Best Friends and Life Partners

0:00I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is a Sunday Story from Up First where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. At the end of the year, I always like to kind of look back on the year that was and think about those things that happened that I'm happy about and those things that I want to leave in the old year and not bring it to the new. This year, I have some really great things that happened to me. And one of the best things that happened was I bought a house with my best friend. Whose jacket is this? McKenna, is this your jacket? Can you come get your jacket? And now we are living together with my three kids and her two kids.

0:55and we are platonically co-parenting and really living this blended family life. You know, some people say, is it like the Brady Bunch? Well, a little bit because it really is a blended family. You know, we get up in the morning, we get the kids ready. Jasmine takes them to school during the day. Me and Jasmine are working. I usually do the pickups with the kids And then I get dinner started

1:30Jasmine helps with the homework And she also does the craft projects Which is very important Because I don't like to do crafts And the kids Generally what they're doing When they're all together is they are screaming and yelling and pushing each other and, you know, hugging each other and playing and being nice and then being mean and then complaining and then going to do basically like siblings. So they just, they do all sorts of things. They do makeovers on each other. That has happened. So it's, it's a lot of fun seeing the kids really like enjoying each other and growing up with each other.

2:18Well, our lovely, lovely mother will help us clean up. So the seed of this idea was planted back in 2024. Both me and Jasmine had started talking about the possibility of us moving in together. We were both recently divorced and we realized we needed help. It's very hard doing this by yourself. So why don't we try to, you know, be each other's support? And right around that time, we did an episode right here on The Sunday Story with Raina Cohen, a producer and editor here at NPR, about her book called The Other Significant Others. In the book, Raina documents friends who also own their homes together and raise kids together.

3:09They even care for each other in old age. And in a lot of ways, they're far more than friends. They're life partners. And I remember kind of leaning over to Raina during that time and saying, hey, you know, me and my best friend are thinking about this, too. And, you know, here now, more than a year later, we've made it happen. That's my life now. I wanted to share that conversation today because I think it really shows how it can expand your life when you allow your friends to be at the center. So that conversation with Raina, after the break, stay with us.

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5:04Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. I'm here with producer and author Raina Cohen. Raina, thank you for joining us. And you're on this side of the mic, you know, so no longer behind the scenes. Reading these stories, you know, it made me think of my best friend, Jasmine. We met as students at Howard University, but we did not, we weren't tight then. We really got close when we ended up working at the same job shortly after college. And that was at a point where I was also in this transition where I had a significant other, but I didn't have someone to just hang out with, like who wasn't him.

5:46And a romantic partner is great, but they can't fulfill everything for you. And that's when I reached out to Jasmine and was like, why don't we go work out and stuff like that? And we would go work out, child, and then we'd go eat some pizza afterwards. We were horrible. Quite a combo. Yeah, so we would do stuff like that. And ever since then, we've become completely inseparable. And what I value so much about this relationship with Jasmine is that she has always been there for me. And I hope that I've always been there for her. So, yes, this is what, to me, I absolutely can see how someone in your life who is not, you know, you're not related to them and they're not your romantic partner can really be someone you can build a life around.

6:38I think one of the most kind of beautiful parts of working on the book is finding that so many people have some kind of experience with this, like what you're describing with Jasmine, of feeling like there is this person in your life who feels almost like a partner and they're a friend. And that's possible. Yeah. You know, I just waxed on and on and on about my best friend. So, you know, I got to ask you about yours. Your first chapter reads like a love letter to your best friend. Yeah, that seems like an accurate way to put it. Can you tell us more about this friendship? Yeah, well, I mean, I call my friend in the book Em, and Em and I met when I first moved to D.C.

7:22when we lived a five-minute walk away from each other and saw each other four or five times a week. We would host parties together. She, like, went with me to the DMV. Like she made me, you know, do things that I was supposed to do in the way that a partner would try to help you kind of move forward in life. So I really felt the kind of excitement that I had felt in romantic relationships, but it was just in a friendship. It's like a rom-com for friendships. Yeah. But without the like romance and the kisses and stuff. Yeah. I actually think friendships can be super romantic. I mean, that was a thing that I discovered with Em.

