Why Do We Exist? & More Than Friends: The Rise of Platonic Partners

Want to get someone to like you – or like you more? If so, there is a simple thing you can do that can work wonders to improve your likeability. This episode begins with this simple technique. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/let-their-words-do-the-talking/201608/people-will-you-if-you-make-them-laugh Why are we here? You must have thought about this question. I mean, here we are, intelligent creatures hurtling through the universe on this tiny little planet. Why? What’s the point of it all? What had to happen for us to be here? These are questions that science has struggled with but is now finding more and more insight into the real reasons we exist. Here to reveal what we do know is Tim Coulson, a professor of zoology at Oxford University whose teaching and research have earned him multiple awards. He is author of the book The Science of Why We Exist: A History of the Universe from the Big Bang to Consciousness (https://amzn.to/4jLgb0n). There is a growing type of relationship that doesn’t even have a proper name. It’s 2 people in a partnership and they are not romantically connected but they are more than friends. They are more than best friends. They often live together, are in each other’s wills, travel together and essentially live as partners. How do these partnerships begin? Who are the people in them? Why is this a growing arrangement? The first person to really look at this is my guest, Rhaina Cohen. She is an award-winning producer and editor for NPR’s documentary podcast, Embedded and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Republic and elsewhere. She is author of the book The Other Significant Other (https://amzn.to/42unjsn). You probably have no idea what all is involved when you sneeze. It’s really quite something! And it involves a lot of different muscles to make it happen. Listen and you will learn things about why and how you sneeze and when you can and cannot sneeze. https://www.medicinenet.com/11_facts_about_sneezes_and_sneezing/article.htm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 0:42Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:27Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, one thing you can do instantly to get someone to like you more. Then, have you ever wondered why we exist, why we are here on this planet?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Science has made astonishing progress in working out why it is we exist. With each passing year, we have a better understanding of all the remarkable things that had to happen from the beginning of the universe 13.8 billion years ago until now.

• 1:56Mike Carruthers?

  Also, what you may not know about what happens when you sneeze. And, a new kind of relationship. It's not romantic partners, it's a platonic partnership with a commitment.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  When I have talked to people about platonic partnerships, people who have a friendship that goes well beyond even what a best friend is, I have been kind of shocked to find out how often people say, "I have that," or "I know someone who has it."

• 2:22Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 2:27Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:56Mike Carruthers?

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• 4:22Mike Carruthers?

  Here's a little piece of intel you can use in your life, if not today, someday. And that is if you want to get someone to like you more, make them laugh. Hi, and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. Laughter releases endorphins, and endorphins make us feel good about ourselves and other people. This good feeling creates a bond between two people and creates a sense of togetherness in groups of people, according to Psychology Today. The Golden Rule of Friendship states that if you make people feel good about themselves, they will like you, and laughter does just that.

• 5:02Mike Carruthers?

  Laughter also provides a good indicator to determine if a woman is interested in a man. A woman who laughs at a man's jokes, no matter how lame they are, signals that she likes him. Men do not experience that same phenomenon when women make them laugh. Women view men who make them laugh as more intelligent than those who don't, and that may be because creating humor takes intelligence. Humor can also blow up on you. What is funny to one person is not necessarily funny to someone else. Many times, what you think is funny is not perceived as funny when you say it out loud,

• 5:43Mike Carruthers?

  and misunderstood humor can quickly kill fledgling relationships. The safest humor is self-deprecating humor, when you make fun of yourself. Few, if any, people find that offensive. And that is something you should know. I'm sure you've thought about this question. Why are we here? We humans on this planet, in this universe. How did we get here? And what's the point of it all? These are questions that science is a long way from answering thoroughly, but we know more than we used to. And here to explain and focus the lens on these big questions is Tim Coulson.

• 6:27Mike Carruthers?

  He is a professor of zoology at Oxford. His teachings and research have earned him multiple awards around the world, and he is author of a book called The Science of Why We Exist: A History of the Universe from the Big Bang to Consciousness. Hi, Tim. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be on.

• 6:49Mike Carruthers?

  So when science looks at that question of why we are here, are we learning a lot more about the answer to that, say, in the last fifty, hundred years? Or is it still kind of, we don't, we don't really know?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  So I think so. I think over the last, say, fifty to a hundred years, science has made astonishing progress in working out why it is we exist. In particular, all the things that had to happen for us to be here. I don't want to kid anyone that it has all the answers. There's still quite a lot to find out. But yeah, with each passing year, we're finding out a little bit more, and we have a better understanding of all the remarkable things that had to happen from the beginning of the universe, thirteen point eight billion years ago, until now.

