In her first book, The Other Significant Others, Rhaina Cohen, an NPR editor and producer, presents an eye-opening exploration into the many ways friendship, in various forms, can enrich and empower lives for the better.
In 2022, Cohen
attended six weddings in six months. Amidst these pandemic-deferred nuptial
celebrations, where couples vowed to spend the rest of their lives together as
a “we,” Cohen began to question societal expectations of love and its meaning.
Was sex the essential component of a truly committed relationship? Was a
person’s life somehow incomplete without a long-term romantic partner? Cohen, married, had always felt that
friendships “electrified” her life. Thus, she began to examine the “we” of
friendship: what draws people together on a purely platonic plane? What made
some friendships endure despite the parties not formally professing a long-term
commitment to each other?
Cohen
presents stories from her own life--along with other historical and
contemporary case studies--that deconstruct diverse friendships of all stripes.
These include people of varying ages, races, genders, marital states, sexual
orientations, and religions. She delves into co-parenting friends; shared
homeowners; friends who serve as executors of estates; and even those who act
as primary caregivers, helping to shoulder the demands and burdens imposed by illness
and debilitating medical treatments.
Cohen’s
well-researched, appealingly structured narrative stretches modern assumptions
of love, making the case that a life bonded by friendship can hold limitless
potential for a more fulfilling, deeply meaningful existence.
The
Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Cohen
St. Martin’s Press (Macmillan), $29.00 hardcover,
9781250280916, 320 pages
Publishing Date: February 13, 2024
To
order this book on INDIEBOUND/Bookshop.Org,
link HERE
NOTE:
This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this
review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (February
23, 2024), link HERE