The Solution To Burnout & Loneliness Is Hiding In Plain Sight—So Why Aren’t More People Doing It?

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[00:00:00] LM: Hello, friends, and welcome to the Liz Moody Podcast, where every week we’re sharing real science, real stories, and realistic tools that actually level up every part of your life. I’m your host, Liz Moody, and I’m a bestselling author and longtime journalist. Let’s dive in. What we are doing isn’t working.

[00:00:19] This episode was sparked by a conversation that I had with a girlfriend who is incredibly successful by all outside metrics. She has an amazing job, her kids are amazing, and she said to me, I am tired all the time. Everyone I know is tired all of the time. Everyone, even the people that we think are doing it right, is stressed and exhausted and feels like they’re running to catch up.

[00:00:43] The structure that we’ve built for our lives isn’t working, so I wanted to begin to explore different structures. My guest today, Raina Cohen, helps do just that. She’s a long time journalist covering social sciences for outlets like the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, NPR, and NBC [00:01:00] News.

[00:01:00] With a Master’s in Philosophy from Oxford, she’s given talks about relationships and society all around the U. S. and the U. K., including at NASA. In her amazing book, The Other Significant Others, and in this episode, she shares some incredible food for thought about the history of this American dream. Life with a husband or a wife and two kids in your own single family home, it is a far more recent dream than you think.

[00:01:23] And it’s fully a lie, the reasons for which Reina shares in this episode. We also get into compulsory coupledom and how it is ruining our lives, how to build Olympic level friendships, the practical steps for communal living, but not the communal living that you might be thinking of, and the history that supports our need for larger platonic communities.

[00:01:44] If you are a parent feeling overwhelmed, if you’re a person feeling lonely, if you feel like life should be more enjoyable than this, if you feel like you’re running yourself ragged and the life that you want still isn’t available to you, this episode is for you. [00:02:00] Let’s dive in. One super quick note, I know that 50 percent of you listening to this episode do not follow the podcast.

[00:02:07] Take a second now to hit that follow or subscribe button. It is the best way to support the podcast and it makes sure that episodes show up right in your feed. Go ahead, do it right now. I’ll wait. Trust me, you do not want to miss out on any of our upcoming shows. They are jam packed with science and stories that will change your life.

[00:02:25] All right, let’s get right into the episode. Reina, welcome to the podcast. I’m so excited to get into the premise that you talk about in your book, because I do think there’s a sense right now that what we’re doing isn’t working, but people don’t know what to do instead. So can you just kick us off by talking us through what you’re advocating for?

[00:02:47] RC: Well, I’ll maybe start with what isn’t working, which is I think the model of having One person, a romantic partner, be everything in your life. There’s a Michael Buble song where he sings you are my everything [00:03:00] and that for people means you’re a confidant, you’re a co parent, the person you live with, the person who is your professional coach and your best friend.

[00:03:08] And that a lot of people are finding that they’re not satisfied in their romantic relationships or they can’t find that one person for everything and really what I’m advocating is to look at a kind of relationship that I think has untapped potential, which is Friendship. And to see the full extent that we can go with friendship, that it can be a central and not a peripheral part of our lives.

[00:03:29] LM: You say that society right now is governed by something that you call compulsory coupledom. Can you explain what that is as a concept? This is a

[00:03:37] RC: term by a British researcher named Eleanor Wilkinson, though I will say that my mom and I sat at Union Station in D. C. and I was, like, talking to her about, like, what would be the term for this phenomenon?

[00:03:48] And we came up with the same exact term and then I looked it up and I was like, someone invented this, like, ten years ago. But it shows that there’s some there there, which is the, the sense that in order to be seen as a successful adult, to be [00:04:00] treated as someone with dignity, really, in the society, that you need to be coupled.

[00:04:05] If you don’t have that, then you’re going to

[00:04:06] LM: be pitied, or you’re going to be seen as incomplete. What are some ways that that shows up in our lives that we might not be aware of? I’m thinking about some single people I know who told

[00:04:16] RC: me that they feel like they’re treated like an extra, that they’re not invited to different outings because they are not part of a couple.

[00:04:23] Just the whole language, societally, or that shows up in movies and rom coms that You’re looking for your other half that you’re not complete unless you have a romantic partner. That all points to this idea that it is mandatory to be coupled. And then it shows up in the law, too, that there are all sorts of privileges, rights, benefits that are attached to being married that you don’t have if you are single.

[00:04:46] If the most important person in your life is a sibling or a friend, we have a society and a legal system that’s built around couples.

[00:04:53] LM: I was thinking about it, because I listened to your interview with Trevor Noah, and I was thinking about it even in my context of him. His friends were [00:05:00] talking about on the episode, he’s so successful, he’s done all of these incredible things in the world, and yet his friends talk about constantly, like, what’s wrong with you on the podcast?

[00:05:09] They’re like, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t we find you a wife? And I’ve even had the thought of like, What’s going on? Why doesn’t he have a life partner?

[00:05:17] RC: The reaction that Trevor Noah had was one of the most vulnerable and thought provoking reactions that I have heard to this, where he said that He’s seen as successful on a lot of levels, obviously, he’s Reverend Noah, but that in other ways, he’s considered a loser.

[00:05:33] Because he has lost at finding a romantic partner, and he can win in so many other realms of life, or be talented, sell out audiences. I mean, this is me saying it, he wasn’t puffing himself up, but the true measure of a good life, and people Treating you like you have figured it all out is finding a romantic partner.

[00:05:55] And he also said it’s not even that you stay with that romantic partner, like at least serving time in [00:06:00] a marriage. Getting divorced might be its own kind of thing that people hold against you, but they at least see that you have made it or made it temporarily. So, certainly the kind of judgment even on somebody who is So successful in so many realms, shows us that the idea of being coupled is really ingrained in our notion of what it means to succeed in this society.

[00:06:22] Why is that? Where does that come from? I mean, where do you start the cycle? Because it’s reinforced from the world around us. that from the time you are a child and you’re watching Disney movies that tell you that Happily Ever After is being romantically partnered, it’s like, well, what does it take to question that idea if it’s something that has been instilled in you?

[00:06:43] I think that for a lot of people what they, um, are searching for is something that can be contained within marriage or within a long term romantic partnership, but they haven’t maybe questioned whether you can get it elsewhere. So they’re kind of conflating the form of the relationship, the structure, [00:07:00] with what’s actually inside it or the functions that it serves.

[00:07:02] So it makes sense to encourage people to give to someone else, to share their lives with someone else. to care for somebody else, to be cared for. But there are lots of ways you can do that. And it doesn’t have to be with one person. It can be, I’ve certainly seen it among friends, it doesn’t have to be with a romantic partner.