• 7:37Mike Carruthers?

  Well, one of the arguments you hear for a religious reason for why we are here is that there are so many things that had to have happened just the right way, in just the right order, for us to be here, that mathematically, it's seemingly almost impossible.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  So it's true that lots of things had to happen. And so, without going through them all, the universe, first of all, had to form, and it did so as a pinprick of intense energy. And some of that energy then converted into matter, so things called quarks and electrons. And over time, they formed atoms, and then molecules, and we had stars. And then the Earth formed, and life had to form. And then there were various steps that had to occur for us to come about. And if one or two of those things hadn't happened, it's entirely possible we wouldn't be here. However, the universe is also so incalculably vast that if we look across the whole universe,

• 8:41Speaker 01

  it seems probable that intelligent life evolved at least once. Well, we know it evolved once, but it may have evolved many times. And I think what science is starting to be able to tell us is is some of the likelihoods of some of these events occurring on the grand scale of the entire universe.

• 8:59Mike Carruthers?

  What's the evidence that intelligent life may have existed before?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  We don't have any, the only intelligent life, and in fact, the only life we have found so far, is on Earth. However, we have only looked in a very tiny corner of our neighbourhood, very small part of the universe, for evidence of life coming from elsewhere. So there are trillions and trillions of planets in the bit of the universe we can see, that's called the observable universe. Yet we've only pointed our telescopes at about 6,000 planets, and the ones that we've pointed the telescopes at tend to be gas giants, so planets a little bit like Jupiter or Saturn, that are, as far as we can tell, don't have liquid water, and we think that liquid water is

• 9:50Speaker 01

  is necessary for life. So although we haven't found any evidence of intelligent life elsewhere, we haven't looked very far or very hard at all.

• 10:03Mike Carruthers?

  And if and when we do, you suspect we will? Is there any reason to think, or if, when we find it, we find it, and if we don't, we don't?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  I think it's the latter, and so one of the challenges is, we don't know how long intelligent life lives in civilisations where they're capable of sending out signals for other intelligent life to detect and then respond to. So all of the civilisations that have appeared on Earth before, so the ancient Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, the Aztecs, et cetera, they've only survived for a few hundred, possibly a few thousand years. Our current civilisation is a few hundred years old, you know, a couple of thousand tops, and we don't know how long it lasts for. Now, if you think about it, the universe is 13.8 billion years,

• 10:55Speaker 01

  so a couple of thousand years is but a blink of an eye. And so the likelihood of two intelligent civilisations being close enough together, close enough to one another in the vastness of the universe to communicate, is actually quite a small probability. But despite that, we are going to keep listening out, and we're going to keep listening to see whether there's any evidence of intelligent life. But what we might find is evidence of simpler life, say bacteria, um, living on other planets. And there is even some space probes that have gone out to the, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn to look for evidence of bacterial life on those moons. Because what we do know is liquid water does exist on those moons.

• 11:41Mike Carruthers?

  When science looks out into the universe and sees that only life is here on Earth, do we get any sense as to why that is? Why, I get, I get that's the name of the book, but it, but why are we here? I mean, I get how we're here. It's a pretty remarkable story how we got here, but what, but what purpose do we serve? What, are we part of this or are we an accident?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  So I think the, the, the, the way that I would ask, answer that question is probably in a couple of parts. And so, um, so we understand what had to happen for life to get started. There are, and there are sort of three things that need to happen. Life is just very complicated chemistry and it's chemistry that can replicate. So it's chemistry that can make coppers of itself. And there are actually quite simple reactions that can make coppers of themselves. They're called autocatalytic reactions. And so we think that life started off as an autocatalytic reaction that became more and more complicated. And we have some ideas why that might happen. The second thing that life needs to get going is energy.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  And the very first life on Earth was almost certainly driven by volcanic energy. It's known as chemosynthesis. So it would have relied on highly reactive molecules that were created in, in, by volcanoes. And it used that to power its replication. And then the third thing it needs is membranes to sort of keep it all together, to keep the replicating molecules together. And those are quite easy to form as well. So given that, we think that simple life probably gets going quite frequently within the universe. There are probably not every planet by any stretch of the imagination. But I think a lot of biologists and a lot of chemists now suspect that that life gets

