An interesting podcast episode / article. Admittedly, I'm not entirely finished with it yet, but it seems ripe for discussion. Particularly online where we are apparently all people interested in...
An interesting podcast episode / article. Admittedly, I'm not entirely finished with it yet, but it seems ripe for discussion. Particularly online where we are apparently all people interested in discourse with people we don't know in real life.
The introduction, from the transcript:
One of my preoccupations in the past couple of years — and this comes out of issues of my own life; it comes out of being a parent; it comes out of these larger social conversations about loneliness epidemics and friendship recessions — is, I think uniting a lot of difficulties in the communal life of Americans, at least, is what I think of as the post-extended family era — that, for a huge amount of time in human history, who we married, how we raised children, who was around us was structured — for worse sometimes but also often for better or just for reliability — by the extended family, by a kin network.
There were always people, people you could make asks of, people who would make asks of you. Who parents aged around was decided. Who would lend a helping hands with kids was known. Who would help somebody find a romantic partner, that was a solved problem. Again, not for everybody, but we had a structure.
And we’re living through this wild experiment now. We’re living through the end of the age, after the end of the age of the nuclear family. As my colleague David Brooks has written, the nuclear family was actually a pretty punctuated period of time when most people lived in that. Now, the share of Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 who are married has dwindled from two-thirds of the population in 1990 to barely half today. Today, about 40 percent of children are born to unmarried parents.
And what we’re doing, in my estimation, is not working. People are lonely. They don’t have enough friends. It’s incredibly hard to be a two-parent, two-job family raising children. It is unimaginably hard to be a single parent with a job, raising children. You have a lot of people aging alone.
And I don’t think we look at this expansively enough. There’s been a bunch of coverage recently of polyamory, which is like a wonderful thing to discuss. But polyamory doesn’t solve aging. It doesn’t necessarily solve or even have that much to say about parenting. And it doesn’t say that much about relationships that are nonromantic.
And so I feel like I was the perfect audience for Rhaina Cohen’s forthcoming book “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center,” partially because I have one of these very intense friendships near the center of my life. And that’s important to me, and it was part of why I’m moving across the country for me was a hard and difficult thing. But also just because I think it is asking the right question, which is, how do we open the relational apertures of our lives?
How do we imagine many other possibilities for parenting, for aging, for intimacy, for friendship, for romance than what we have right now? Because the idea that what we have right now is a working norm and everything else should be understood as some deviation is wrong. It is factually untrue.
It is not a norm. It is a wild experiment in the history of human existence. We have never done this before for any period of time. It’s not how we raised children. It is not how we have met each other. It is not how we have lived together.
And it’s not working for a lot of people. So this is an experiment, and we should be trying more. And what Cohen’s book is about is these experiments, is looking at things people are already doing, and, in a sense, making clear that there are more relationships happening right now in the world around you, more forms of relationship, than you could possibly imagine.
Very much enjoyed this episode. My partner and I are never having children, and that opens up a conversation for what happens as we age. The logical conclusion is some version of community living,...
Very much enjoyed this episode. My partner and I are never having children, and that opens up a conversation for what happens as we age. The logical conclusion is some version of community living, and thankfully we have a group of like-minded nonbreeding friends. The conversation was very poignant in that regard.
I have a daughter but no close friends. The only people I talk to regularly besides my coworkers are my wife and my brother (who lives almost 700 miles or 10 and a half hours by car away). My wife...
Exemplary
I have a daughter but no close friends. The only people I talk to regularly besides my coworkers are my wife and my brother (who lives almost 700 miles or 10 and a half hours by car away). My wife and I live about 400 miles (6.5 hrs by car) from where we grew up, so I have no real connection to my high school friends.
I resonate deeply with the discussion he had about how uncomfortable men in particular can be with adult friendships. The idea of sitting on a couch watching a movie in physical contact with someone besides my wife or my daughter—to say nothing of deliberately cuddling—sounds unbelievably uncomfortable to me. Repulsive, even.
The guest brushed past it, but I thought Ezra was really on to something when he said there is a certain conservativeness to the idea of polyamory. We find it more reasonable to expand our intimate relationships to include people we are having a sexual relationship with than to even consider having friends we are as close with as our spouses.
Once upon a time, we had our tribe. Then our tribes were replaced with our village. Then The village got replaced by our nuclear families plus our extended families. Now we barely have close relationships with our extended family is as we all move away from each other and focus on our own lives. That leaves everything to the nuclear family and, to a greater extent, our spouse for all of our emotional needs. It's not reasonable and I think it's making a lot of us rather miserable. But despite these attempts to find other avenues for non-sexual relationships described in the podcast, they really are the exception. I think our society is continuing to get more atomized. And I don't know how we fix it.
