Publisher’s write-up:
‘Why
do we place romantic partnership on a pedestal? What do we lose when we expect
one person to meet all our needs? And what can we learn about commitment, love,
and family from people who put deep friendship at the center of their lives?
In The Other Significant Others, NPR's Rhaina Cohen invites us into the
lives of people who have defied convention by choosing a friend as a life
partner. Their riveting stories unsettle widespread assumptions about
relationships, including the idea that sex is a defining feature of partnership
and that people who raise kids together should be in a romantic relationship.
Platonic partners from different walks of life—spanning age and religion,
gender and sexuality and more—reveal the freedom and challenges of embracing a
relationship model that society doesn't recognize. And they show that orienting
your world around friends isn't just the stuff of daydreams and episodes of The
Golden Girls, but possible in real life.
Based on years of original reporting and drawing on striking social science
research, Cohen argues that we make romantic relationships more fragile by
expecting too much of them, while we undermine friendships by expecting too
little of them. She traces how, throughout history, our society hasn’t always
fixated on marriage as the greatest source of meaning, or even love. At a time
when many Americans are spending large stretches of their lives single, widowed
or divorced, or feeling the effects of the "loneliness epidemic,"
Cohen makes the case that one model of a flourishing adulthood—lifelong
romantic partnership—isn't enough. A rousing and incisive book, The Other
Significant Others challenges us to ask what we want from our relationships—not
just what we’re supposed to want—and transforms how we define a fulfilling
life.’
The
Other Significant Others is a book on adult relationships other than monogamous
relationships written by the journalist and social commentator, Rhaina Cohen.
The book starts with the premise as to how society tends to promote certain
types of relationships more than others. This is all the more pertinent when
governments tend to provide tax benefits to married couples or in some
countries (like France), to registered civil partnerships but it is not
extended to other co-dependent adult relationships.
The
writer brings about the story of people from several walks of life, and also
different sexual identities (straight, gay, asexual, polyamorous, etc.). The
author certainly brings about an important conversation that needs to be had,
given relationships of adults no longer revolve around the family system. The
author gives several examples of adults who lived together as platonic friends
under the same roof, sometimes for financial reasons but other times, even for
non-tangible reasons such as emotional support and companionship.
While
the author did bring about an important subject, this book was a dull and
difficult read for me. To start with, she went too deep into personal stories
of people who did not interest me. She had established her point within the
first 30 pages and anything beyond that felt like a pointless repetition and
more and more anecdotal stories to establish the same fact.
The
book is also very US centric, which is not something I would blame the author
for, but again, people from certain cultures might feel the points are not
relevant for them. For instance, she talks about ‘touch’ being important in
forming a close relationship and it is usually frowned upon in non-romantic
contexts; which might be true of US, but is not true in several other parts of
the world, several cultures within South Asia for instance where touching in platonic
friendships is normal. So, if one is reading this book from outside the US,
they would need to accordingly adapt it to their circumstances.
I
also feel that there are many economic / legal factors for which things are
moving not as fast as they ought to. To put in my personal opinion, I do not
agree with the governments de facto establishing certain relationships to be more
privileged than others (especially with falling birth rates in the West – with many
countries often giving several handouts to families with young children), I can
understand it while disagreeing with it. However, the author does not address
much of these points in this book.
To
conclude, I would say that the author brought up a discussion that is necessary
to be had in the society. However, this should not have been more than an op-ed
in a newspaper and the book did not establish anything new nor did I have any
moments of epiphany upon reading this book. On that note, I would award the book
a rating of four on ten.
Rating – 4/10
Have a nice day,
Andy
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