Why friendship can be just as meaningful as romantic love | Rhaina Cohen
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

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 Raina Cohen is challenging that framework. In her 2024 talk, she paints a picture of a future where friendship can be at the core. Her eye-opening talk is after the break. ♪

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Beat the holiday rush and get your paper tablet at remarkable.com today. And now our TED Talk of the day. 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 mean, I wouldn't let my husband do that in the office either. It's just, you know, setting matters. 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. 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 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. And now, back to the episode. 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 whole. 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 had a courtship process to recruit him to come to our city and live with us. The other had a job in our city, and we invited her to stay. It didn't take long for us to start scheming with about a half dozen other friends about trying to buy property together, the kind of place where we could raise kids alongside one another. Our working title for the place is "The Village." I don't know if this will work out. I can keep you posted about it, but if it does,

I feel really confident about one thing: that if one of us has a migraine at 6:00 a.m. and there's a toddler bouncing around, or we get a terrifying diagnosis, we will not be a lonely person calling out only for no one to answer. And this is what I hope for all of us: that we feel like we have permission to share our lives with whoever we are lucky enough to find, whether that's a spouse, a sibling,

or a house full of friends. Thank you. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are the things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit Progressive.com to see if you can save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.

Something about the way we're working just isn't working. When you're caught up in complex A requirements, or distracted by scheduling staff in multiple time zones,

or thinking about the complexity of working in Monterey while based in Montreal. You're not doing the work you're meant to do, but with Dayforce, you get HR, pay, time, talent, and analytics all in one global people platform. So you can do the work you're meant to do. Visit dayforce.com slash do the work to learn more. That was Raina Cohen speaking at TED Next 2024.

If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Fazi-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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