• 13:39Speaker 01

  going reasonably easily. And it got going quite quickly on Earth once conditions became suitable. We had liquid water for that to happen. So we don't think the early Earth was so unusual that life would have got started only on this planet. We suspect it's quite it's quite it's quite commonplace. Now, if that's if that's the case, the next question is, how long does it need to become complicated? And life has been evolving on Earth for about four billion years. And so a planet needs to remain suitable for life and enabling life to thrive for long enough for it to become complicated. And we don't know how many planets fall into that category. You just haven't studied enough other planets

• 14:22Speaker 01

  yet. So in terms of why we're here, do we have a purpose? Well, biologically, the purpose is to replicate, so to to produce offspring. But that's a very boring purpose. I don't believe we've been put here, we haven't found any evidence that we've been put here with a specific mission in mind, but I think we can give ourselves a mission. And one of the things that I so I nearly died when I was a teenager. I got malaria. And shortly after that, I decided I wanted to try and understand what science could tell us about about why we exist. So I started diving into that. So I gave my life purpose to try and understand what it was about why we existed. And I've loved every minute of it. I think

• 15:03Speaker 01

  it's been absolutely fantastic. And so I think we can give ourselves. So I think we're here by by luck. I think a lot of things have happened. We have won the cosmic lottery. I don't think we're here for a higher purpose, but we can give ourselves a purpose and we can make our lives meaningful. And I think nearly all of us do that.

• 15:21Mike Carruthers?

  You had said a few moments ago that, you know, we've only looked at a little bit of the universe and not found life anywhere else other than Earth. But if there is life, intelligent life, out there that perhaps is more advanced than ours, why haven't they found us?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  It's a good question, and it boils down again to the size of the universe. And the universe has a maximum speed limit, and that's the speed of light. And even in terms of light years, so that's a distance that light travels in a single year, the universe is absolutely vast. It's, you know, it takes, the Sun is our closest star, obviously. It takes eight minutes and 20 seconds for light from the Sun to reach Earth. But if you're looking out to our nearest star system, even if you're traveling at the speed of light, it's going to take you about four and a half years to get there. Now, anything that weighs anything, so anything with mass can't get anywhere near the speed of light.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  So, you know, it can only get to a fraction of the speed of light. So even if an intelligent species on another planet had heard us and set off, it's going to take them, you know, decades, if not hundreds or thousands of years to get here. So it takes light 26,000 years to get to the center of our galaxy, and that's moving at the universe's speed limit. So unless we can come up with ways of traveling around the universe, perhaps, you know, through thinking about kind of Star Trek and kind of in science fiction here, through wormholes in space, it's going to be very difficult for intelligent aliens on other planets to get here.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  And we've only been sending out signals to them for 120 years, which is when Marconi sent his first radio signal out. So if they're listening to that, and they were, say they were 60 light years away, they would have heard that. If they sent a signal back to us, we would only be receiving it about now, and they would have to be within 60 light years, so 60 to get to them and 60 to get a message back. And there's only about 3,000 stars in within 60 light years of Earth, which is a tiny number compared to the compared to the stars in the universe. So it's possible there's alien intelligent aliens making their way to us now, but they're probably not going to arrive for a while.

• 17:45Mike Carruthers?

  We're exploring those deep questions of why we exist. What are we doing here? My guest is Tim Coulson. He is a professor at Oxford University and he is author of the book, "The Science of Why We Exist: A History of the Universe From the Big Bang to Consciousness."

• 18:02Mike Carruthers?

  This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should get rid of. You go to your closet and you look at the clothes hanging there. And chances are the ones toward the middle are the clothes you wear most often. But the clothes pushed way over to the left or the right, some of those you probably haven't worn in years. And yet there they hang, taking up space. But here's the thing, you could turn those clothes into money. That's where Vinted comes in. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer wear and make some extra money.

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• 19:28Mike Carruthers?

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• 20:13Mike Carruthers?

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• 20:57Mike Carruthers?

