What Relationships Would You Want, if You Believed They Were Possible?

Around 40 percent of people who marry eventually get a divorce. Almost half of children are born to unmarried women. The number of close friends Americans report having has been on a steep decline since the 1990s, especially among men. Millions of us are growing old alone. We are living out a radical experiment in how we live, love, parent and age — and for many, it’s failing. That’s partial context, I think, for the recent burst of interest and media coverage of polyamory. People want more love in their lives, and opening their relationships is one way to find it. A poll from last year found that one-third of Americans believe their ideal relationship would involve something other than strict monogamy. But polyamory, for all its possibilities, isn’t right for many, and it doesn’t have that much to say about parenting or aging or friendship. As radical as it may sound, it’s not nearly radical enough. It’s not just romance that could be imagined more expansively. It’s everything. “If this is such a significant relationship in my life, why is there no term for it?” wonders NPR’s Rhaina Cohen about a relationship that transcends the language we have available for friendship. Her forthcoming book, “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center,” is a window into a world of relational possibilities most of us never even imagined existed. It’s a call to open up what we can conceive of as possible. Some of these models might appeal to you. Others might not. But they all pose a question worth asking: What kinds of relationships would you want in your life, if you felt you could ask for them? Mentioned: “Men’s Social Circles are Shrinking” by Daniel A. Cox The Two-Parent Privilege by Melissa S. Kearney How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti Book Recommendations: Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on X @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  One of my preoccupations in the past couple of years, and this comes out of issues in 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

• 1:03Ezra Klein?

  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, the after the end of the age of the nuclear family. As my colleague David Brooks, as we're in the nuclear family, was actually a pretty punctuated period of time when most people lived in that. Now, the share of Americans

• 1:45Ezra Klein?

  between the ages of 25 and 54 who are married has dwindled from 2/3 of the population in 1990 to barely half today. Today, about 40% 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.

• 2:30Ezra Klein?

  And it doesn't say that much about relationships that are non-romantic. And so I feel like I was a perfect audience for Raina 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 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

• 3:13Ezra Klein?

  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've raised children. It is not how we've met each other. It is not how we've 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. As always, my email, eshrakline show at nytimes.com.

• 4:01Ezra Klein?

  Raina Cohen, welcome to the show.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Could not be happier to be here.

• 4:05Ezra Klein?

  So there's been this burst of coverage of polyamory recently. There was this New York Magazine cover. There's this memoir. There was a Times piece, a New Yorker piece, the Wall Street Journal had this piece about how nobody on dating apps can find enough monogamous profiles. What do you make of all this as somebody who covers relationships? Why this? Why now?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  I think there's a growing recognition that the way people have been approaching their romantic relationships is not working that well. I can't tell you the number of people I've had repeat back to me this now famous line from the psychotherapist Esther Perel, that we now expect of one person what we used to expect of an entire village. And as people are understanding that maybe it doesn't make sense to put everything on one person because you're going to compromise the stability of that relationship, then it opens the door to be thinking about, well, if it's not one person, then can you have multiple people? And I think it's becoming less taboo than it has been for a long time to think about the possibility of having multiple romantic partners.

• 5:06Ezra Klein?

  I find the conversation around this, and particularly the emphasis on the multiple romantic partners, it sounds weird to say this about polyamory, but I find it weirdly conservative. People often frame this, I think, as just all about who you get to have sex with. But people open up their marriages, people who particularly do so polyamorously, which is what makes it different than just kinds of non-monogamy, they're often looking for something more than sex. What else do you think they're looking for?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  I think people are looking for connection. I mean, I just think even of the term an emotional affair, which is an indication-

• 5:43Ezra Klein?

  Such a good term. So interesting.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so that means that there have been no physical lines crossed, and yet there's still a sense that someone is seeking something from another person that they're not getting in their partner, and that there was a breach of trust that happened by being that close to another person. So the existence of this term shows that people are not just looking for sex and physical connection, they maybe want to be understood. Maybe they don't share some of the same interests and hobbies with somebody that they met 20 years ago, or just simply have more facets to them than one person can answer. And I don't know that I would say that it's conservative that people are focusing on the sex piece, but it feels like less imaginative, maybe, and that there is this real narrow

• 6:28Speaker 01

  attention on the role that a sexual partner can play when we really look for different things from so many people in our lives beyond a physical connection of that kind.

• 6:38Ezra Klein?

  Well, this is my somewhat canned way of getting to your book because I found your book much more radical than a lot of where this conversation goes. Because I think we're used to the idea that we can love and be dependent on people we have a romantic attachment to. In a way, that's why polyamory is so threatening in a way that people often, I think, don't find friendships threatening. But this book is all about how we can love and be dependent on people we don't have romantic attachments to. So tell me a bit about why you got interested in that.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  I think of the social scientist term of me-search. Like, I kind of got here from a personal place, which is I have a friendship where, particularly in the first couple of years of our friendship, it felt like it really scrambled the definition of what friendship could be because of the level of closeness that we had. For the first couple of years, we lived a five-minute walk from each other, so most days of the week became really integrated into each other's lives. Like, we would BCC each other on emails to colleagues and all sorts of people.

• 7:37Ezra Klein?

  Every time, when you wrote about that, I found that terrifying.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  I mean, they were never like bad.

• 7:41Ezra Klein?

