Around 40 percent of people who marry eventually get a divorce. Almost half of children are born to unmarried women. The number of close friends Americans report having has been on a steep decline since the 1990s, especially among men. Millions of us are growing old alone. We are living out a radical experiment in how we live, love, parent and age — and for many, it’s failing.
That’s partial context, I think, for the recent burst of interest and media coverage of polyamory. People want more love in their lives, and opening their relationships is one way to find it. A poll from last year found that one-third of Americans believe their ideal relationship would involve something other than strict monogamy.
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But polyamory, for all its possibilities, isn’t right for many, and it doesn’t have that much to say about parenting or aging or friendship. As radical as it may sound, it’s not nearly radical enough. It’s not just romance that could be imagined more expansively. It’s everything.
“If this is such a significant relationship in my life, why is there no term for it?” wonders NPR’s Rhaina Cohen about a relationship that transcends the language we have available for friendship. Her forthcoming book, “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center,” is a window into a world of relational possibilities most of us never even imagined existed. It’s a call to open up what we can conceive of as possible. Some of these models might appeal to you. Others might not. But they all pose a question worth asking: What kinds of relationships would you want in your life, if you felt you could ask for them?
Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for concision and clarity. You can listen to the full interview above or by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
Ezra Klein: You have this lovely line in the book where you say married people both hold dual citizenship in the kingdom of the single and in the kingdom of the couple.
Rhaina Cohen: Yeah, really, marriage, is a temporary status of our adult lives. Just look at marriage trends: People are getting married later. So let’s say you get married at 30 or 35. What do you do for 10, 15 years of your adult life? Like, who is your next of kin? And then how many marriages dissolve? But let’s say it’s a great case and your marriage survives until one spouse passes away.
And if you’re in a heterosexual relationship, it’s likely to be the woman who is outliving the man, and the stats are pretty startling. A third of women over 65 are widowed, and almost half of women over 65 are unpartnered. So it’s OK to say that marriage is meaningful, but we also need to be thinking about these other periods of life or if they don’t get married at all, which a lot of people are not.
Klein: Can you tell me about Natasha and Lynda?
Cohen: So Natasha, when she was 36, decided that she was going to have a child on her own. Her friend Lynda, who she knew as a fellow law professor where they worked, wanted to help her through her pregnancy.
And Lynda was the first person to hold the baby, Elaan. She really fell in love with the baby immediately, and she continued to have this really important role in Elaan’s life. But it took years to figure out that she was really acting as a co-parent and that she wanted to have legal recognition as a parent. There were some obstacles along the way that point to the very limited ways that we think about who can be parents.
Klein: I found the story so affecting. Something you didn’t mention is Elaan has significant health challenges. And you have a beautiful line in there where he didn’t need just two parents. He needed all the parents he could get.
And that gets to the oddity of these legal obstacles. Because it’s one of the most common concerns in American politics that so many children grow up right now in single-parent families. We want children to have more adult figures in their life who are emotionally there, who are financially there. And yet we really only create one speedway for someone to become a parent to someone else’s child, which involves clearing a sexual-romantic test first. That it’s so unusual to say, “Oh, my best friend or another family member will become part of this child’s life” in that way just strikes me as a kind of poverty of imagination.
Cohen: Here’s a law professor who puts this nicely, Sacha Coupet, and she says that the law puts misplaced emphasis on eros, sexual love, and not enough on agape, self-sacrificing love.
And if it were possible for people to disconnect the sexual part from the parenting, then the law and our society might recognize that there are more kinds of people who could be wonderful parental figures.
So Natasha and Lynda, who are both legal scholars, they don’t understand the emphasis on romance. I mean, Lynda said that it’s an irrational test for parenthood, that romance is lovely but really what matters is compatibility and trust and all of that. And then on the flip side, there were people more on the right or the center like Brad Wilcox, who literally has a book called “Get Married” coming out. And focusing so much on romance, from his perspective, makes relationships more fragile, and if people focused more on the raising of the children, then that would be a stronger foundation for forming families.
One is trying to push toward one specific kind of family, and the other is trying to broaden them. But both have arrived at this idea that there are other kinds of characteristics that really matter.
Klein: I know so many people who want to have children but haven’t met the right partner. And, I assume, I know people who have had children, gotten divorced, then met people who are a good partner for them but not a good parent for their child. But because they need to braid those roles, they can’t be in this partnership that might be fulfilling. And I know people who have great relationships with other people in their life and would probably be really good at raising children together and can’t do that. And what it also means is you can’t distribute weight.
You brought up Wilcox’s book, and Wilcox is a very important scholar of marriage and family breakdown. And we know that children put incredible stress on a marriage.
It does seem to me that even if the only thing you really cared about in life was getting people back into stable romantic partnerships, then being more imaginative about how to take the pressure off those partnerships and, particularly, to take some of the pressure of parenting off those partnerships — which richer families do with money — it just strikes me as a place where our cultural expectations have come into conflict with the things that we now say we value.
Cohen: I live with a couple of my friends and their kids, so I get to experience a little bit firsthand what it looks like to have other adult figures in the picture.
Klein: Tell me a bit about how that began. You mentioned that at the end of the book. I’m very curious about it.
Cohen: My husband and I have been interested for a long time in living with friends. And we were really excited to live with these particular friends, and we have been for about two and a half years. There are all sorts of ways that I know that my life is enriched by having access to these kids. But also, my friends enjoy our presence as other adults in their kids’ lives, and I think pressure on them is relieved. A couple of weeks ago, my housemates were trying to figure out whether to take their older son to the E.R., and one of them went to my husband and was like, “Can you hold the baby for 10 minutes while we go and figure this out?”
That’s not co-parenting, holding a baby for 10 minutes. But it’s just one of the many ways that simply having more people can make the parenting experience so much less stressful or difficult.
And I think that the kids love to have other adults who love them there. Yeah, there are toys on the floor, and particularly with two kids, I feel there’s a bump up in chaos.
Klein: That’s also how I felt about it.
Cohen: Yeah. I just think that everything comes with the pluses and minuses and that it is so much easier to overweight the negatives of the unconventional decisions and to overlook the negatives of the conventional decision.
Klein: I have a friend who lives in what I would describe as a commune. I think that the modern term that gets used is “intentional co-living community.” And she also helps set them up. And I was asking her about this once, about these trade-offs, and she said something that has always stuck with me: that she’s decided to choose the default in her life being the problems of community as opposed to the problems of not having community. That she wants the problems of connection rather than the problems of how to find that connection. And it seems so obvious when she said it that way, but I’d never thought of it.
Cohen: I think what’s interesting there is that she’s saying that people are maybe making decisions but don’t realize that they’re making decisions. Like, when I’ve toured through my friends’ beautiful houses that are far away from all of their other friends, I sometimes wonder — “You’ve got this gorgeous kitchen, but what are you giving up to have this beautiful kitchen island and this renovated home?” And I’m not going to be obnoxious and start that conversation with a friend there. But I do think that people are creating conditions where they are disconnected. You know, privacy and control have a lot of benefits. But when the car breaks down and you need to get your kids to day care and you don’t know any of your neighbors in your cul-de-sac of five houses, you’ve given something up in the process.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.
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