[00:07:20] But we’re told there’s only one way to get those things. So people are maybe chasing after something that could enrichen their life, but they don’t know that they can go elsewhere for that. And people push against it when you try.

[00:07:32] LM: I

[00:07:32] RC: do find the idea

[00:07:34] LM: that Being chosen above all other people by one person, though, is this pinnacle of success in society.

[00:07:43] And I think we think with friends, like, oh, well, you can have a bunch of friends, so that doesn’t mean you were chosen specifically, so it doesn’t have the same marker of success. I’m not saying it’s right, I just feel like that’s kind of what’s going on there.

[00:07:54] RC: I think it’s a really good observation. I think.

[00:07:56] And I have felt that within friendship too, like the feeling of being chosen [00:08:00] as the most important person in whatever category is something that can make you feel like you matter and that you are not kind of constantly questioning what is wrong with me because you have some evidence that of all people in the world, that someone picked you.

[00:08:17] So I absolutely get that. But again, I think that it’s, It’s possible to find that in other ways. And like, to me, one of the most devastating experiences I had was having a friendship where I had felt really chosen. And then Was this Em? Uh, yeah. That was the friendship that made me want to write the book.

[00:08:34] And this is a friend I’m still really close to. But as we became less close, I had lost the particularities of our friendship. Like, she’s radiant and brilliant and I loved being around her. But there was also these more general things that I felt like I didn’t have in the same way, like the feeling of being chosen, just getting to have the kind of physical affection that she gave that was both particular to her but was just nice to have in my [00:09:00] life.

[00:09:00] So I really understand the desire to have somebody recognize you and kind of pluck you out in a way that others haven’t. Do you think there’s a better way we should all be grappling with that feeling? I think just broadening our horizon in terms of who could fill that role. I think, honestly, what we’re talking about is an attachment relationship.

[00:09:21] Maybe your parent didn’t choose you and you can have an attachment relationship with a parent, but we’re talking about like a sense of security. And there’s a way that a monogamous romantic relationship can absolutely provide that. But there are so many people who might want that kind of relationship and can’t find it and then feel like they have no recourse.

[00:09:40] Collectively, if we saw that it was possible to you. choose another person to find security in a relationship that is not just a romantic relationship. We might make it possible for more people to find those things so we can receive it and we can give it. And I’ve really seen this in my own life, but in the people that I [00:10:00] interviewed for my book who have a friendship that is strong enough to be a life partnership.

[00:10:03] These are friends who. Take care of each other in the hospital when one is getting cancer treatments for years. These are people who have decided to buy a home together, who are raising kids together, who are growing old together. I mean, they are choosing each other and they have a sense of security in one another and we treat romantic relationships as if they have a monopoly on things like security and chosenness and they don’t, which I think is

[00:10:25] LM: exciting.

[00:10:26] One of the benefits of romantic partnerships, particularly marriage though, is that you are literally defining this idea of what do we owe to each other. You are saying, in sickness and in health, you are saying, for better or worse, for richer, for poorer. And in friendships, you’re not having that same type of communication around what What are we to each other, and who will we be to each other if things get hard?

[00:10:50] You mention you’ve seen people be there for each other when one of them gets cancer. I read that book, We All Want Impossible Things, which you recommended on another podcast, and [00:11:00] it broke me, first of all. It’s an incredible book. It’s absolutely phenomenal. But I still found moments where I couldn’t believe that this one character is essentially me.

[00:11:10] It’s amazing. Caretaking for her best friend who’s in hospice and the husband is back in New York City taking care of their child and she is Doing things that are gross. She is doing things that are hard She is there in these moments that you are like, I don’t know I’ve seen friends run away when somebody complains about their breakup Too much.

[00:11:31] So I’m like, how are we to believe without that concrete agreement when even that doesn’t work sometimes, that these people will be there for us when times are really tough.

[00:11:42] RC: There’s so many things I wanna say on this. Is there a guarantee in any relationship that someone’s going to be there? One of the things we’re dealing with right now as a society is that people are getting older.

[00:11:52] Who are the caregivers for people at the end of life? And it’s not just because people don’t have spouses and kids, but also that kids are not always going to be there. Maybe they [00:12:00] don’t want to. Maybe they’re estranged. And then, you know, right now, 40 percent of marriages are projected to end in divorce.

[00:12:06] About 30 percent of women over 65 are widowed. I mean, they’re really just kind of, you know, No guarantees, particularly at the end of life, that you’re going to have somebody who you expected to be there to take care of you. And those are all in relationships where there’s a sense of obligation that’s built in, parent child or spousal.

[00:12:25] In friendships, things are less defined. People do show up and we don’t necessarily talk about it. Like I have a colleague who I learned was married. flying across the country essentially every week to take care of her friend who’s dying and was not talking about it with other colleagues because we leave these things in the background of our lives.

[00:12:43] We don’t talk about the friendships. So I think we don’t necessarily see the evidence that is out there that friends can show up. And certainly there are going to be people who walk away, but there are people who walk away from other kinds of relationships too. So you think

[00:12:57] LM: that, to the question of what do [00:13:00] we owe each other, it’s almost individual, it’s not how do people show up once the relationship’s been defined, it’s who are we talking about and how are they going to show up in any of their relationships?

[00:13:10] RC: Yes and no. I think that that is generally true. I do want to acknowledge that there is something that is important about people making commitments to each other and doing that in public and It’s one of the reasons that I wanted to write the book in the first place to show That these sorts of friendships are societally invisible and there are consequences to that That you don’t end up getting support from other people that you yourself might not realize that You can ask for things, you can expect things from friends that might seem like it’s crossing a line.

[00:13:40] So I actually do think it’s really important to have those defining conversations, but I just want to acknowledge that even in the relationships that we’re holding as a comparison point, particularly marital relationships, that those are not always guaranteed either. So I think it doesn’t make sense to compare the flaky friend against the flaky friend.

[00:13:57] to the ideal spouse. You might need to [00:14:00] compare, like, an average friend versus an average spouse. Or kind of what I’m doing in the book is to show, like, these are people who are taking friendship to the extreme. They’re like Olympian level friends, and they show us that there is so much more that we can do within friendship, but we need to treat friendship differently, and we need to maybe have conversations or be willing to make, doing convenient things, to be there for the we’re not necessarily told is at all something that we should plan to do or should be on our radars.

[00:14:29] What do you think is getting in

[00:14:32] LM: the way of us being Olympian level friends.

[00:14:35] RC: Well, I think this compulsory coupledom, these ideas about finding the one, I’ve been to so many weddings where people declare that their spouse is their best friend, and then I’m like, but what about the maid of honor, the best man?

