Transcript of Best Friends and Life Partners

I'm Ayesha Rosco, 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 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. 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, and we are platonically co-parenting and really living this blended family life. Some people say, Is it like the braided Bunch? Well, a little bit because it really is a blended family. 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.

Now, I don't think Zola ate. Zola, did you eat anything? I did. You did? Okay. Jasmine helps with the homework, and she also does the craft projects, which is very important because I don't like to do crafts.

Guys, if you were actually here, you would see my name, this beautiful crochet.

And the kids 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... Basically like siblings, right? So they do all sorts of things. They do makeovers on each other. That has happened. So it's a lot of fun seeing the kids really enjoying each other and growing up with each other. Well, our lovely, lovely mother will help us coolen 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 be each other's support? Right around that time, we did an episode right here on the Sunday Story with Reina Cohen, a producer and editor here at NPR, about her book called The Other Significant Others. In the book, Reina documents friends who also own their homes together and raise kids together. They 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 leaning over to Reina during that time and saying, Hey, me and my best friend are thinking about this, too. And 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 Reina after the break. Stay with us.

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I'm here with producer and author, Reina Cohen. Reina, thank you for joining us. You're on this side of the mic, so no longer behind the scenes. Reading these stories, it made me think of my best friend, Jasmine. We met as students at Howard University, but 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 who wasn't him. And 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 go eat some pizza afterwards. We were horrible.

Quite a combo. Yes.

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're not related to them, and they're not your romantic part partner can really be someone you can build a life around.

I think one of the most beautiful parts of working on the book is finding that so many people have some 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. I just waxed on and on and on about my best friend. I got to ask you about yours. But 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 call my friend in the book M, and Em and I met when I first moved to DC, when 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 went with me to the DMV. She made me do things that I was supposed to do in the way that a partner would try to help you move forward in life. I really felt the 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 with It's out for romance and the kiss and stuff.

Yeah, I actually think friendships can be super romantic. I mean, that was a thing that I discovered with Em, just wanting to be in Em's presence all the time, wanting to get the warm glow of her brilliance and charisma by being around her. It just showed me that there are these emotional experiences that are possible to have in a friendship that aren't usually acknowledged, that you can be so excited about a friend that you want to tell everybody about them. I wrote in my journal, I remember after 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. At 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? This friendship and this romantic relationship? I was like, I don't have sex in one of them? They felt like they were both really nourishing seeing people that I felt really understood me and they were devoted.

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.

This friendship helped me realize that friendships can be a lot bigger than we're told, but I really quickly realized that there was no name for Em and I would talk about, How do we describe each other? Should we use something like partner? To me, one of the questions was, Why don't we have a name for a relationship that is one of the most important connections a person has in their life? I had the sense that it wasn't just me who had this. I'd known people throughout my life who had this friendship. I saw Broad City and Insecure. There were these examples in pop culture, but there was no language for it. I wanted to set out to find some of these people. I learned that I definitely was not alone. It is hard to describe our relationship. I do see him as my family.

Then I started calling her my platonic life partner.

This is my platonic lifemate, as we call each other.

Lifetime friendship love partner.

A friendship love partner.

It's just frustrating because you need a lot of words, but then it's awkward.

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, but they also often felt really misunderstood. They got comments from people that really get at these assumptions that are about both romantic relationships and friendships. So one of them is that your spouse should be your everything, this one-stop shopping model, and that doesn't really leave much room for friends if you're supposed to get everything in one person. Another one was like, if you don't have a romantic relationship that you as a person are incomplete. And a third that I came across was like, in the drama of your life, a The manic partner is supposed to be the main character, and the friends are the supporting cast. It really made it hard because of these assumptions for people on the outside to recognize that a friendship could be the main character As I started to realize this, I knew then that I didn't want to just validate these friendships and 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.

It's like that idea from Boss Baby, if you've ever seen that classic movie. But basically, 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.

Especially with this one person should be your everything model, and you spend any of that energy elsewhere, then it's taking away. I just saw again 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.

You looked to history for this, too, right?

Yeah. I mean, that was my first I very quickly found that friendship has been way more significant in history than we now treat it. 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. These men appeared to have this relationship that was really common in England, but also across the world in different cultures. It's called the Sworn Brotherhood. What would happen that men would be ceremonially turned into brothers and expected to protect each other and help each other out for the rest of their lives. It was a public way to acknowledge and ritualize friendship. You can look forward in history to 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 this level of effusiveness that would strike most people as pretty bizarre. Women would exchange 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.

Well, 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, crying over each other. I mean, these two men in the Bible who just had a deep and abiding love for each other.

