Talks on Love Playlist (5/5): Why friendship can be just as meaningful as romantic love | Rhaina Cohen

**Elise Hu** (0:00)
June is LGBTQ Pride Month for many around the world. It's a time to celebrate the fight for rights and the many forms love and relationships can take. In honor of this, today we're dropping five of our favorite TED Talks from the archive on love and relationships. Happy listening.
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. We are so conditioned to think of our romantic relationships as central to our lives and the foundation of our families. But journalist and author, Rhaina Cohen, is challenging that framework. In her 2024 talk, she paints a picture of a future where friendship can be at the core. We'll dive into this talk right after the break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Rhaina Cohen** (1:02)
There is a Supreme Court case that you could mistake for a sermon. It's the case that recognized that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Here is a sense of what Justice Kennedy wrote. Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. He goes on to say that marriage offers care and companionship, and the decision argues that these are basic human needs that everyone should have access to, whether they're straight or queer. Validating. But what do these words say to you if you're single? Anybody single here? I mean, there should be quite a few of you, because in the US, the percentage of American adults who have never been married is at a record high.
Married people, you're not off the hook.
I'm going to get a little morbid for a moment and have you contemplate what happens if your marriage doesn't last until the end of your life.
Whether because of divorce or outliving your spouse, in the US, about 30 percent of women over 65 are widows.
The reality is, any one of us is unlikely to have a spouse by our side until our last dying breath. Regardless of whether we are partnered now, we need to rely on more than one relationship to sustain us throughout our full, unpredictable lives. We need other, significant others.
And there's an overlooked kind of relationship that we can turn to. Friendship. I got the sense that friendship could be this stronger force in our lives because of a friendship that I stumbled into. We would see each other most days of the week, be each other's plus ones to parties. My friend has this habit of grabbing my hand to hold, including when I brought her to my office, and then I'd have to be like, no, not in the office.
But it's only, I wouldn't let my husband do that in the office either. It's just, you know, setting matters. But it was only an issue because for us, affection is a reflex.
And I knew it couldn't be just us. I went out and interviewed dozens of people who had a friendship like ours, and I wrote a book about them. And the kinds of friends that I spoke to, they don't just have a weekly phone call. They're friends like these. Natasha and Linda are the first legally recognized platonic co-parents in Canada. Joe and John have been best friends for many decades. When Joe was struggling with alcohol and drug use, John got him into recovery.
And then John decided that to support his friend, he would also become sober. Joy took care of her friend Hannah during Hannah's six-year battle with ovarian cancer, and that included flying out to New York, where Hannah got specialized treatment. Joy had trouble actually sleeping overnight in the hospital because she was too busy watching to make sure her friend's chest was still rising and falling.
Some of the friends that I spoke to had this friendship to occupy the space that's conventionally given to a romantic partner. Some had this kind of friendship and a romantic partner. It's not either or. As I spoke to these people, I realized that they were at the frontier of friendship, helping us imagine how much more we could ask of our platonic relationships. Which is true, but another way of looking at it is, they're doing something retro, even ancient. In ancient Rome, friends would talk about each other as half of my soul or the greater part of my soul, the kind of language we now use in romantic relationships. From China to Jordan to England, there was a practice called sworn brotherhood, where male friends would go through a ritual that would turn them into brothers. About a century ago, friends would sit for portraits like these, with their arms wrapped around each other, their bodies up close. What I took from this history is that if we don't limit friendship, it can be central to our lives. But today, not everybody recognizes that. I spoke to a mother who really tried to get her son to make dating a priority because she wanted him to find emotional wholeness. And her son told her, I found it in my platonic life partner. His best friend, who he had known since high school, who had moved across the country to be near him, to live with him, in fact. The mother said, I don't understand how you can be partners with someone you're not romantic with. Understandable has a reaction in a culture that treats friendship as the sidekick to the real hero of romance. We get that message from rom-coms, from Supreme Court justices, also from policy. So Joy, during the six years she took care of her friend, she was not entitled to family medical leave. When Hannah died, Joy was not entitled to bereavement leave, because the two of them were considered unrelated. In our government and workplace policies, friendship is invisible. Sometimes this diminishment of friendship comes from the outside, and sometimes it comes from the inside. A woman wrote to me about her friend who she considers her person. She spent so much time with her friend's kids that she was given car seats for them. She's also divorced and tried to find a new spouse, because there was a hole she wanted to fill in her life. Then, she read stories of people like Joe and John in an article I'd written, and she realized there was no hole. She had been happy all along, but she hadn't known, been made to believe, that it was possible to have a friend be enough. If we can recognize what friendship has the potential to be, and if we can recognize that there is more than one kind of significant other, then we can imagine more ways for us to find love and care and companionship. And we can support people who have these kinds of friendships. So the mother I mentioned, she's completely changed her tune. She now admires the commitment between her son and her son's friend. I feel like I get to live in a future world where you can just build a life with your friends. I live not only with my husband, but also two of my closest friends. One of them, we kind of like had a courtship process to recruit him to come to our city and live with us.