for people outside of marriage or if they don't get married at all which a lot of people are not tell me a bit about
Barbara and Ines. Barbara Ines are a pair of women who I profiled in the book a couple the first people I got to talk to who I met at a home that they share in the suburbs of St. Louis and they have been best friends for more than 50 years and in Ines's case she did the marriage thing in the way
she was supposed to like she got married very young back in the 1960s had two kids by the time she was in her mid 20s had a house in the suburbs and all that but her husband was like not a great husband not great to her sons and she despite it being you know relatively rare at that time to get
divorced she did and started a job to take care of her kids to provide for them and she met a woman named Barb and Barb herself was in a place where she didn't expect her life to go she had moved back home to take care of her parents finances and she couldn't have children biologically
and she's an only child that always wanted biological children so that you can see another human being who looked like her and her desire for marriage really waned because of that not being able to have a child of her own and the two of them basically became like family Barb took care of the kids
they went on vacations together how did the two of them become family like I'm interested in that turn well they started doing things that friends don't often do and I think one key moment began with Barb being a little forward and just asking if she can join a trip that I know is going on
with her sons to Washington DC and Barb was like I've never been can I come and I said yes so that was a two week trip where I know is in Barb had a long road trip with these two kids who I think were around you know preteens and that gave them a sense that they could camp together share
space together that the kids respected her Barb loved kids and she really connected to them and at points where maybe people would not have I don't know made the decisions on behalf of a friend they did so Barb as I mentioned had only moved back to the St. Louis area with her family for a
temporary reason she decided to go back to Phoenix where she had been living and offered for Inaz and her kids to move and said that they could stay here until you find a home and that's what Inaz did so there is some kind of like leap of faith there to follow the other person I was so
struck by a stat in that chapter we write that friendships are actually more predictive or at least a little bit more predictive of mortality than marriage I mean this sort of putting your life whether you still have friends tells you a little bit more about how you're doing then whether
you're still married one thing I found affecting about the Inaz and Barb story is there a lot of stories in your book and we'll get to some of them where people are living out something that they understand to be counter cultural right they have to put work in against societal expectations
sometimes against legal structures that's not true for the two of them they have this real practicality about it we did this because it made sense Inaz has children and she has a completely useless husband in that respect and Barb really on becomes helpful I mean when you
were saying Barb invites herself along on a trip to Washington DC as a parent of some kids viotic my kids alone to Washington DC and anybody no matter whether I like them or not was willing to come along and help I would say yes to that offer and it did seem to me some of the reciprocity
of their relationship was built in early co-parenting they may not always have called it that but that clue seems to me to have been what it is and this is a space where I think like my interest is bigger than in any other space here I mean because the part of life I'm going through
right now it's very clear to me that you're not supposed to raise multiple kids with two full time working parents say nothing of just one parent you need a lot more help and that ability to give and give back help it really does bond people together I mean it's bonded me closer to family
who I wasn't as close with before but the way they've shown up for us and our children has meant the world to me it's bonded me with the friends who have been there in that way for us but it still feels like there should be more possibilities here so I wanted to ask you about another of the stories
which is Natasha and Linda can you tell me a bit about them so Natasha when she was 36 decided that she was going to have a child on her own so she had it and you know anonymous donor sperm was pregnant her friend Linda who she knew as a fellow law professor where they worked
wanted to be the birth coach and kind of help her through her pregnancy and Natasha ended up having an emergency c-section Linda was there in the first person to hold the baby she described I think seeing the boy Alon as some like marvelous love bomb or something like she's just so
effusive and really fell in love with the baby immediately and slept in the same bed as Natasha waking up every three and a half hours to feed Alon and continued to have this really important role in Alon's life but it took years to figure out that she was really acting as a co-parent and
that she wanted to have legal recognition as a parent and ended up asking Natasha if she would go along with it which she would and there were some obstacles along the way that I can talk about that point to the very limited ways that we think about who can be parents but Linda just was
there for the kid and provided support to Natasha in a way that really parents do and maybe we don't necessarily expect friends to well I think it's worth talking about at least some of them I mean I found the story so affecting something you didn't mention is Alon has significant health
challenges and you have a beautiful line in there where he didn't just need two parents he needed all the parents he could get I see this in my own older son who'll be five around when this comes out and the degree to which he wants other figures in his life it's so obviously I mean a big part
of the reason we move across the country is to be near to my wife's parents his grandparents and he is so delighted to be near to his grandparents it means so much to him he loves him so much he loves all of his grandparents so much but also just other figures right loves my best friend back in
SF so much right kids feel very tuned to me to have a lot of allot parents as they're called in their lives I mean they're again the idea they would just be two is weird but it then gets to what I think of as the oddity of these legal obstacles so it is one of the most common concerns