  So go to shopbeam.com/sysk now. That's shopbeam.com/sysk. So Tim, what about this whole journey that you went on to explore why we exist? What about it boggles your mind?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  So I think one of the things that I, you know, I was really amazed that I didn't know is our moon is getting further away. So each, with each orbit, it goes around the Earth. It gets a little bit further away. And so when it formed, and this is another fascinating fact, when the the moon formed, when the young earth, when it was about nearly about four and a half billion um years ago, it collided with another planet that's been called Theta. And that melted the the surface of our young planet. It threw a huge amount of debris up into space and that accreted to form the moon. So it came together under gravity to form the moon. But the collision also formed the first atmosphere. And without that atmosphere,

• 21:59Speaker 01

  life probably would never have got going. So we we probably owe our ex- well, we do owe our existence to a collision uh that formed the moon. But also, over the course of time that life's been here, there have been all sorts of great extinctions when when A, the dinosaurs died, and then at the end of the Permian, um you know, nearly three hundred million years ago, there was a a mass extinction that killed, you know, um over eighty um eight, over eighty-five percent of organisms in the sea and over seventy percent on land. And if these violent events hadn't happened, and these great extinctions haven't hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here and mammals wouldn't have been here. So I think that's one of the amazing things.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  But what's truly stunning and what's truly staggering is is that is that that science has been able to piece so much together. You know, the science is driven by imagination and curiosity. And we're all scientists at heart. Science is about finding what works and what doesn't work through trial and error, through experiments. We can all be scientists.

• 23:02Mike Carruthers?

  Isn't it true that you could that there is just such a huge, long list of things that you could talk about that end with the sentence, and if that didn't happen, we wouldn't be here?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  You're right that there are a number of things that if they didn't happen, uh we wouldn't be here. As an example, at sixty-six million years ago, uh an asteroid collided with the earth. It caused a mass extinction and it cau- it it caused the death of of all dinosaurs except birds. So birds, birds are the few dinosaurs that survived the extinction and they have radiated and spread and to come the birds we know and love today. If that hadn't happened, mammals wouldn't have got the upper hand. And mammals, we are mammals, mammals wouldn't have evolved to create us. Now, despite all of these, these, these events, these, these kind of events that look like luck.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  There are some physicists and some scientists, and they say this with very good reason. That if we were to start our universe exactly the way that it formed. Thirteen point eight billion years ago, when we were to do the experiment where we run the experiment forward. We would find that we were here, we were sat here today, having this conversation, that exactly the same things would happen. And so they argue that what, what they say is the, the universe is deterministic and with a big enough computer. We would be able to predict the behaviour of every single tiny particle. In the universe and how they formed atoms and how they formed planets and how they formed us. And that if we ran the clock again, we would be here.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  There are other scientists that say, actually, no, I don't believe that. I think we've won the cosmic lottery. There've been a large number of events that had to happen for us to be here. And they were chance events and they were truly chance events. And then the question comes, the question that they then ask is what is luck and where does chance come from? And what's really interesting at the moment, the only true source of randomness, so where luck could come from in the universe. Is the behaviour of tiny particles and that's known as quantum behaviour or, or quantum mechanics. And it's the fact that these tiny particles behave like waves as well as particles. And I won't go and it's, it's quite an abstract concept. It's a very powerful theory and it's almost certainly correct.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  And the question is, is how does that randomness at the very, very small scale of tiny particles. Translate to random behaviour such as an asteroid colliding with Earth. Or even the evolution of consciousness. Because one of the really interesting things that comes about is if the universe is deterministic. Then free will is an illusion. That doesn't sit well with me. I don't believe that, um, that free will is an illusion. I was. It was inevitable that we'd be having this wonderful conversation now at the birth of the universe. But, but some scientists believe that it's deterministic and for a reason. Known as something as quantum entanglement.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  And quantum entanglement is something that we don't fully understand yet, and I don't believe we've quite got the right interpretation of.

• 26:14Mike Carruthers?

  So you had mentioned in the beginning that there is some evidence that perhaps, or there's some reason to believe anyway, that intelligent life may have been around before elsewhere, which implies, or I infer from that, that our intelligent life may someday just go away, like it may have happened in the past.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Well, so a couple of answers to that. So first of all, there was another species, a cousin of ours. We shared a common ancestor, but it was a different branch of the tree of life called Neanderthals. Many people will have heard of them. And they lived in Europe up until about 40,000 years ago. And they had language, they had culture, they painted the first cave paintings. So they buried their dead. So these were clearly another intelligent species on Earth, related to us, but not our direct ancestors or anything. So intelligent life has evolved twice. They had brains that were about the same size as ours. Now, the

