Rhaina Cohen at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store welcomes RHAINA COHEN—award-winning producer and editor for NPR’s documentary podcast Embedded—for a discussion of her new book The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. She will be joined in conversation by REBECCA TRAISTER—New York Times bestselling author of All the Single Ladies and Good and Mad.

About The Other Significant Others

Why do we assume romantic relationships are more important than friendships? What do we lose when we expect a spouse 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—spanning age and religion, gender and sexuality and more—who have defied convention by choosing a friend as a life partner. Their riveting stories unsettle widespread assumptions about relationships and reveal how freeing and challenging it can be to embrace a relationship model that society doesn't recognize. And they show that orienting your world around friends isn't limited to daydreams and episodes of The Golden Girls, but actually possible in real life.

Based on years of original reporting and striking social science research, Cohen argues that we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them, while we diminish friendships by expecting too little of them. 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," 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.

Praise for The Other Significant Others

"Rhaina Cohen’s moving, intimate portraits of people in unusually devoted friendships upend our cultural narratives about which relationships matter. An arresting work of compassion and insight." —Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

"Energetic, open, considered, and beautifully reported." —Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of All the Single Ladies and Good and Mad

"An absorbing overhaul of everything you thought you knew about friendship." —Marisa Franco, New York Times bestselling author of Platonic

Masking Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.