[00:14:45] Like, where’s the space for friendship in your life? And in those cases, people are just, I think, responding to the world around them and what they’re being told. The hierarchy of relationships, And the sense that a romantic relationship should not just be on top, but it should be this all encompassing [00:15:00] relationship stands in the way of friendship.

[00:15:02] And it translates also into the way that we set up our lives. I understand why people find it difficult to spend a lot of time with friends when they live a half hour away from them. Like, what for you was the best time in your life for friendship? What was your, you know, golden era of friendship in your

[00:15:16] LM: life?

[00:15:17] Probably right after college. I lived in San Francisco and then I lived in New York and I had roommates. And I love having roommates. So I don’t know if that’s what you’re nodding towards, but I love it.

[00:15:25] RC: Proximity. Like, I’m thinking about when I was in college and I lived in, like, the crappiest dorm that had not been, you know, renovated since the 1970s, but it was really a socially rich dorm because we’d had suites.

[00:15:37] So instead of having to go into somebody’s individual room, if you had free time, you would just hang out in the suite and there would be no problems. tons of people around and that kind of ease where you can just have run ins with people and you can have unscheduled time together and you can spend 20 minutes together.

[00:15:52] You don’t have to, like, slot everybody into a little calendar time. That is where friendship can be really rich and where [00:16:00] also a lot of closeness comes because you’re living your life alongside each other. But that’s it. The way that we are told a successful life looks like, which is, you know, getting a house with you and your partner or maybe getting an apartment on your own, and who cares how far it is from other people as long as you have the nice sideboards and granite kitchen countertops and so on, that we are told to prioritize things that really take us away from friendship and from the ease that would make it possible to be closer to our friends.

[00:16:30] LM: We’re going to get into all things communal living shortly because I have a lot of questions for you. It’s something that I’m really interested in, but I have yet to be able to do in my adult life. So I want you to solve all my problems there in a second. But first I want to get into the things that I see as barriers in terms of having these sort of deep, incredible Olympic level friendships.

[00:16:50] One is the time to hang out with people. Do you think that Proximity is the solution there, or are there other solutions to the fact that we [00:17:00] all feel burnt out just by the tasks of day to day life and the relationships we already have? I

[00:17:06] RC: think the hack is trying to find things that you would maybe otherwise do alone, or that would be chores, and then have friends come along for the ride for that.

[00:17:16] The example I always think of is when I was procrastinating on getting a new state ID, and my friend just was like, we’re gonna go to the DMV together, and woke up early with me on a Saturday morning, and we like, went across town, and she sat with me while I waited, and you know what? My ID is now coming up for expiration, and I just keep being like, well, it’s just a couple months away, you really gotta do this, and And maybe what I should do is try to see if I can have a friend come along.

[00:17:41] But that was probably like a two hour thing that I might have otherwise done alone. And instead it was a memory that we shared together and it was time for us to be together. And one of the reasons that was relatively easy was because we lived a five minute walk from one another. And there are so many other ways that this [00:18:00] friend and I got to be involved in everyday life, and you start to accumulate information about each other.

[00:18:05] There isn’t this kind of catching up culture where you are summarizing your life after you’ve done it. You are just living your lives in the thick of it together. Instead of trying to find new slots in your schedule, you are taking existing life and layering And unless you are somebody who always wants to be alone, like introverts, that is probably just going to make life more fun.

[00:18:29] And, and it feels a little bit like I hacked the system. That things are just more lively than they would be if I had to, you know, cook on my own. Or even just like reading in silence with friends. And there is a lot of shared time that you can get that I don’t know that people are, you know, Tapping into the way

[00:18:44] LM: that they could.

[00:18:45] I love that so much for the two reasons you said. I love the idea that you’re not having to find new pockets of time in your life. You’re looking at the existing pockets of time. Hey, I have to go grocery shopping. Hey, I have to go to the DMV. Can we do this together? Hey, I’m [00:19:00] working this afternoon. Do you just want to be silent on computers together and be in each other’s company?

[00:19:04] And two, I do think that’s a huge thing that makes Being roommates with somebody you feel so close because you are living life together, and I hadn’t really identified the difference between recapping your life to somebody and actually living it moment to moment with them.

[00:19:19] RC: I, for three years, was living with two friends, well, I was living with my husband, uh, two of our close friends, and their two kids.

[00:19:25] It’s, like, hard for me to even remember what I knew about them beforehand. And one of them officiated my wedding. So, like, it was a close thing. Close friend. And then what I know from three years of having our parents visit and kind of learning about my friends through, you know, their dynamics with their parents and I can identify them by the sort of different cadence of thuds on the stairs as they’re coming down the stairs.

[00:19:48] I know just so many things that are, that could seem small, but they add up to feeling like you know somebody more completely. And I can certainly say that For one of the friends that I lived with, I really put her [00:20:00] on a pedestal before we lived together, which makes a lot of sense. She’s brilliant. She has, like, this sort of aura about her.

[00:20:06] And now that I’ve lived with her, it’s like I just know her as a more fully formed human being. And that just, it comes from the deep conversations and the long dinners, but it also just comes from running into each other in the kitchen or, you know, realizing, like, some of her little

[00:20:21] LM: quirks. It’s the number one reason I love living with roommates is I am actually an introvert and I find the social pressure of we’re going to sit at a table and we have to make sparkling conversation for three hours to be a lot, but the pressure of we’re going to make dinner and you’re going to chop onions for a second and then I’m going to say something interesting and then you’re going to say something interesting and then we’ll maybe fall back into silence while you’re sautéing, it takes away so much of the pressure.

[00:20:49] RC: I think that people intuitively know some of this in dating, or in other parts of social life, that it is easier to talk to somebody when you are sitting in a car next to each other, or, I was talking to a friend [00:21:00] about what kinds of dates he likes to have, and he thinks going on a walk is the kind of optimal date.

[00:21:04] And it’s for some of the reasons that you’re talking about, like you, you don’t have the moment where you’re sitting across from somebody and you, neither of you have a question to ask, and you just like look at your glasses and take a sip, that you can have Silences that keeping your hands occupied if you’re cooking or something can free up your mind in a way and We in some ways structure our friendship Interactions in ways that are similar to the like harder parts of dating you’ve had Logan Urion Like she’s talked about how you should go out and do things in the world on dates and that opens you up So that’s That’s maybe like another reason to try to figure out in your friendships, what are things that you can do that aren’t just going out and having dinner and then giving a rundown of your life over the last, you know, week or

[00:21:46] LM: six months.