• 27:17Speaker 01

  second part of your question is what might happen to the Earth in the future? Well, eventually, the sun, the sun's probably about halfway through its life. It's about four and a half, 4.6 billion years old. It's going to survive for another four billion years or so. And when it comes, when it burns up all its hydrogen fuel, it's going to go through periods of rapid expansion and rapid contraction. And when it does that, if the Earth's still in the orbit around it, it's going to burn the Earth up. And any life that may have survived until then is going to be destroyed. It's going to go extinct. However, we suspect that life's going to go extinct before then. And the reason is, over the course of Earth's

• 27:59Speaker 01

  history, and in some ways this is a bit ironic, given what lots of people are talking about now. Is that the atmosphere of Earth has been declining in the amount of carbon dioxide in it and increasing in the amount of nitrogen in it since it formed. And in about a billion years' time, carbon dioxide levels are going to have dropped to such a low level that photosynthesis, so the way that plants make a living, is going to cease. And when plants cease to be able to do photosynthesis and create oxygen, then animals like us that require oxygen to breathe are going to go extinct as well. So we know that life on Earth will die out. We know it may, hopefully, it's going to be a long time away.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  We know, you know, that, so we know the direction that it's going. We're not going to be here forever. Intelligent life's not going to be here forever because the Earth's not going to be here forever. Now, of course, that's still a very long way away, and who knows? In the coming years, in the coming decades, in the coming centuries, humanity may end up finding a way to get to other planets outside of our solar system and forming colonies there. We can't do that yet, but science has brought us on a hell of a journey, and it may continue to take us on a journey where, as we learn more, we do realize that we are able to colonize the galaxy. But at the moment, it will take us a very long time to get to those planets.

• 29:21Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it's always fun to explore those deeper questions. Why are we here? Why do we exist? What are we do, what are we doing here? And I appreciate you sharing what science can tell us. Tim Coulson has been my guest, and the name of his book is The Science of Why We Exist: A History of the Universe From the Big Bang to Consciousness. And it's a beautiful book, and if you'd like to read it, there's a link to it in the show notes. Tim, thank you for coming on today.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Wonderful. Thank you very much for having me on, Mike. It's been entirely my pleasure.

• 29:53Mike Carruthers?

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• 33:08Mike Carruthers?

  I'm going to bet that you know people in the following kind of relationship, and maybe you're one of them. The relationship looks like this. Two people who live together, they're not romantically involved, they're often the same sex, but they're more than roommates. Their lives are more involved and intertwined. They're close, they do things together, they own things together. They may be in each other's wills. They are essentially life partners, but rather than romance at the center, it's friendship. This type of relationship doesn't have a name. It's hard to know what it is when you see it because you would need to know more of the story. Still, it's a growing category of relationship that you

• 33:52Mike Carruthers?

  don't hear talked about very much. We're going to talk about it now with Raina Cohen. She is an award-winning producer and editor for NPR's documentary podcast Embedded, and she is author of a book called The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. Hi, Raina, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  So glad to get to talk to you.

• 34:17Mike Carruthers?

  So explain this relationship a little more, a little deeper.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  So I think people have an association with the term significant other and that they're thinking about a spouse or a romantic partner. And what I have found is that there are a lot of people who don't have a romantic partner, or who don't only have a romantic partner as an extremely significant relationship in their lives. And a friendship can play as meaningful of a role in shaping people's lives as a romantic partner, even sort of rise to the level of being a partner like the person you would live with or raise kids with and make life decisions around.

• 34:56Mike Carruthers?

  Does that happen very often?

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Often enough that I have spent many hours talking to people who have these sorts of friendships and that I have experienced one in my own life. We don't really have great language for these friendships, so it makes it really hard to know how common they are, but it is really something I think that is hidden in plain sight that, you know, when I have talked to people about what I'm calling platonic partnerships, people who have a friendship that goes well beyond even what a best friend is, I have been kind of shocked to find out how often people say, "I have that," or "I had that," or "I know someone who has it," that my aunt and her best friend lived next to each other for 30 years, or whatever the case may be. So I think it's more often than we probably think.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  We don't really know for sure because we don't have any stats on this. But I think regardless of how common it is for people to have these sorts of friendships, they're really worth looking at because they show us how much more we actually can ask of our friendships, and they also provoke really profound questions, I think, about what it means to have a good life, like what are the components of a good life? How do we think about the significance of romantic relationships? And how do we define what family is?

• 36:09Mike Carruthers?

  So where's the line between, say, a best friend and what you're talking about? What's the difference?