7:58Just like wanting to be in M's presence all the time, like wanting to sort of like get the warm glow of her brilliance and charisma by being around her. It just sort of showed me that there are these emotional experiences that are possible to have in a friendship that aren't usually acknowledged. That you can, you know, be so excited about a friend that you want to tell everybody about them. Like I wrote in my journal, I remember after, you know, a few months of getting really close to Em that I felt like I was falling in love with her not so differently from the way that I felt like I had fallen in love with my now husband.

8:33At one point, a friend of mine and I had a conversation and he was like, what's the difference between these two relationships to you? Like this friendship and this romantic relationship. And I was kind of like, I don't have sex in one of them. Like they felt like they were both like really nourishing people that I felt really understood me and they were devoted. I mean, I love hearing about your friendship, but this book, it's not a memoir. So how did you go from that personal experience to this book, which is mostly telling the stories of other people? So this friendship, you know, helped me realize that friendships can be a lot bigger.

9:15than we're told. But I really quickly realized that there was no name for it. And Em and I would talk about like, you know, how do we describe each other? Should we use something like partner? And to me, you know, one of the questions was like, why don't we have a name for a relationship that is one of the most important connections a person has in their life? And I had the sense that it wasn't just me who had this. I kind of known people who like throughout my life who had this kind of friendship. I saw, you know, Broad City and Insecure. And there are these examples and pop culture, but like there was no language for it.

9:46So I kind of wanted to set out to find some of these people. And, you know, I learned that I definitely was not alone. It is hard to describe our sort of relationship. I do see him as my family. So then I started calling her my platonic life partner. This is my platonic life mate, as we call each other. Lifetime friendship, love partner. Friendship, love partner. You know, it's just frustrating because you need a lot of words, but then it's awkward. And, you know, something happened as I started talking to these people, which was, yes, they adored their friends, and that was wonderful to hear about.

10:28But they also often felt really misunderstood. And they got kind of comments from people that really get at these assumptions that are about both romantic relationships and friendships. So one of them is like that your spouse should be your everything. This kind of like one-stop shopping model. And that doesn't really leave much room for friends if you're supposed to get everything in one person. You know, another one was like if you don't have a romantic relationship that you as a person are incomplete. And, you know, a third that I came across was like in the drama of your life, a romantic partner is supposed to be the main character.

11:07And the friends are the supporting cast. So it really made it hard because of these assumptions for people on the outside to recognize that a friendship, you know, could be the main character. And as I started to realize this, like, I knew then that I didn't want to just kind of validate these friendships and, you know, show them. I wanted to understand how we got to the point where we think of friendship in this way and how these really, really devoted friendships challenge how we think about relationships of all kinds. Mm. It's like that idea from Boss Baby, if you've ever seen that classic movie.

11:44Basically, the idea is that love isn't limited, that just because you add another person in who you love, that doesn't have to take away from the people you already love. I'm sorry, I love that movie. You know, especially with this one person should be your everything model, and you like spend any of that energy elsewhere, then it's taking away. And, you know, I just saw again and And again, how people felt like the more close relationships they had, the more support they had. It was like a multiplier effect instead of zero sum. And you look to history for this too, right? Yeah. I mean, that was kind of my first stop.

12:20And I very quickly found that friendship has been way more significant in history than we now treat it. So I'll just give a really specific example. There's a chapel in one of the colleges at Oxford that has a monument. and it marks the joint burial of two men. This was from the 14th century. And these men appear to have this kind of relationship that was really common in England, but also across the world in different cultures. It's called the Sworn Brotherhood. And what would happen is that men would be ceremonially turned into brothers and expected to protect each other and kind of help each other out for the rest of their lives.

12:58And it was a public way to acknowledge and ritualize friendship. And, you know, you can look forward in history to like the 1800s, 1900s, to what are called romantic friendships that you would see with both men and women, these same-sex friendships, where there's just like level of effusiveness that would strike most people as pretty bizarre. You know, women would exchange locks of hair. You could see photos of men doing studio portraits where they have their arms entwined around each other. That was really normal. There was this idea that was understood that friendship could contain a lot of these bigger emotions and also more devotion than we think about now.