[00:21:47] A hundred percent. Okay. And then my second impediment that I thought of to becoming Olympic level friends is that it can be hard to find the person who’s going to reciprocate what you want there. So I found my [00:22:00] significant other. my romantic relationship, my husband. And I feel like I got really, really, really lucky to find one person in the entire world that I enjoy spending as much time with as I do and that feels similarly about me.

[00:22:14] So I’m thinking about your DMV story. How do we find these people who want to go to the DMV with us? And And that we like enough to develop these really significant, important relationships with.

[00:22:27] RC: Well, I guess I want to give a disclaimer, which is that I’m not saying that the original thing that everyone was telling you is that you needed to find a romantic partner.

[00:22:34] Now, you also have to find this, like, hyper close friend because if you don’t do that, then you failed. Like, that’s totally not what I’m saying. A lot of people either stumble into these friendships and don’t know what to make of them, don’t know how to talk about them. And then also people have a kind of nebulous feeling that they want more from their friendships.

[00:22:51] then they believe is reasonable to want. So those are the things that I want to push on. I want people to feel like it is okay to want more of your [00:23:00] friendships, it is okay to give yourself more over to friendships, it is okay if you find a friend that you want to build a life around or you see as equal to a romantic partner, you can go do that.

[00:23:09] And that can be a really full and fulfilling thing. In terms of like how do we find these people, when I think about the people that I feel most affection toward, there’s a lot of luck, being somebody who takes initiative helps. I was talking to this couple that’s probably in their like 50s now, and they were saying that they will host a lot and people won’t reciprocate.

[00:23:31] So I think they’re on the flip side of this where they are trying, but then they find that people are not giving back. I think you sometimes just need to Take some risks, and make some overtures, and deal with the possibility of rejection, and have people come and be part of life. And the friend of mine who went to the DMV with me, she would host all sorts of things, like people coming over to read in silence together, would host these really elaborate music parties, was willing to be herself, and Have these structured ways of [00:24:00] gathering and not everybody’s into that, but then you’d select for the people that are really into the same thing, and then it makes it faster and easier to have that kind of connection.

[00:24:09] LM: I also love, you talk about this in the book, how if we have other significant relationships in our life, we’re not sort of waiting to meet our romantic partner for our life to begin, which, I do feel like it’s something we don’t talk about enough, this sense of like, oh, until I meet this person, I’m almost living a pretend life.

[00:24:29] RC: Yeah, it’s like you’re in the preface of the book of your life. Who wants to live their life feeling like they’re in a holding room, and that something is going to be on the other side, but you never know when, and it’s like, It’s not really in your control totally, I mean you can do things to inhibit it if I guess you never try to meet people.

[00:24:46] But the life that you have right now can be one that already feels full and ready. One way that I saw this play out was somebody wrote to me after I’d written a piece about these really close friendships and she was divorced and [00:25:00] said that she essentially felt like she was waiting for her life to begin, that she felt like her life was incomplete until she found a new spouse.

[00:25:06] And until she did. I saw these stories of people who had these really close friendships and realized she had that kind of friendship. This was a friend that, you know, she put on her emergency contact form, who was the owner of two car seats for her friend’s kids, like that’s how close they were, and was taking care of them during the pandemic.

[00:25:24] And she realized her life was full. She had nothing to fill in. She had not been given permission to believe that her life was complete as is, and that it took from her the actual happiness and satisfaction that she felt because she had She had been getting these messages that she couldn’t possibly be happy.

[00:25:42] I found that profound and devastating that it’s not just that people are genuinely unhappy because they don’t have a romantic partner, but that they might not be able to access their own satisfaction because they’re getting countervailing messages all around them. And do you think the antidote

[00:25:56] LM: to that Because there are so many of these societal [00:26:00] messages, it’s just to keep reminding yourself that what you have is valid and real and enough, or to hear stories like the ones that you share.

[00:26:08] How do we counter the sheer amount of messages to the other side that we get?

[00:26:12] RC: I don’t want to put this all on individuals. I totally get it if People feel like they don’t feel good about themselves, or they feel like they’re missing something. Those are not facts about their lives, but having some grace if those are feelings that do come up.

[00:26:27] And one of the things that I’m trying to do is show through these stories that people exist who have these sorts of friendships, and I would be really excited for Hollywood to have more of these depictions. I mean, it’s certainly the depictions that do exist help. Like, I love Booksmart. I love seeing more movies where the platonic relationship really is the plot.

[00:26:47] And, you know, the friends are not just the sidekicks, but we need more of that. Having a legal system that Isn’t basically marriage or bust where it is possible to exchange rights and benefits. I think like seeing what [00:27:00] ceremonies look like for friendship that we don’t really have rituals around friendship If people started to have those and have them publicly that might start to change people’s ideas of what friendship can be I met somebody recently who she and two of her friends All picked a last name that they legally changed their last name to and like are really a chosen family in that and created this whole ritual with their families to all spend time together and I understand why it’s hard to manufacture all those ideas on your own and that we need to be able to like look at the world around us and pick up books and watch movies and see scripts that we can choose to follow as opposed to just a single script that we’ve been told that we have to follow.

[00:27:42] Yeah,

[00:27:43] LM: I agree completely. And I think it’ll help with this idea, like, That it’s the backup choice. It’s so interesting because even hearing these stories, even reading your book, I have the sense that a lot of people’s reaction would be, okay, yeah, if I can’t have this, I’ll make do with this. And you’re saying, [00:28:00] no, this doesn’t need to be the backup choice.

[00:28:02] And I think that the fact that we have pedestalized the romantic relationship for so long is what’s planting that thought in our head.

[00:28:10] RC: Well, I think the other reason that people might come to that thought is because they’re looking at who has these sorts of friendships, and that so often the people who have these friendships, so not exclusively, are people who don’t have a conventional romantic relationship, but they might be getting cause and effect backwards.

[00:28:25] The reason that many of the people who have these sorts of friendships don’t have a traditional romantic relationship. Um. And what ends up happening if you don’t have a traditional romantic relationship is, you could be sort of sullen about that, but what I’ve also seen is that people end up getting more creative, and that somebody who I write about who is asexual, it was devastating for them to realize that they could not have a traditional romantic relationship until they started to be more curious about it, and ask themselves questions like, If a sexual relationship isn’t going to move my life forward, what is?

[00:28:56] And they realize they already had the kinds of partnerships that they really wanted [00:29:00] in their life, and they can go out and pursue them. I write about women in their 80s who, one of whom had gotten married very young and got divorced. The other had really wanted to have kids, but then was infertile after emergency surgery and never ended up getting married.

[00:29:13] They didn’t end up having the conventional path in front of them, and these two women forged a life together and have been best friends for 50 years. It’s quite possible that if they had both Been married for life, that they would’ve never turned to each other in that way. So I don’t think it has to be the case because I also find people who have romantic partnerships and have had this kind of friendship and they’ve just fallen into it.

