The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, by Rhaina Cohen, is both wonderfully open and frustratingly narrow. It explores vast generational-societal issues, yet spirals down whirlpools of personal anecdote. It wrestles with vital questions of loving-kindness, then flips into selfish-childish clinging. Perhaps instead of a book it could have made an awesomely thoughtful essay?

Key themes that Cohen analyzes include:

• the importance of "platonic partnerships" aka "passionate friendships" in fulfilling human needs, outside of and in contrast to more-conventional romantic relationships
• the arguably unfair distinctions that current law and custom draw between marriage and other forms of interpersonal alliance
• the challenges associated with sexual, asexual, and non-traditional relationships
• the dilemmas spawned by break-ups, disease, ageing, and death

Cohen mentions the concept of mapping a person's "social atom" – drawing bubbles on a page, with "... the size of the circles and their distance from the center represent[ing] the space each person takes up in their lives and how close they are." She quotes studies that suggest most people can only have ~5 truly close friends at a time, that a romantic relationship may occupy ~2 of those five slots, and that the half-life of most friendships is ~7 years.

Fascinating! – and perhaps leading to testable hypotheses with important large-scale consequences. Hmmmm!

_{(see also Cohen's 2020 article in The Atlantic titled "What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?", and cf Virtual Friendships (1999-11-05), Running Friendships (2012-03-06), Friendship and Meditation (2012-11-06), Stand by You (2017-01-11), Friend Sits by Friend (2018-07-04), Friendship (2023-09-28), ...) - ^z - 2024-05-07}