• 36:17Speaker 02

  A person that you treat as a platonic partner, we can use that term, is somebody that you are moving through life with in lockstep, that you are making decisions together about where to live, maybe what jobs to take or to not consider, that you are really figuring each other into your future, that you're building a future together.

• 36:41Mike Carruthers?

  You know, when I think about the kind of relationships you're talking about, you know, like, for example, my grandmother lived with her sister in much the way you're talking about for a long time in their later years because her husband had died, my grandfather had died very young, and she wasn't particularly interested in finding a new love of her life. So she and her sister moved in together and became kind of what you're talking about, but they are related, but it's almost like it's a, I don't want to say second place, but it's the result of circumstance rather than something you go after, that things kind of didn't work out over here, so maybe we could get together and do something else.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Well, I think necessity is another of invention and that many of the people who I spoke to who have these friendships did have something about their lives that went off track where they couldn't have or no longer had the kind of nuclear family setup that they had been really raised to aspire to. And they also were lucky enough to find a really deep connection with a friend. And so they had kind of the space and, and the open mindedness to let a friend into their lives in a way that usually, you know, you're supposed to only have a romantic partner do. But just because it often happens in circumstances like, you

• 38:08Speaker 02

  know, widowhood, as you're describing, or the dissolution of a romantic relationship or people not finding one, doesn't mean that it is by necessity a lesser option or a plan B. And, and what many people who I've interviewed, like, you know, women in their 80s who have been best friends for 50 years, own a home together, you know, have the same primary care doctor, have the same email addresses, like, you can get companionship in different forms. And that often what people are talking about when they say, I don't want to die alone, or I don't want to, you know, be alone, is, doesn't really have to do with sort of sex and sparks, which we associate with romantic relationships. But these other forms

• 38:52Speaker 02

  of, of connection, intimacy, commitment, that are possible to find outside of romantic relationships. And I'm looking at friendships, but certainly siblings are a really great case of this.

• 39:03Mike Carruthers?

  Do you find when you talk to people, because it would seem, it would seem like these things kind of happen rather than they're very deliberate and intentional?

• 39:15Speaker 02

  I mean, there's no dating app for you to go out and find a platonic partner. So I think it is relatively unusual for someone to say, you know, I'm 25 or 30 or even 50 and like, you know what, what I want to go out and do is find a friend who's going to be my life partner. We just don't really have a social script for that. I have seen people be extremely intentional, partly because something about their life didn't quite work out. So, you know, one of the people whose stories I find, I think, very, very moving is this man named Art who met his best friend at a Christian college when they were both Training to be youth pastors and, you know, in conservative congregations,

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Art comes to terms with the fact that he's gay. And the way that he reconciles his faith, which is so important to him and his sexuality, is to become celibate. And he decided, you know, so he's not going to have a kind of conventional romantic relationship. And his friend sort of saw how devastating that would be to, to Art and kind of offered to act as family with him. And the two of them, I think, have been kind of astonishingly intentional and open in their conversation about how they want to play a really important role in each other's life as friends. So, so intentionality can come in, but, uh, you know, again, it's, it's, it's often arising

• 40:39Speaker 02

  because someone is being forced to be a little bit more creative to get core needs met in their lives. And, uh, you know, I think just as often, it's, it's like someone needs extra support and a friend is there and is jumping in, which was the case with a woman that I interviewed who saw that her, who like fell in love with her friend's baby, um, after being this kind of birth coach. And the, and the mother needed a lot of help because the child had, um, complex disabilities. And she ended up functionally becoming a second mother and, and legally, um, eventually becoming, um, another mother to this child.

• 41:12Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, I didn't mean necessarily that people start out with that intention, that they, it's when you look back and see how it developed, that it was more the result of circumstance and it just seemed to happen rather than any kind of one day, somebody saying, you know what we should do? We should become, you know, roommates, best friends and platonic partners. When you look back, it, it, it wasn't a straight line like that.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, often it is, something happens and that escalates the closeness of the friendship. Like with, you know, I'm thinking of one woman who- Was diagnosed with breast cancer and her friend immediately offered to be there for every single appointment and she did that for a year. And you know, when you start to spend four hours every week at Kibo with somebody that you love, like you're just going to build intimacy and and trust and you know, see each other in a vulnerable state and that makes you closer and then it becomes less of an odd thing to ask, you know, for each person to ask for other forms of help or to put the that person in your will or to designate them as the medical power of attorney.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  There, there is this way that there, there can be this kind of snowballing that people don't necessarily anticipate at the, at the front end.