[00:29:33] Often the friendship precedes the romantic relationship, but I think what we can maybe do is look at the people who have these friendships and don’t have romantic relationships and admire the imagination, the creativity that comes from constraints, and then people who. Maybe aren’t forced into those same constraints can then have the possibility of choosing what these other people have shown us is possible.

[00:29:54] LM: Well, and you’re one of those people who’s chosen it. You have a husband and you [00:30:00] have all these other really significant, important relationships in your life. And one thing that I love is I met my husband when I was six. I think 21, a really long time ago. And I love the way that you described falling in love with your friend M, because I think a lot of people who are in long term relationships mourn the fact that they’ve lost those early tingles, that early sparkle of new love, and you’re saying, no, you can have that again.

[00:30:25] It was a huge

[00:30:26] RC: surprise to me. I mean, I met my husband at 22, and one of the things I thought about was like, wow, I feel really lucky. I really did not expect to end up in a long term romantic relationship that young, but I was like, so this is great, but the downside is that like, I’ll never experience this feeling again, which people, you know, rave about.

[00:30:44] New relationship energy. It’s exciting. And then I ended up feeling that for a friend, and I was like, wait, this can happen? And why didn’t anybody tell me about this? Is this like some well kept secret? You know, I just had the same kind of infatuation and excitement and I learned it’s not just [00:31:00] me and a lot of people tend to point to their adolescence, early adult years when you have the opportunity for, you know, Constant interaction.

[00:31:09] If you are in school together, if you’re in dorms together, that you can kind of link up and be attached at the hip. But as we get older, we maybe are not putting ourselves in the position where it’s even possible to have that kind of excitement. Like, I’ve certainly met people where the first time I was so excited to meet them, and then it was like the next time we saw each other was a few months later because that was the next time that they could see me, and it’s hard to foster that excitement if you’re not constantly seeing one another.

[00:31:37] LM: I had Molly wrote in Winter on the podcast, you know who that is? She wrote a memoir of her open relationship, and I feel like you guys were sort of identifying really similar problems, but coming at different solutions, and hers was to open up her relationship to feel more of that joy, to feel more of that connection and spark.

[00:31:55] Can you explain how what you’re advocating for differs from [00:32:00] open relationships? There’s actually

[00:32:02] RC: quite a lot of overlap in terms of the underlying principles of non monogamy and what I’m talking about in friendship, even though they would seem to be like, one is about romance or sex, and one is about friendship.

[00:32:13] And I think the underlying idea is to diversify your relationship portfolio, essentially, to like diffuse the responsibilities and to know that you can find different kinds of joy and connection in, in relationships. different people in your life. One way to do that is by having more than one romantic or sexual partner, but there are other kinds of people you can have in addition to a romantic partner or not have a romantic partner.

[00:32:37] And a lot of people who are non monogamous will talk about their Friends also being really central and in fact two people who were the first ones I interviewed when I was working on the book I’ve been best friends since they were 15 and they are both straight men They found that when they dated women That they would hit a point where the women were not okay with the fact that the friendship was so high in the hierarchy of their [00:33:00] lives essentially And they decided to start dating non monogamously.

[00:33:04] They didn’t want multiple romantic partners, they just wanted to have the friendship be the primary relationship. And they found that the only people who were likely to get that were those who had a framework of non monogamy. So they’ve had much more success in terms of finding romantic partners. In a non monogamous context, even though they only want one romantic partner.

[00:33:23] So that’s the way that these things overlap. I think one way that they might be different is like, some people can approach non monogamy in a way that sort of entrenches the importance of romantic and sexual partners, where you’re just like, consuming more and more of life with romantic and sexual partners, whereas I’m saying, like, let’s not just move from one central person to more than one, but also let’s destabilize this idea that only a romantic relationship is the one that can be on top, if you’re going to have one on top.

[00:33:52] LM: It is interesting in the book your exploration of what is the difference, in essence, between a friendship and a romantic relationship, and I’m curious [00:34:00] what conclusions you came to about that. Like, is it sex? Is it something else? It’s

[00:34:04] RC: so nebulous. It’s a very interesting dinner party conversation. I would totally recommend asking people, what makes a romantic relationship romantic?

[00:34:11] And I’ve heard things like, well, it’s friendship plus sex. Well, is it that? And I started to then ask, like, what is it about romantic relationships that we think are special? And try to break some of that down. And I think what makes romantic relationships special for a lot of people is the commitment and the sense that you’re going to have a shared future together.

[00:34:31] So you were talking earlier about the vows that people have to one another. I mean, Yeah. That’s when people break down and start crying at weddings, like, both people getting married and the people in the audience, I’ve, like, seen this every time. I think that that is primarily the thing that romantic relationships share, because there are romantic relationships that are hot and heavy, and there are ones that are companionate, that look much more like friendships.

[00:34:53] And yet we consider them all under the same category. So, like, what is it that they share? And I think it is the sense that you are building a life [00:35:00] together, that you are Looking toward a future together and maybe there’s some idea that like if you started in a romantic place and you always get that gloss But I find that unconvincing when maybe you had that for a couple years, but the rest of it is Companionate.

[00:35:14] So the lines between friendship, especially a very close friendship and a romantic relationship can be really blurry if both are committed or in the case of me and Em where we had a lot of like You affection for each other. And we had a lot of sweetness and characteristics that we associate with romance, which I can say, like, I’ve seen romantic relationships that don’t have any of those elements.

[00:35:33] So these are not things that we normally question and we’re just like, oh, this is a committed relationship where maybe there’s some sexual attraction. Like, that’s a romantic relationship, even though all the boxes are checked.

[00:35:43] LM: That investment, though, I do think is at the core of one of the things that makes people so scared to go all in on these other significant relationships in their life.

[00:35:53] Like. You and your husband were living with this other couple and you just told me that you guys stopped living together [00:36:00] because One of them was in academia and so they needed to move to take a job or whatever if they were married to you You would have moved together. So my Question is how do we? Get this invested with people when we know that they’re not going to be prioritizing us in the same way that you would with a marriage.

[00:36:21] As part of our

[00:36:21] RC: living arrangement, we knew from the get go that our friends were going to go on the academic job market, and we had like percentages of likelihood of how long they would be around, but we thought like one to four years, and it ended up being three years. So, Yeah, there is something about if we were married, we’d probably go to the same place together, but we were on the same page about what the nature of the commitment is.

[00:36:41] One thing that I’ve been really interested in, partly because of this very important and yet temporary experience with my friends, is that it is possible to have commitment that is not commitment forever and that is temporary. And it can even be like commitment to a place. I will talk to people who are like, Well, this isn’t my forever city, so I’m not gonna invest in it.

