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Last week I was talking to therapist Amanda White all about social media and the impacts that's been having on our real lives, including in our friendships and how we're

interacting or lack thereof within our own communities.

So I'm giving a totally opposite perspective this week with Raina Cohen.

She's the author of the book, The Other Significant Others, and she walks the talk by communal living,

and she's going to share how our romantic partnerships don't have to be the center of everything.

She's giving perspective on the importance of friendship and platonic bonds,

along with rewriting the script for how some things have been sold to us when it comes to partnership and friends.

Joining me this week is Raina Cohen of the book, The Other Significant Others.

Raina, how are you?

So glad to be able to talk to you.

I'm excited to have you on because this book is really cool and I love anything that challenges a normal narrative and I feel like your book is

really doing that and trying to open our minds just that much further to say, hey, let's look at

life a little bit differently. And one of the

main things that this is focused on is friendship. So having this book and writing this book,

I'd love to know where the beginning of this started and why you wrote the book.

It started because of a friendship that I have that really made me ask fundamental questions

about what friendship even is and what it can be. So my friend who I refer to as M,

she and I, especially at the beginning of our friendship, felt like we weren't even just best

friends. Like that was too small of a term to describe how intertwined we were in each other's lives.

We lived right near each other.

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