in American politics it's so many children grow up right now in single parent families and single parents do amazing heroic and to meet genuinely unimaginable work but if they meet somebody a stepfather or stepmother potentially the path there to that person becoming a recognized
parent to the kid in in legal ways is very smooth very straightforward right the braiding of the romantic relationship without any biological relationship is very accepted your mom has dorscht dad your mom has a boyfriend the boyfriend becomes a partner and now that's your new stepfather
and we think great a two-parent family again that there's no way to do that that it's so unusual and weird to actually say oh my best friend or actually like another family member or will become part of this child's life in a legal factual way again just strikes me as a kind of poverty of
imagination right we want children to have more adult figures in their life for emotionally there who are financially there who are just there with time I mean time matters in many ways more than anything else and yet we really only create a speedway for one kind that has to clear a
sexual romantic test first no matter whether that person is a good father or good mother to that child it seems strange we've worked backwards from a problem but only if we can solve a secondary problem along the way well there's a law professor I think puts this nicely named Sasha coupé that
she says that the law puts misplaced emphasis on euros so like sexual love and not enough on a gappe so self-sacrificing love and if it were possible for people to maybe disconnect the sexual part from the parenting then the law and our society might recognize that there are more
kinds of people who could be wonderful parental figures so Natasha and Linda who are both legal scholars they don't understand the emphasis on romance I mean Linda said that it's an irrational test for parents that she said romance is you know lovely but really what feels like it matters is
compatibility and trust and all of that and then on the flip side there are people you know more on the right or the center like Brad Wilcox who literally has a book called Get Married that's coming out and Key really is trying to prevent divorce and so on and says that again like
focusing so much on romance from his perspective makes relationships more fragile and that if people focused more on the raising of the children then that would be a stronger foundation for forming families like these people have really different outcomes that they're looking toward one is
trying to push toward one specific kind of family and the other is trying to broaden them but both have arrived at this idea that there are other kinds of characteristics that really matter when it comes to raising a child.
I know so many people who want to have children but haven't met the right partner I know people who have had children got divorced then met people who are good partner for them and not a good parent for their child but because they need to braid those roles they can't be in this
partnership that might be fulfilling and I know people who have great relationships with other people in their life and would probably be really good at raising children together and can't do that and what it also means is you can't distribute weight what I was thinking about when you're bringing
up Brad Bullcock's book and Bullcock's like I think a very important scholar of marriage and family breakdown is that we know that children put incredible stress on a marriage and I see it in my own life like the fact that we can pay for care the fact that we can do something
financially that relieves some of that stress so my wife and I can have a date night every two weeks so that we can occasionally go away together right and we also move closer to family for in part for that reason it relieves stress on our marriage there's an Atlantic article a couple years ago
about a couple that raises their children and thruple with one of their best friends who's asexual and I read that that that sounds wonderful it does seem to me that even if the only thing you really cared about in life was getting people back into stable romantic partnerships that being
more imaginative about it take the pressure off of those partnerships and particularly to take some of the pressure of parenting off of those partnerships which again richer families do with money but you can't do that if you're you know middle class or working class it just strikes me as a
place for our cultural expectations have come into conflict with the things that we now say we value I don't know if this is a place to say that I live with a couple of my friends and their kids so I get to experience a little bit firsthand of what it looks like to have other adult figures in the
picture right tell me a bit about how that began you you mentioned to the end of the book I'm very curious about it yeah my husband and I are very interested like have been interested for a long time in living with friends and we ended up in a conversation with a couple of our friends where the
idea of living together came up they were to our surprise very interested and they did not think that we would be interested because they already had one child at the time when we're planning to have more children in addition to other things like my husband are relatively secular they are
observant Jews so like you know keep a kosher kitchen keep shabat and all that and kind of figured we wouldn't be want to deal with all that but we were really excited to live with these particular friends and we have been for about two and a half years and you know I think one of the fun and
apt ways I've heard someone else describe the relationship that my husband and I have to our friends children is as grandparents where your pure existence just makes them attach to you my housemate was telling me last night that as his older son was going to bed and he said I love
you Abba which Abba is um he preferred dad and he was like an I love Ima so like mom and I love and he's like you know goes to talk to about his brother and then he says and I love Coco and I love Reina Coco is the nickname that this like kid has for my my husband and he as a three and a half
year old like sees us as part of this sort of same household unit and I mean there are there are all sorts of ways that I know that that my life is enriched by having access to these kids but also that my friends enjoy our presence as other adults in their kids lives and I think pressure on them