[00:36:59] And then they [00:37:00] end up there for like five years, and they never made friends, because they were treating it as something that was transient. And I think if we can treat relationships As ones that are worth digging into, even if we have some uncertainty about how long they can last, that we might end up making them much stronger, and that the strength of those relationships might then make us choose differently, that we might make decisions that we want to live in a different place or buy a home next to each other, and that by preemptively Divesting from relationships that we are kind of just reinforcing this cycle where we say well It’s not gonna be important and therefore not gonna treat it as important and therefore there’s no reason for me to do anything that would Bestow any importance on

[00:37:42] LM: it.

[00:37:43] Do you think we should be having this define the relationship conversation with our friends?

[00:37:49] RC: I’m a very, like, not a should person in general, but I think that there are probably people and relationships that would benefit from these conversations. The version that I’ve been having, last time I was [00:38:00] actually in the Bay Area, my husband and I and a close friend spent a couple weeks together, and we talked about, What would it look like to buy a home together, to potentially raise a kid together?

[00:38:09] We ended up having a very long conversation with some people at Radish, which is a co living community in the area about, both philosophically and like, nuts and bolts, what does it look like to build out a community together, and I found it pretty thrilling. To have that kind of open conversation and visioning together of what our lives can look like.

[00:38:29] And it felt special to do that with friends in a way that maybe I would’ve taken for granted in a romantic relationship. You know, I wouldn’t have that conversation with every single friend in my life, but this was a particular person who my husband and I, and he could all see us. trying to forge a life together.

[00:38:45] And so he’s the person we’re now living with. He could live anywhere in the country, decided to live in DC, and we’re doing a trial run to see, like, do we like this? Like, do we want to try to make this long term? And I think that that itself can be a kind of example of, like, one, having the conversation, and two, it’s not like we’ve [00:39:00] committed to the next 30 years.

[00:39:01] We’re, like, committing to figuring out, do we want to commit? And I think friends can do that. And then there are smaller level things like, do you want to just commit to seeing each other once a week or every other week? It doesn’t have to be all the way on the extreme end, though the extreme end has its rewards.

[00:39:14] LM: Okay, let’s dive into communal living because I’m fascinated by communal living. I love the idea of it, and yet I have not been able to make it work. So I have some of my own thoughts on that, but I would love to hear from you. What do you think are the barriers people experience when they’re contemplating communal living?

[00:39:32] RC: One is, people are told that roommates are for a stage of life and that you move past it. So that can really get in the way of people even contemplating living communally and that they might enjoy it because it’s seen as juvenile. So that’s one. Another is just, uh, Our housing system, the housing that we have, the real estate agents, the way that banks work, are not designed for people who are not related by blood or [00:40:00] marriage to live together.

[00:40:01] So you have to be able to maneuver and be creative and put in work on the front end. There are some structural things, and there are cultural issues, and then there are some mindset concerns that people might have where they will immediately focus on all the things that they would be giving up by living communally.

[00:40:20] They’ll give up privacy, they’ll give up control, maybe they won’t have as much space to themselves, and they are really overemphasizing all of the drawbacks, and maybe, They’re overemphasizing all the possible drawbacks and underappreciating all the benefits, like the kind of connection you can get. I’m staying with friends right now, and there were multiple times during the day when a friend and I had a ten minute kind of break in between what we were doing and just ended up chatting and sitting on the ground while we, were talking.

[00:40:51] Pet their rabbit and their people are not necessarily picturing those sorts of ways that your life can become [00:41:00] more exciting and connected by living with

[00:41:01] LM: friends. I also keep coming back to this is how historically it was done. We used to live in a village. I have so many friends who have had kids recently and they’re like, it is so hard.

[00:41:14] And I’m like, yes, it is probably harder than it has. ever been in history. We have women in the workforce, which is absolutely amazing, and I’m 100 percent for, but there’s been no compensation for that on the caretaking end. We have made it so that the greatest success we can achieve is putting ourselves in these little homes by ourselves that are separated from anybody who could be helpful with our children.

[00:41:36] And I’m just like, this is not how it always was. Even 50 years ago, it wasn’t like this. Can you explain some of the historical precedent for more communal living?

[00:41:47] RC: We’ve been given this benchmark that was a historical anomaly. So the benchmark we have is the 1950s and 1960s, post war, white Americans get their GI Bill and their nice home in Levittown in the suburbs.[00:42:00]

[00:42:00] And that was an aberration, that for most of human history, people have lived in the suburbs. settings where it’s not just two parents and kids. It might have been if it was in a city, like a professor of mine had talked about, I think it was 13 people living in a three floor bungalow in Chicago, and it was just sort of tons of relatives or people living in other kinds of multi generational homes, extended family networks.

[00:42:24] And people who they might call family, they might call cousins and aunts and uncles, but in fact were really family friends. So, you know, what we are aspiring to is something that only existed in a really short period of time and might have worked for that short period of time for some people. And yet, like, uh, The people who had those homes were probably getting outside help.

[00:42:45] I just think about like in these Victorian or Regency era TV shows that people are interested in, you have wet nurses. The mothers aren’t even breastfeeding their own kids. In a lot of these households, there are servants. There are other people who are making households run. So the idea that you can have two [00:43:00] people doing everything and that that is the ideal is not really what we’ve expected

[00:43:05] LM: for thousands of years.

[00:43:07] So how do we begin to deconstruct that notion? Because I think one of the biggest things that keeps us from attempting this is the judgment from others, but also the self judgment.

[00:43:17] RC: Yeah, the self judgment that you are not a true adult. I can say from my own experience that people have assumed that I have a non monogamous relationship with friends I’m living with, which is, in the case of these particular friends, kind of hilarious because they are religiously observant and that would never be something that they’d contemplate, but it is So much easier for people to think about commitment and sharing a home together if you have a romantic or sexual entanglement.

[00:43:44] And that we don’t think that friends can have that kind of commitment. And that again, it’s only for a certain stage of your life, this preface, the holding room, before you’ve arrived at the real life, when you have partnered up with a friend. So, you know, that really keeps people from actually, looking [00:44:00] around and seeing who they maybe want to live with, who could they get along with well.

[00:44:03] So how do we

[00:44:05] LM: deconstruct that, though? Like, how do we stop judging ourselves and stop judging other people?

[00:44:10] RC: There’s hard work to be done to figure out what is it that we actually want and to detach that from everything that the world around us is telling us. And I still, like, think about somebody who I interviewed at length for my book who, Went on this whole journey as a straight man who was told, like, he shouldn’t be close to male friends, he shouldn’t touch them.