13:35Well, it makes me think of David and Jonathan in the Bible and their deep friendship. I mean, they were just like, I mean, they had deep ties to each other, cried over each other. I mean, these two men in the Bible who just had a deep and abiding love for each other. And yeah, they make a covenant. Make a covenant with each other. You know, that's like one of the earliest models of friendship that a lot of religious people also still look to as this kind of paragon of friendship. But in the 1800s, men's friendships were kind of using the David and Jonathan model as something for them to look up to.

14:12So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this goes pretty far back. So as you reported in your book, you also found many examples of devoted friendship, not just from history, but from now. Yeah, I mean, I really got to speak to dozens of people who have this kind of like invisible but really important friendship. And I got to follow some of them for years and sort of see how their friendships unfolded. And two of the first people who I got to talk to were this pair of women named Barb and Inez. I just love their story because of the longevity of their friendship. They are now both in their 80s. They met like 50 years ago, and they were working in the same place at a time of transition in their lives.

14:54Inez had just gotten this administrative job because she was splitting from her husband and needed to take care of her kids and support them. And Barb had just moved back to help out her parents. And the two of them became really close, and Barb became very close to Inez's children. Soon they basically went on family vacations together. Eventually, Barb moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and Inez followed her. You know, we were doing so many things that maybe a family would do if there had been a father in the picture. I think that to me, whether it was totally conscious or even unconscious, we began functioning as a unit that we would back each other up.

15:35Barb had always wanted to have children, but she had emergency surgery in her 20s that left her unable to have biological children. And once I was told that, I don't think the drive to get married was as strong as it had been before. And because she had Inez in her life, her kids basically became pretty much her kids too. Inez's younger son started calling her his angel mom, and she became the godmother to Inez's older son, Scott. There was this moment, the first time that I talked to them, that has to do with Scott that really captures how close they are, I think. Barb was telling me how Scott responded when she was recovering from surgery she'd gotten when she was in her 30s.

16:18Inez and the boys kind of took care of me. You know, I mean, even Scott, who at the time I think was only 13, would come and sit with me. Yeah, he did. I probably can't say that. We lost Scotty. Scott died. When Scott was in his late 30s, went on for a run one morning, and he had a massive heart attack, and we lost him. So that was hard for us. That was very, very hard. So what happened there was Barb was talking about this real moment of tenderness, and she got choked up. She couldn't even describe the fact that Scott had died, and Inez, the biological mother, had to step in. And notice at the end, Inez said, like, that was very hard for us.

17:04Like they really, it's an us, it's a we with the two of them. And after Scott died, I mean, Barb was the one who came over every day to Inez's house and cooked for her, took care of her and really mourned with her. That's so beautiful. You know, a lifelong friendship like that that will outlast everything else. Yes. You know, it's interesting because talking to you, like, I feel like one of the reasons why society kind of underestimates and limits friendship has to do with this idea that if you don't have this romantic partner, then you might end up alone. But it seems like when you look at Barb and Inez, that's not necessarily the case.

17:52Yeah, I mean, they have been taking care of each other for decades. When they decided they were going to retire, they wanted to live near each other, which they had done for a long time, and they couldn't afford it. We thought, wonder if we could share a house because we traveled together overseas and all around the West. And we thought, well, we never killed each other on a trip. You know, maybe this could work out. And they decided to become roommates to buy a house together. And that's where they have lived for the last 25 years. That was the home that I met them in. Well, you know, and my grandmother, I always admired her because she had very deep friendships.

18:32And some of her friends, she did end up being like their power of attorney. She helped them in the nursing homes, like get them in nursing homes when they could no longer care for themselves. Like she would be that person who would step in for her friends that way. And she was a legal stranger to them. Yeah, yeah. She wasn't getting probably much social credit for it. No, no. She was just doing this. And she had a husband who she also took care of and children and grandchildren. She was just but that was just who she was. And I always admired that even though she had a husband and a family, she had friendships outside of that that she nurtured and that were meaningful to her.