An interesting podcast episode / article. Admittedly, I'm not entirely finished with it yet, but it seems ripe for discussion. Particularly online where we are apparently all people interested in discourse with people we don't know in real life.
The introduction, from the transcript:
There were always people, people you could make asks of, people who would make asks of you. Who parents aged around was decided. Who would lend a helping hands with kids was known. Who would help somebody find a romantic partner, that was a solved problem. Again, not for everybody, but we had a structure.
And we’re living through this wild experiment now. We’re living through the end of the age, after the end of the age of the nuclear family. As my colleague David Brooks has written, the nuclear family was actually a pretty punctuated period of time when most people lived in that. Now, the share of Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 who are married has dwindled from two-thirds of the population in 1990 to barely half today. Today, about 40 percent of children are born to unmarried parents.
And what we’re doing, in my estimation, is not working. People are lonely. They don’t have enough friends. It’s incredibly hard to be a two-parent, two-job family raising children. It is unimaginably hard to be a single parent with a job, raising children. You have a lot of people aging alone.
And I don’t think we look at this expansively enough. There’s been a bunch of coverage recently of polyamory, which is like a wonderful thing to discuss. But polyamory doesn’t solve aging. It doesn’t necessarily solve or even have that much to say about parenting. And it doesn’t say that much about relationships that are nonromantic.
And so I feel like I was the perfect audience for Rhaina Cohen’s forthcoming book “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center,” partially because I have one of these very intense friendships near the center of my life. And that’s important to me, and it was part of why I’m moving across the country for me was a hard and difficult thing. But also just because I think it is asking the right question, which is, how do we open the relational apertures of our lives?
How do we imagine many other possibilities for parenting, for aging, for intimacy, for friendship, for romance than what we have right now? Because the idea that what we have right now is a working norm and everything else should be understood as some deviation is wrong. It is factually untrue.
It is not a norm. It is a wild experiment in the history of human existence. We have never done this before for any period of time. It’s not how we raised children. It is not how we have met each other. It is not how we have lived together.
And it’s not working for a lot of people. So this is an experiment, and we should be trying more. And what Cohen’s book is about is these experiments, is looking at things people are already doing, and, in a sense, making clear that there are more relationships happening right now in the world around you, more forms of relationship, than you could possibly imagine.
Very much enjoyed this episode. My partner and I are never having children, and that opens up a conversation for what happens as we age. The logical conclusion is some version of community living, and thankfully we have a group of like-minded nonbreeding friends. The conversation was very poignant in that regard.
I have a daughter but no close friends. The only people I talk to regularly besides my coworkers are my wife and my brother (who lives almost 700 miles or 10 and a half hours by car away). My wife and I live about 400 miles (6.5 hrs by car) from where we grew up, so I have no real connection to my high school friends.
I resonate deeply with the discussion he had about how uncomfortable men in particular can be with adult friendships. The idea of sitting on a couch watching a movie in physical contact with someone besides my wife or my daughter—to say nothing of deliberately cuddling—sounds unbelievably uncomfortable to me. Repulsive, even.
The guest brushed past it, but I thought Ezra was really on to something when he said there is a certain conservativeness to the idea of polyamory. We find it more reasonable to expand our intimate relationships to include people we are having a sexual relationship with than to even consider having friends we are as close with as our spouses.
Once upon a time, we had our tribe. Then our tribes were replaced with our village. Then The village got replaced by our nuclear families plus our extended families. Now we barely have close relationships with our extended family is as we all move away from each other and focus on our own lives. That leaves everything to the nuclear family and, to a greater extent, our spouse for all of our emotional needs. It's not reasonable and I think it's making a lot of us rather miserable. But despite these attempts to find other avenues for non-sexual relationships described in the podcast, they really are the exception. I think our society is continuing to get more atomized. And I don't know how we fix it.
Direct link to the mp3 file being played on the NYT site, to avoid the paywall:
https://nyt.simplecastaudio.com/3026b665-46df-4d18-98e9-d1ce16bbb1df/episodes/930129f2-7c05-4b8e-83f0-472b05bf4ca3/audio/128/default.mp3/default.mp3_ywr3ahjkcgo_27bff73933e708bcfe82d9df01a267e0_58836806.mp3
The podcast is also available on Google Podcasts for free here or on Spotify here. Presumably it's also available on Apple podcasts similarly free.