is relieved a couple weeks ago my housemates were trying to figure out whether to take their older son to the hospital to the ER and one of them you know went to my husband and was like can you hold the baby for 10 minutes while we go and figure this out and that's not co-parenting like
holding a baby for 10 minutes but they had somebody that they could just sort of relieve them of responsibility while they were in this really hectic moment you know it's just like one of the many ways that just simply having more people around even if they're not rising to the level of
being equal co-parents can make the parenting experience so much less stressful and I think that the kids love to have other adults who love them there are just so many ways that my life has been enriched that yeah like there are toys on the floor and there are particularly with
two kids I feel like there's a bump up in chaos how I felt about it yes and I just think that everything comes with the pluses and minuses and that it is so much easier to overweight the negatives of the unconventional decisions and to overlook the negatives of the conventional decision
I have a friend who both lives in what I would kind of describe as a commune I think that the modern term that gets used is intentional co-living community and also helps set them up and I was asking her about this once about these trade-offs and she said something that that is always stuck with me
which is it she's decided to choose the default in her life being the problems of community as opposed to the problems of not having community she wants the problems of connection rather than the problems of how to find that connection and it seems so obvious when she said it that way but I
never thought of it that way I think what's interesting there is that she is saying something that people are maybe making decisions around but don't realize that they're making decisions around like you know when I have toured through my friend's beautiful houses that are far away from all of their
other friends I sometimes wonder I'm like oh you've got this like gorgeous kitchen but what are you giving up to have this beautiful kitchen island and this renovated home and I'm not going to be obnoxious and start that conversation with a friend there but I do think that people are
creating conditions where they are disconnected but are so focused on maybe the benefits that that look like the shiny forms of success that you have this nice house that you own and it's you're a lawn that you get to mow and you don't hear anybody else and privacy and control has a
lot of benefits but like when the car breaks down and you need to get your kids to daycare and you don't know any of your neighbors and you're called the sack of five houses like well you've like given something up in the process tell me about the idea of an invariable I found that
to be helpful language yeah this is from Sheila Heddy's novel How Should a Person Be and she is writing about people who have this kind of really intimate and separable friendship and these two women are kind of repairing their relationship so one of the characters tells the
other well it's like in life you have the variables and you have the in variables and you want to use them all but you work around the in variables I thought you were an invariable and then you left without saying a word and the other friends thinks very deep inside something began to vibrate
I was an invariable an invariable no word had ever sounded to me more like love I think an invariable is really the opposite of the way that we think about friendship that friendship is peripheral and is fungible dispensable you know you can move across the country from
your friend and you'll make new friends and an invariable is somebody who is going to be at the center of your life and that other things work around this to me is one of the tensions of the book which is there is room really only for so many invariables in life what my children
need is an invariable well my wife needs to me is an invariable and one of the challenges it seems to me is what happens when invariables clash and collide it's all great to talk about having more wonderful deep intimate caring interdependent relationships but they take
a lot of management they can fall into conflict with each other it's like an almost in human level of communication how do you think about the downside the dark side of this the you know I mean we talked really about control and that being a push towards small nuclear families and single
family boxes but there's also just simplicity how many people's needs are you really balancing how many people do you have to answer to how many people can you really answer to with a busy life and a job and and all the rest of it how do you think I guess about the skills and and to the
trade-offs here and then what happens when you know it turns out somebody felt like an invariable and now they're not or they are in your heart but you've got to make choices tell me a bit about the conflict at the heart of a lot of this we are used to dealing with conflict
between the needs of people that we love and that we think of as well absolutely I have to meet this need children spouses aging parents it's not like we are freed from this conflict if we only have a romantic partner it's just that maybe those are different categories of people and
I think like we're going to disappoint people in our lives we're not going to be able to be there for everybody at every single moment and it would be a sad thing to proactively withdraw from relationships because you think that at some point there might be some conflict that's not
resolvable where you have to make a choice and sometimes these things are difficult and people have to put one person in front of the other but I feel like the first thing I'm just trying to get people to do is realize that you can add more people as factors you can treat more people as worth
making these decisions around maybe you're going to have to have hard conversations with people and develop those communication skills that we sure can use where we are honest about what our bandwidth is or where our priority has to be for some portion of our lives but you know I am reminded
of something that Nick's girlfriend told me where she also has this kind of chosen family that she last I know anyway was living with them had moved across the country with them when I had brought up this question to her about like is it exhausting basically to negotiate all these relationships
