Living and Loving Outside the Limits of Normal Friendships and Compulsive Couples – The Marginalian

We walk through the world largely unaware that our emotions are made up of concepts – the brain's way of dealing with the growing confusion of who we are. We label, we categorize, we contain – that's how we divide the maelstrom of experience into meaning. It is a useful impulse – without it, there would be no science or storytelling, no taxonomy and theories, no poetry and prose. And it is the limit – the most beautiful, beneficial, and life-changing experience that transcends the stages our culture has created to contain the chaos of consciousness, nowhere more than the realm of relationships – those mysterious blessings that close the abyss between one consciousness and another.

When we close the voice a friend through overuse and abuse, when we contract love with fixed and rigid roles, expecting the impossible, we become prisoners of our minds. The history of feeling is the history of labels too small to contain the love we are capable of – they are varied and dynamically transformed from one form to another and back again. It requires both great courage and great vulnerability to live outside concepts, to meet each new experience, each new relationship, each emotional state on its own terms and allow us to expand the goals of life.

That's what Raina Cohen explored Significant Others: Rethinking Life and Friendship in the Institution (public library) – a journalistic investigation of the vast yet invisible world of inseparable intimate relationships, profiling pairs of people in various situations and stages of life supported by such bonds, people who “redrawn the boundaries of friendship, pushing the lines outward and outward to include more space in each other's lives,” people who found themselves.

What emerges from this depiction of the “hidden in plain sight” type of relationship is an antidote to treading the “one-stop-shop” and “an invitation to expand what options are open to us,” offering a reminder that we pay a price for living according to the common principles of our culture:

While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.

A generation after Andrew Sullivan celebrated the rewards of friendship in a romantic culture, Cohen writes:

This is a book about friends who have become a wedespite having no documents, no ceremonies, and precious few models to guide them in a long-term platonic commitment. These friends have moved together across regions and continents. They were the primary caregiver for their friend through organ transplants and chemotherapy. They are co-parents, co-owners, and executors of each other's wills. They are members of a group without a name or membership form, often unaware that there are others like them. They fall under the umbrella of what Eli Finkel, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, calls “significant others.” After escaping the normal setup of life, these friends face dangers and discover things they would not have discovered otherwise.

Noting that his interest in the topic is more than theoretical, stemming from his extended relationship with another woman in conjunction with his marriage, Cohen views these class-defying bonds as a countercultural act of courage and resistance:

I began to see how this unusual relationship can be irritating — upsetting a set of social teachings that affect our intimate lives: That the most important and important person in a person's life should be a romantic partner, and friends are supporting characters. That romantic love is a real thing, and if people say they feel like they have a strong platonic love, they shouldn't indeed be platonic. That adults who raise children together should have sex with each other, and marriage deserves special treatment by the government.

By looking at the long list of people who have defied their time and place categories – the full range of people MeasurementI could write more to explore such relationships – he adds:

Challenging these social norms is not new, and our platonic partners are not the only ones to disagree. Feminist, queer, trans, of color, nonmonogamous, single, asexual, aromantic, celibate, or cohabiting people have been questioning these ideas for decades, if not centuries. They all offered counterpoints to what Eleanor Wilkinson, a professor at the University of Southampton, called a forced couple: the idea that a long-term, long-term relationship between husband and wife is necessary for normal, successful adulthood. This is a counter to feminist writer Adrienne Rich's influential idea of ​​”forced heterosexuality” – the idea, enforced through social pressure and practical motivation, that the only normal and acceptable romantic relationship is between a man and a woman. Some of the first stories we hear as children focus on a forced couple, balancing characters finding their “one true love” and living “happily ever after.”

[…]

It can be confusing to live in the chasm between the life you have and the life you believe you should be living.

In the remainder of the Other Significant OthersCohen conveys the stories of people who have cut through the confusion to create lives that work for them through relationships made by fashion designers that reward the deepest and most authentic parts of themselves, relationships that rethink what it means to love and be loved, to see and be seen – relationships like those of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, Claph Schumann and Johannes Margaret Waldom and Rahmerson Rahms.

Fill it with poet and philosopher David Whyte on love and resisting the pressure of relationship labels, then revisit Coleridge on the paradox of friendship and romantic love.