[00:44:26] As he became really close to a gay man who represented so much of what was the opposite of what he was told was okay, that he started to ask himself, What are the things that I reacted to instinctively that I thought are okay or aren’t? And, How much of it do I actually believe? Something as simple as him having his friend touch him on the shoulder felt like, oh no, that’s wrong.

[00:44:49] And he started to ask himself, with the help of his friend, like, is this something moral that’s actually wrong? Is this a cultural message that it is wrong for men to touch each other like this? Or is it personal? Do I actually not [00:45:00] like the physical experience of somebody putting their, their hand on me?

[00:45:02] And I think that a lot of us can take a version of that for ourselves. Like, have we never considered? Living with friends, or maybe even in a multi generational household, because it doesn’t feel right to the kind of life that we want, that it would not suit us well, or are we getting messaging that’s kind of been internalized, and that we can’t actually hear for ourselves what it is that we want?

[00:45:25] Taking that pause to think about it, and to talk about these things with one another, can, help us live lives that feel more connected. I think we’re at the risk of too little connection more than we are of too much and that it might be worth trying to take the risks of the kind of problems that show up by orienting your life more communally, not having the privacy, maybe somebody will move something in the refrigerator or will eat your leftovers that you didn’t label or whatever.

[00:45:53] Sometimes that might be worth it in exchange for all the things that These are real examples for friends like when their car broke down. down. [00:46:00] Somebody could drive their kids to school. When they ran out of cereal, someone can hand it over the balcony or will text them on WhatsApp to say, I’m going to the grocery store.

[00:46:08] Do you need anything? When someone is sick, you have multiple people to take care of you. So I think one way to deconstruct this is to look at trade offs differently and not just think about The things that you might lose from an unconventional life, but, but think about the things you might gain, and experiment, and try out, would you like it?

[00:46:25] What my husband and I did with our friend was, we stayed in a friend of a friend’s house for a couple weeks while she was gone, and house sat, and we got to experience in a small way, what was it like to live together, and that was part of the decision making, we want to try this for six months now.

[00:46:43] LM: How did you deal with judgment from external people?

[00:46:46] Like, did you have people saying, like, Oh, like, that’s too bad for you. I just bought a house. Or, oh, like, are you ever gonna grow up?

[00:46:52] RC: Yeah, I mean, I’ve definitely gotten all sorts of reactions. Is your husband not enough for you? A lot of comments about living with kids in particular, and [00:47:00] like, oh, I can never do that, and I value my sleep too much, people making assumptions.

[00:47:04] I found that once people, And I think for whatever people were either telling me or not telling me that maybe they were skeptical of, that witnessing it changed their minds. And, you know, I’m not trying to live my life so that I get approval from everybody. I know that it’s rewarding and it is nice that people, kind of over time might come around, but you know, your first question was about like the status quo isn’t working.

[00:47:36] So you know, why try to make ourselves look like we are everybody else who is adhering to the status quo that has given us a loneliness epidemic where 15 percent of men in this country say they have no close friends. I would rather risk overcorrection than doing the thing that doesn’t seem like it’s working in general.

[00:47:54] And certainly as somebody who. Like adores my friends and loves having multiple people influencing [00:48:00] my thinking and to call on in my emotional life. I would rather kind of honor and tend to that than try to conform to what is not generally working.

[00:48:11] LM: Was it hard living with other people’s kids? I confess, when I read that you did that, I was like, wow, that’s crazy.

[00:48:18] Well,

[00:48:19] RC: I will say I am not a kids person. For my husband, living with a, then it was one child, a one year old. It was likely that our friends would have another child they wanted to. That was a huge plus for him. For me, it was like, wow. I haven’t wanted to have kids forever the way that he does. I would say there’s a difference between one and two kids in terms of like how that changes a household.

[00:48:38] But even as somebody who is not like, I want to hang out with everybody’s kids, I found it really beautiful and rewarding. Like when the second child was born, I was the person at the bris to announce to the community what the name was of the child. One thing I realized is that your mere existence in their lives, like you don’t have to do anything.

[00:48:59] We’ll make the kids [00:49:00] attached to you and make them comfortable with you. Even, I have a very close friend who lives a five minute walk from me and love her kid, but she’ll sometimes be really excited to see me, but sometimes will get shy, which is different than the kids who are completely at ease with me at home.

[00:49:15] It exposed me to a different way of life, and one reason that it worked was that our house was well suited for this kind of arrangement. The actual structure of a place really matters. Um, my husband and I had the third floor in this, like, three floor row house to ourselves. So we had this balance of shared space and privacy, and I think that’s really a kind of compromise that a lot of people want.

[00:49:35] I think it’s why for many people the dream would be living next door to their friends and knocking down the backyard so that they can kind of come and go, but they also, you know, aren’t always compelled to be with each other, and we had that kind of balance. So I don’t want to sugarcoat it and be like, you can do this in a one bedroom apartment and cram five people into it.

[00:49:53] It’s going to matter per person, like the actual. Architecture makes a difference.

[00:49:57] LM: That is probably my [00:50:00] dream, having a shared backyard with my friends, having a bunch of friends on a block together and our kids can all play and we can share child rearing responsibilities and things like that, but that feels almost impossible with houses being as expensive as they are and it’s like anything you can find, great for you, much less finding everything together and having it be workable for everybody.

[00:50:22] So do you have any advice for, in a really pragmatic sense, living together? Communally and making that actually happen

[00:50:29] RC: Well, the housing affordability can cut both ways for people like some of the parts of the country where you’re seeing a lot of communal Living like where we are right now in the Bay are the parts of the country where it is so expensive Where you know people who might not have otherwise thought to buy home together have the money as an excuse essentially to do something that they then enjoy but in our society would have felt a little bit odd.

[00:50:55] If you are up against unaffordability, maybe use that as an opportunity to see, [00:51:00] like, can you pool resources with friends? I would like us to have, like, more duplex, triplex kinds of setups. And so if anybody’s listening out there who’s involved in city planning or architecture or zoning, like, let’s make that happen.

[00:51:12] Another thing that I’ve learned from the creators of Radish, which is the co living community I mentioned earlier, is that sometimes you just need to start small, and you need to plant a flag, and that will affect what other people do. It’s not guaranteed, but like, in their case, it was a couple people who created a co living community that just had a few people at the beginning, and now it’s almost 20.

[00:51:31] Just knowing that you’re playing, if not a long game, then like, A medium term game that you’re not maybe going to get like all the people in the same place at once. But if you’re willing to put in some work on the front end, that can be encouraging. I’ve seen a version of this in New York City with a woman named Priya Rose who over time has had like dozens of friends able to rent units in a building together.