Yeah, they make a covenant. Make a covenant with each other. That's one of the earliest models of friendship that a lot of religious people also still look to as this paragon of friendship. But in the 1800s, men's friendships were using the David and Jonathan model as something for them to look up to. To aspire to. Yeah. I mean, this goes pretty far back.

As you reported in your book, you also found many examples of devoted friendship, not just from history, but from now.

I really got to speak to dozens of people who have this invisible but really important friendship. I got to follow some of them for years and see how their friendships unfolded. Two of the first people who I got to talk to were this pair of women named Barb and Ines. I just love their story because of the longevity of their friendship. They are now both in their 80s. They met 50 years ago. They were working in the same place at a time of transition in their lives. Ines had just gotten this administrative job because she was splitting from her husband and needed to take care of her kids and support them. Barb had just moved back to help out her parents. The two of them became really close, and Barb became very close to Ines' children. Soon, they basically went on family vacations together. Eventually, Barb moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and Ines followed her.

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.

Barb had always wanted to have children, but she had emergency surgery in her 20s that left her unable to have biological children.

Once I was told that, I don't think the drive to get married was that It was as strong as it had been before.

Because she had Ainez in her life, her kids basically became pretty much her kids, too. Inès's younger son started calling her his angel mom, and she became the godmother to Inès's older son, Scott. There's 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.

Inès and the boys took care of me. 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. 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. That was hard for us. That was very, very hard.

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 Ines, the biological mother, had to step in. And notice at the end, Ines said, That was very hard for us. It's an us. It's a we with the two of them. After Scott died, Barb was the one who came over every day to Ainez's house and cooked for her, took care of her, and really mourned with her.

That's so beautiful, a lifelong friendship like that that will outlast everything else. It's interesting because talking to you, I feel like one of the reasons why society 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 Ines, Because that's not necessarily the case.

Yeah. 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, I wonder if we could share a house because we traveled together overseas and all around the West. We thought, Well, we never killed each other on a trip. Maybe this could work out.

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.

My grandmother, I always admired her because she had very deep friendships. And some of her friends, she did end up being their power of attorney. She helped them in the nursing homes, get them in nursing homes when they could no longer care for themselves. She would be that person who would step in for her friends that way.

And she was a legal stranger to them? 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. 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.

And also, I think what your grandmother's story illustrates is that our social lives are much more complex. Lots of people care for their friends or want to organize their lives around friends, but we just don't have that in our picture of what people's lives look like, and the reality is different. In the case of Barb and Ines, who I was mentioning, there was a time where Ines 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. She was literally waiting out in the cold. Eventually, a nurse came around and asked, Do you know who has Ainez's medical power of attorney rights? And Barb did. Then she was allowed in. The paperwork that they had set up, like your grandmother had for other people, it did protect them, but it took some time for it to happen. Can you imagine being left out in the cold on a winter day in the Midwest while the person you really care for is in distress, is in the ER? It's undignifying and it's not good for anybody involved.

In 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-blood tie. All that time that she cared for her friend, she wasn't entitled to family medical leave. When her friend eventually died, was not entitled to leave, though she could have been for an uncle that she had never met. We just have these really strict dividing lines about what family gets, what spouses get, and friends are really left out, and people suffer from that.

How can we improve things for people like Barb and Ines 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 why do we value marriage? There are a lot of answers to that, but I've gotten to observe a little bit of this going to tons of weddings. I'm in my 30s peak wedding time. The moment where I really see people get choked up during the vows when the bride or a groom, whoever says, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. There's a shared future that people imagine. 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. 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. 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, if this episode were a rom-com, it would probably end with a wedding. But there aren't like, ceremonies like that to celebrate friendship.

Yeah, I mean, you got to go back to medieval England or like the sixth century, if you're a pair of monks, 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, Hwasu, 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, the grief over friendship. We had to listen to love songs for the most part. We don't have songs about friendship that get at the real lows and also the real highs. I was talking to some friends about this who are songwriters, and they actually wrote a song. Wow. Oh, my goodness. They're filling in the gap. I love Carole King and You've Got A Friend, but it's been 50 years, we could use more music. I'm going to play it for you. It starts with the story of Barbe and Inès. Oh, my goodness.

When Barb met Inès, 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, her joy and tears, sharing an old brick home, share 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. When I feel so bad, I'll be there for you the rest of our lives, dear friend.

True friendship and that true bond is really... It should We celebrated. So thank you so much for coming in and sharing these beautiful stories and ideas about friendship. Thank you. That's Reina Cohen, an editor and producer at NPR and author of the book, The Other Significant Others. This episode was produced by Justine Yann. Our editor is Jennie Schmidt. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. The engineer for the episode is Maggie Luther. 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 theunday story@mpr. Org. I'm Ayesha Rosco. 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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