• 42:31Mike Carruthers?

  And so what happens typically, if there is a typically, what happens when someone's in a relationship like this, but then a romance starts with someone else for one of them?

• 42:45Speaker 02

  It can go in different directions. Um, I've certainly seen cases where a romantic relationship crowds out the friendship. Um, and I've, I mean, I've had a number of people write to me about how hard that has been for them. Um, and then there's a psychologist named Robert Dunbar at Oxford who's, who does a lot of research on friendship and he's found that in general, a, the beginning of a new romantic relationship crowds out two of the five closest relationships in a person's life. Um, so it really can take up, take up a lot of, um, space and can lead to a kind of demotion of, of close friends. I have, you know, also seen cases where there's, there's kind of competition and jealousy

• 43:28Speaker 02

  often on the part of the romantic partner, um, and that can be a real source of tension. Something has to give. So either the romantic relationship ends, uh, or the friendship ends. And that's in the kind of worst case scenario. And I've seen other situations where with the right. Person, the right romantic partner, it all becomes additive rather than competitive. So I had mentioned to these two men who, you know, who've decided to sort of operate as a family, Nick and Art, and Nick is a straight man, has always wanted to get married and have children. And he had a romantic partner who was really suspicious of the friendship, thought, you know, she had a lot of issues with it. They ended up breaking up.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Nick was introduced to a woman who herself had what she calls a chosen family, has really close friends. And to her, it was a plus that Nick had this close friend in his life, Art, and that all three of them see each other as kind of enhancing both the friendship and the romantic relationship because they can all support each other, they can take the load off of each other.

• 44:33Mike Carruthers?

  So when I think about people who are in relationships like you're talking about, my guess would be that they're more women than men in these relationships and that they're older women.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Well, you know, as I said, there are no, there's no like association for platonic partners that I can look to, so I don't, I don't totally know what is more or less common, but I can say sort of anecdotally from what I was able to find, it was certainly much easier for me to find women who had these friendships than men, and that men ran into issues that women didn't in the same way. So specifically, there, there was a lot of sort of distrust and rumors around men, around straight men, or if at least one person in the pair was straight. So there are a couple of straight men who I followed, who, they worked in the same lab together as grad students and their PhD, you know,

• 45:32Speaker 02

  the, the head of the lab basically gossiped about the two of them and was like, are they, you know, are they romantic partners? The mother of one of them kind of kept trying to ask if they, if the two of them were romantically involved and was trying to be supportive. So those are not things that I hear really in the same way with women. I think there's, there's a lot more license for women to be. Close to one another emotionally and, you know, and physically close and to not be suspected of having romantic involvement. There isn't that kind of disapproval. So it is sort of, it certainly was less common for men. And I think that there's, uh, men are swimming against the tide even more than than women are.

• 46:14Mike Carruthers?

  Do these things generally have a lifespan? Or do, I guess it depends on how young you are when you enter it. Because as you pointed out, if if romance enters the picture for one of them, that that could end the relationship because romance is gonna often win.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  No, you know, not always. But yeah, I, I, you know, have seen friendships that have lasted decades. But I think it's, it's, if you were to ask the same question about what is the lifespan of a marriage or a romantic relationship, you're gonna get a ton of variation. And I think that that is, is true here. And there are kind of parallels too. Like, a lot of these friendships naturally foster when people are very young and when they are, you know, have spending a lot of time together. And when that is kind of condoned and not seen as, as taking away from dating or a, uh, taking care of family.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  And those can be really intense and they can flame out. Or people, you know, make different decisions. So I think some of the, some of the younger ones might be less likely to sustain versus people who are, you know, maybe meeting a little bit later in life when things are, are more settled and they would have to potentially work more to, to maintain the, the friendship. But, uh, yeah, I, I just, um, I have interviewed people where in the course of a year, like, they had been, they gone from being very close to having a falling out. And I have interviewed people who have been, you know, best friends for, for many, many decades. So I think it really runs the gamut. I mean, somebody sent me an email recently asking, like, essentially for self-help books for platonic partners.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Like, there aren't any. There's, there's no kind of structural support for these relationships, and yet they, they persist.

• 48:02Mike Carruthers?