[00:51:51] So you can make incremental steps toward a big decision is one option. And the other option, um, is being willing to go in on a big decision [00:52:00] with friends and make sure you have conversations and. There are lawyers who can handle making contracts if you’re going to get into this big commitment together.

[00:52:09] But realizing the commitment is possible is another side of the coin that helps.

[00:52:12] LM: What do you wish more people knew about communal living?

[00:52:16] RC: I think I just wish people knew about the mundane joys and realized that We’re kind of like depriving ourselves of those forms of connection, like, not to say that everybody needs this or everybody wants it, but I think it’s so easy to just take the thing that we’re told to do and that everybody’s been doing and assume that that’s the best thing and not that it comes with certain things that you’re giving up, like maybe just thinking about if you went to college on a campus, like what were the best elements of dorm life and then imagine that you were like 10 plus years more mature.

[00:52:52] Like, because I think the other thing that people don’t necessarily realize with communal living is that if you’re doing this in your [00:53:00] late 20s or 30s, don’t compare it to a bunch of 19 year olds who were not that responsible, not that conscientious living together. It’s not just the structure, but also who the people are when they’re coming to that arrangement.

[00:53:14] Mm. That makes a

[00:53:15] LM: lot of sense. If somebody is listening and they are. Interested in exploring communal living and they have no idea where to begin. What would you say is a good first step?

[00:53:26] RC: I really love a newsletter called supernuclear One of the things I really like about this newsletter is that it gives case studies like stories of people who are doing communal living But also shows how do you do it because that was big hump that I had to get over.

[00:53:42] I was literally writing a book on friendship, and then when this opportunity to live with friends came up, I was like, to my husband, like, don’t we need to save for a down payment? And he was like, is that the thing that matters? And what we ended up doing was talking through, like, what are the values that are important?

[00:53:57] So that was a first step, to think about the values, so I [00:54:00] would encourage maybe people to do that. And then the next thing for me was seeing. An example of communal living and what it took to make it happen for Radish was very complicated in terms of making an LLC and having investors and they like built their property like it was So much and I thought oh, okay one There’s some work involved I can’t just have this dreamy conversation about like wouldn’t it be so fun to like live with friends Which I think a lot of people do I have to translate this into essentially a project but also um That what Radish did was so much more complicated, so much more involved than what I wanted to do, and if they could make it happen, then I could figure out how to make something that was much more pared down happen.

[00:54:41] So, you know, it’s like seeing the most extreme version can make you, you know, dream bigger, but also make you realize, like, if that’s possible, then you can do a scaled down version

[00:54:52] LM: of it. Radish is intimidating to me because, like you said, it is like a whole. Thing and there’s people who pretty much devote their lives to running [00:55:00] it and i’m like, oh my gosh If i’m not willing to go all in and have this be my entire personality I can’t do it, but it has been really expansive in terms of the people who live there are really successful they Break down that stereotype of oh, you’re only living with roommates if you’re haven’t made it in your life These are people who for all intents and outside judgments, you’d be like, oh wow They’ve really made it and they’re choosing to live with roommates.

[00:55:23] Did you know that margot robbie lives with roommates? No, but also Brandy Carlisle lives on a compound where I didn’t know that there’s so many examples and I do find those examples though to be really helpful because to our earlier conversation, we are getting so many messages on the other side about like buying the single family home is the American dream.

[00:55:43] Having one partner and building this little isolated life together is the American dream. And I think that the more of these outside examples, it can feel trite to be like, Margot Robbie lives in a mansion with a bunch of her Hollywood friends. But I also think it’s really important to say Margot Robbie could choose to live in a mansion by herself, [00:56:00] and instead she’s choosing to live in a mansion with all these other people.

[00:56:03] RC: Yeah. One of the conversations I’ve had with some people who are interested in trying to make communal living more accessible to people is like, Why isn’t this something people aspire to? Yeah. And we need to show that this isn’t just something that you do because you can’t afford anything else, because you’re forced into it, but because it is a version of the American dream.

[00:56:21] We’ve been told there’s only one dream and there actually are other things. If we had all the resources in the world that we would still choose. Yeah, so I think that that’s kind of real value of hearing an example like Margot Robbie.

[00:56:32] LM: I love all of the work you do around this. I really do think that it is so important just to consider that.

[00:56:38] There are alternatives to the way that we’re doing it and we need to think intentionally about the choices that we’re making because they are choices and sometimes we act like they’re not. So I really appreciate all of your research, all of your experiences that you’re putting out in the world.

[00:56:53] RC: Oh, thank you.

[00:56:54] And I will say like one of the ideas that I think. I think kind of encapsulates what I’m trying to do, actually comes from the [00:57:00] friend that I’m living with now, Adam, and it was in the book where he was talking about different relationship structures and realized what he’s against is feeling like you have to adhere to defaults, and then he spitballed the term defaultomy, you know, like there’s monogamy and non monogamy, like defaultomy, and that’s like what I want people to think about, not that they have to Now aspire to something totally different and that, again, if they don’t, they’re going to be judged.

[00:57:22] Different strokes for different folks. People want different things, but to look at the defaults that you have been handed and to actually ask, does this make sense for me? You know, I’ve been told to take this for granted and what if I did something different? Would that

[00:57:37] LM: actually fit me more? Mm. I love that.

[00:57:39] Can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your amazing book and anything else that you want to spotlight?

[00:57:44] RC: My book is called The Other Significant Others, Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, and it’s really a series of profiles of people who have these very intense, intimate, committed friendships, and in each story trying to pick [00:58:00] out what are the questions that these friendships raise, like, You know, why is it so hard for men to become really close to one another?

[00:58:06] Can you have a really committed friendship and romantic partnership at the same time? Why do we think that the way to ensure that you won’t die alone is to have a romantic partner? The people who I interviewed gave a lot of themselves over to me in the book and allow us to work together. to sit in their lives in pretty intimate ways.

[00:58:23] My hope is that for people who want to understand the full extent of what friendship can be, or want to understand people who have these friendships that maybe they’ve seen in their lives, because there are a lot of people out there who have them, that they’ll connect with the book. And otherwise, I do writing on social connection and people who are pushing against defaults, mostly for The Atlantic, but also where I have my day job at NPR, and I’m always interested in stories about interesting ways of living if people have them.

[00:58:49] Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Raina. Thanks for the

[00:58:52] LM: really thoughtful conversation. That’s all for this episode of the Liz Moody Podcast. If you loved this episode, one of the best [00:59:00] ways that you can support the pod is by sending a link to your friends, your family, your partner, your coworkers, you name it.

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[00:59:48] Oh, just one more thing. It’s the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, [01:00:00] or any other qualified professional.