19:11And also, I think what your grandmother's story illustrates is that like our kind of social lives are much more complex. Lots of people care for their friends or want to organize their lives around friends, but we just kind of don't have that in our picture of what people's lives look like. And the reality is different. So, you know, in the case of Barb and Inez, who I was mentioning, there was a time where Inez ended up in an ambulance because she had an emergency and Barb was told she wouldn't be able to get into the hospital, so don't bother trying anyway. She tried and still couldn't get in.

19:47she was literally waiting out in the cold. And eventually, you know, a nurse came around and asked, do you know who has Inez's medical power of attorney rights? And Barb did. And then she was allowed in. But so the kind of paperwork that they had set up, like your grandmother had for other people, it did kind of protect them. But like it took some time for it to happen. And can you imagine being left out in the cold on a winter day in, you know, in the Midwest, while the person you really care for is in distress, is in the ER. You know, it's undignifying and it's, you know, not good for anybody involved.

20:25In a similar vein, another woman I talked to took care of her best friend during the six-year battle with ovarian cancer that her friend had. She lied to doctors and nurses sometimes saying that she was her friend's wife because she was afraid of getting kicked out of the hospital as a non, you know, blood tie. And all that time that she cared for her friend, she wasn't entitled to family medical leave. And when her friend eventually died, was not entitled to bereavement leave, though she could have been for an uncle that she had never met. So like we just have these really strict dividing lines about, you know, what family gets, what spouses get, and friends are really left out and people suffer from that.

21:03So how can we improve things for people like Barb and Inez, like to truly acknowledge that you can have a partnership that can be equal to what it is between married people that they could also or should have some weight? Well, I think it helps to consider like, why do we value marriage? And there are a lot of answers to that. But I've gotten to observe a little bit of this going to tons of weddings, like I'm in my 30s, peak wedding time. And the moment where I really see people get choked up are during the vows when the bride or groom, whoever says for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, there's a shared future that people imagine.

21:43And that's the thing inside marriage that really matters and that we hold close. It's not really the sex and sparks so much. It's about commitment and long-term sacrifice and knowing that there's going to be somebody caring for you. And so I think what would help is if we can focus on the function that relationships serve in people's lives, like the commitment, rather than the form that they take. And if we are able to do that, I think it becomes clear that just because people don't have a sexual relationship doesn't mean that the relationship doesn't have value to society. Well, speaking of that, I mean, you know, if this episode were a rom-com, you know, it would probably end with a wedding.

22:23But there aren't like ceremonies like that to celebrate friendship. Yeah. I mean, you got to go back to like medieval England or like the sixth century if you're a pair of monks, like then you can get your ceremonies, but pretty hard now. Another thing there really isn't much of for friendship are songs. Oh, yeah. The culture critic Hua Xu wrote a beautiful book about a friend of his who was killed. And he was really in grief after that, but there weren't songs about friendship, like the grief over friendship. So we had to listen to love songs for the most part. So we don't have songs about friendship that kind of get at the real lows and also the real highs.

22:59And I was talking to some friends about this who are songwriters, and they actually wrote a song. Wow. Oh my goodness. They're like filling in the gap. I mean, I love Carole King and You've Got a Friend, but like it's been 50 years, like we could use more music. So I'm going to play it for you. And it starts with the story of Barb and Inez. Oh my goodness. When Barb met Inez, her life was a mess. Everything was falling apart. Told her husband she's leaving, but she had a feeling she was off to a new start. Through 50 years, through joy and tears Sharing an old brick home Sharing primary care and the peace They won't be facing the end alone My world feels easy when I'm with you My place of refuge You're my person, you're my rock The one I call when life gets hard A part of my soul, a piece of my heart Dear friend, you're my person, you're my life.

24:07When it feels so right, I'll be there for you the rest of our lives. Dear friend. True friendship and that true bond is really, it should be celebrated. So thank you so much for coming in and sharing these beautiful stories and ideas about friendship. Thank you. That's Raina Cohen, an editor and producer at NPR and author of the book, The Other Significant Others. This episode was produced by Justine Yan. Our editor is Jenny Schmidt. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. The engineer for the episode is Maggie Luthar. the song you heard earlier is called dear friends by the band rings of maple we always love hearing from you so feel free to reach out to us at the sunday story at npr.org i'm aisha roscoe up first is back in your feed tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week until then enjoy the rest of your weekend

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