  I would imagine that one of the real problem, or I don't know how big a problem it is, but one of the common problems with those kind of relationships is how do you explain it to other people? People, when you say, when you tell somebody, this is my soulmate, the assumption is always that this is a romantic relationship. It's not. We're, and we're just friends.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this was one of the things that made me so interested in these friendships to begin with. I mean, well, one thing, I fell into an extremely close friendship and we, the two of us had trouble naming it. And we thought that best friend was inadequate and we, you know, we're looking around at like, aren't we just kind of partners? Like, I bring you to my office holiday party and, you know, all of my, like, all of our coworkers know, like, know the other person and we host parties together. We're kind of assumed to, you know, if one person is invited, you invite the other. Uh, so we were playing around with, with what language we could use. And then as I interview people, like, everybody had their own terms that, and,

• 49:09Speaker 02

  um, like platonic life partner, platonic soulmate, best soul friend, non-romantic life partner. I mean, you know, the list goes on and there's, it, it is very difficult to get people to understand something if you don't have language that other people recognize. And even if you come up with your own term, it doesn't mean other people will respect it. Um, and, you know, when you, like, I think about people who told me they didn't know what to do and they were filling out their emergency contact on the, the doctor's office. And, you know, came, like, came up with different terms each time. So, um, it can feel really invalidating to not have language, um, for you and the person in, in the friendship.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  But it also, um, can make it really inexp, like, inexplicable and confusing, um, when you're trying to tell people what a person means to you.

• 50:00Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it's certainly an interesting topic that I, you know, obviously people don't talk about it much. They don't even really think about it much that, but as, as again, as you're talking, I, I can think of people past and present that I know that are in these kind of relationships. But you never talk about it, even to them about it. It's just, we're roommates or we're, you know.

• 50:24Mike Carruthers?

  They don't carry a torch for this kind of relationship typically, at least in my experience. It's just something that that's their business and, you know, so that's why I don't think people know much about it. They just make assumptions and that's that.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Well, I think what you're saying there, like the roommate example is actually really a good case of why we don't know about more of these friendships. You know, I have heard people say, well, like, I don't really want to make, have to give people like my whole life history or map out my family tree. So I'm just going to use a proxy. I'm going to say that my friends, my like best friend's partner is the stepmom of our child, even though that's not really what it is, or that this person is my roommate or housemate or best friend. And so there's, or calling people, giving people family names, this is my aunt or my cousin, when that's actually not what you are. So there, there are this kind of euphemistic language that makes it more legible, what the relationship is.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  But what it ends up doing is that we all have a kind of obscured sense of reality. So we, we don't have people telling us about these deep friendships because they think that we don't, we won't understand it. And because we're not presented with them, we, you know, if we ourselves have that kind of relationship, we're not going to tell anybody else about it. I think there's something that's very powerful about talking about this subject because people will, you know, it just cracks open lots of stories, past and present, that people have, that they didn't realize anybody else would understand.

• 51:55Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I think everyone listening to this, if you think about it long enough, you, you know, somebody, if it's not you, you still know somebody who's in a relationship like Raina has been talking about. And how great to bring it out in the open and talk about it because it, it's a reality of life that we, we don't really, it's kind of invisible. We don't see it. I've been talking with Raina Cohen. She's author of the book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. If you'd like to check out her book, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Raina, thank you. Thanks for bringing this topic to life.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Well, thank you for giving it attention.

• 52:41Mike Carruthers?

  Since I have allergies, I am no stranger to sneezing. And frankly, think it's one of the weirdest things the body does. But here are some interesting facts about sneezing you may not know. Your body has a sneeze center. And that sneeze center sends messages to all the muscles that have to work together to produce a sneeze. These muscles are located in your chest, your vocal cords, your throat, your belly, and they all work together to make you sneeze. Your sneeze can travel at a speed of 100 miles an hour. And one sneeze can send 100,000 germs into the air. It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. And it is impossible to sneeze when you're asleep.

• 53:26Mike Carruthers?

  That's because the nerves that stimulate that sneeze center are also at rest while you're sleeping. The reason we sometimes sneeze multiple times right in a row is because the first sneeze wasn't strong enough to remove whatever itchy particles you had in your nose. So the nose takes a few tries to get it out. And if you have the urge to sneeze, you should let it out. Sneeze's tend to be very powerful. And when you hold them in, pressure can build up and can cause damage. And that is something you should know. I know I end most episodes asking you to share this podcast with someone you know. And I do that because it really does help us.

• 54:10Mike Carruthers?

  And so I would appreciate it. And here I am asking again to please share this podcast with someone you know, or two people. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 54:25Speaker 03

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• 54:52Speaker 04

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