and so on she was like well of course it's exhausting like families exhausting people you love are exhausting but the 5% of the time that it's complicated and hard is so outweighed by every other moment where you're getting so much for it like we are making our lives unnecessarily deprived by
hoping that simplicity will will solve us of having to make these trade-offs and I think for a lot of people at the very least they're going to have to make trade-offs about do they take care of their aging parents or take care of their kids like the math here is not straightforward that
sometimes having more people means that you are giving more and other times it means you're getting more support so in the case of art when he had this big falling out at his workplace it was Nick's girlfriend who was also supporting him in addition to Nick so I think it's also worth
paying attention to the ways that it can add to your life and not just the conflicts it creates one thing that struck me in your book was it there's actually research on this on marriages in the context of many friendships survey research what does that show that basically the same
principle that applies to finances also applies to relationships that it's good to diversify your portfolio and have multiple people in your lives so to name a couple of studies on this there is one that shows that people who have more close relationships are happier in their marriages than those
who have few close relationships outside their marriage so you know friendships and another that was as you're looting to measuring court is also like a stressed response and found that people who were married and were more satisfied with the level of social support they had outside their
marriage had less of a court is all spiked than those who were not satisfied with the relationships that they had outside of their marriage so there's like indications besides maybe your intuition that distributing the load across multiple people and not having this kind of like one stop shopping approach to relationships can actually make their romantic relationships stronger.
It feels so intuitive to me on one level which is it and she's written about this before so I'm not speaking out of school but my wife went through four or five years where she's very sick and we didn't really know what's going on and was just exhausted I mean truly clinically exhausted
all the time and that was an incredibly hard period in my life and I've thought a lot about what that period would have been like if I didn't live physically in the air deep support and that also changed my feelings about a lot of this like it made it clear to me how other important relationships
end up being fortifying for a marriage. Yeah I mean I there are like more people to hold your hand or more people to vent to or more people to send you food and it is not the way that maybe we're told to set our priorities because you're really supposed to funnel so much energy in one person
but there's fragility there I mean a very formative experience for me was watching a relative of mine who had gone through two successive long term relationships like four or five years of peace and was all consumed in them and you know had his confidant and lover and intellectual partner and all
in one after each of those relationships ended he really didn't have anybody around and it made me even as like a teenager decide like that's not what I wanted like I wanted to have multiple people in my life both to enjoy the richness of each of their kind of personalities and experiences but also so that like when things are bad you aren't down to one person or if things end down to zero. So then always our final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
So my first book is by Andrew Solomon it's called Far From The Tree and it made a huge impact on me it's an on fiction book about parents who are fundamentally different from their child on some dimension and every chapter is about a different one like children who have dwarfism who are deaf
who are prodigies who are trans and he's like looking at the extreme for a situation that I think is true of all parents that you are raising a child who is not you who is a different being and that especially with these parents and these children that they have to learn to love their kids on their own terms and it's really a beautiful book the second is a novel called We All Want
Impossible Things by Catherine Newman are you laughing because you know this? No I just love that I just love the title and the and the cover is great too because it has like a soda can in it and there is a both a flower in the soda can and a straw it is a hilarious book which you might
not expect because it takes place in a hospice and it is about one friend taking care of the other at the end of her life and it just does this beautiful job of showing the kind of intermingling of existential dread and the pain of losing someone but also the kind of absurdity of the end of life and the mundanity of the end of life and and the writers hilarious I almost never reread books but I reread We All Want Impossible Things because I was like I want to make sure that this is like
the recommendation I'm going to give and I and I just like laughed my way through it and I was like yep yep yep this is this people should read this book my third book is Dinabers' Wife by Gay to Least which is about 40 years old and it's a book that's looking at these twin impulses in American
culture to be both sex obsessed and also very puritanical and he writes with a level of like intimacy about people's lives that are pretty astounding and as somebody who's obsessed with narrative journalism it is one of the most originally structured books that I've read and woven into all these narratives you're like learning about utopian communes and anti-accentity laws and supreme court cases so there's a lot of meat in there too.
Raina Cohen your book is called The Other Significant Others which I loved and recommend it everybody thank you very much. Thank you so much. This episode of The Ezra Clancho is produced by Andy Galvin. You'd fact checking by kids in Claire and very much locker. I've seen an engineer as Jeff Galb with additional mixing from a female Shapiro. I've seen her editor as Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Michelle Harris,
Roland Hu and Christen Lynn. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Simuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Andy Roastrosser and special thanks to Sonia Herald.