  You're writing a work email, and maybe you get the BCC field wrong.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that is dangerous. But anyway, we were very integrated into each other's lives to the point where the term best friend didn't feel like it cut it. Not just that it didn't kind of rise to the level of what the relationship was, but also that it had a kind of juvenile form to it. And it opened up so many questions for me, like, if this is such a significant relationship in my life, why is there a no term for it? Are there other people like us out there? What would it mean if we saw the possibility that friendship could be this close? So it was catalyzed, like, this whole project was catalyzed from a personal place of discovering a friendship that went beyond what I was told a friendship could be.

• 8:19Ezra Klein?

  I was interested in your focus in the book on the lack of language for relationships like this, because, sort of similarly to why you wrote the book, one of my interests in the book is I have a relationship like this. I have a best friend, I've been friends with him since I was 16, and it's very much a kind of life partnership. When I moved from SF, where he lives, to New York, where I live now, one of the great griefs of that move was being separated from him and his family. And it was hard to talk about with people, because if I said I was moving away from my wife, that something had happened, and now we had to be across the country from each other because of our work or whatever. I think the misery of that would be legible. People would really come to me, I think, with a lot of sympathy.

• 9:03Ezra Klein?

  But moving away from this other important partnership, like, oh, that's sad. But you don't make decisions about where you live based on your friends or your best friends. And it was interesting to me how difficult that experience was to convey. It made me think a lot about how few gradations we have in the language for people we love. I mean, we have spouses and partners and friends and best friends. It's like four categories. And there's a lot of human experience not captured in that.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  When you were telling people about moving away, like, what was the language that you used?

• 9:33Ezra Klein?

  I still use best friend. I mean, now sometimes they'll say that there's like a platonic life partnership dimension to that. I don't really love that term. It's just very clinical. And also, I don't think people want to be assaulted by your endless rhapsodizing or description of your own interior relationships. So, you know, you kind of just move on.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. The kind of language issue came up again and again where people would come up with a term like platonic life partner, platonic soulmate, non-romantic life partner, whatever. And it would maybe be accurate, but like, people didn't get what it was. So was the language really doing anything? And then on the flip side, you know, there were situations that I write about in the book where people are in the hospital and then they like refer to their friend as their sister or as their wife because they're like, well, the thing that matters is that people get the connotation right, even if the particularities aren't right. And I think it's a terrible thing to not be able to communicate what one of the most important people in your life means to you and to have to hang on language that really

• 10:38Speaker 01

  might not do justice to the relationship or give people the wrong impression about it. So it feels like a big gap to fill in right now.

• 10:46Ezra Klein?

  To use a nerdy term for this, there's a kind of counter cyclical dimension to this book. Because you're talking about these unusually deep friendships, these unusually deep partnerships. At the same time that the dominant discourse is about a loneliness epidemic, is about what gets called a friendship recession. So I want to open into some of that, too. What is the thing that people call the friendship recession?

• 11:10Speaker 01

  So this came out of work by a survey researcher named Daniel Cox, who has done some of the, I think, best work on friendship recently, where he ended up tracking in a survey from 2021 just this precipitous decline in the number of close friends that Americans have. And this is quite connected to loneliness. I mean, he found that Americans who had three or fewer close friends are much more likely to say that they were lonely in the last week than people who have 10 or more close friends. So the loneliness epidemic is this term that has, I think, become ubiquitous because of the Surgeon General. And what this research on the decline in friendship shows is that the withdrawal that a lot of people have had from their friendships,

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I mean, particularly, American men, has really harmed people's emotional lives and their sense of connectedness writ large.

• 12:02Ezra Klein?

  I want to zoom in on that question of American men, because we seem to be doing particularly badly on this. So another stat that's in your book that caught my eye is that in 1990, more than half of men reported having at least six close friends. In 2021, only about a quarter of men could say the same. 15% of men report having no close friendships, a fivefold increase in the number saying that from 1990. So 1990 to 2020, we're talking about 30 years here. It's not 300 years, it's not 3,000 years. And there's been a pretty precipitous drop in the quantity and depth of male friendship. Why do we suck at this?

• 12:46Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things that actually comes up in this survey and in other research is how men really expect to get their emotional needs fulfilled from their female partners, but they're not necessarily expecting to go to their male friends. And, I mean, I think some of the things that I've heard from men is like, they're not developing these skills, essentially, and that they're waiting to the point at which they're like dating to develop the kind of communication and emotional skills and are not necessarily applying that to their friendships. But, you know, some of this goes to like Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, things around the ways that men especially might have communed previously in like larger group settings have fallen away. And they might end up sort of fearing being perceived as gay if they have close relationships and, you know,

• 13:32Speaker 01

  We have a less homophobic society than we did previously, but not so much that people don't fear that they're going to be misread if they have that kind of intimacy with another man.

• 13:42Ezra Klein?

  I am not pretending my personal life is a representative sample, but my gay male friends are so much better at friendship and have such a delightful, deep friendship community compared to virtually anybody else I know, but particularly the straight men I know, that it's really striking to me. I mean, there is a, I can imagine reasons it might be, but the emphasis placed on friendship there seems really quite different than what I see elsewhere.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Well, I would think particularly in queer communities, there is so much emphasis on friendship, partly because people can't necessarily rely on their families of origin to be the people who are going to kind of ride through life with them, because they might have rejected them because of their sexuality. So there's this long history of friends being chosen family. So it really makes sense in the context of gay men. But I even think about, like, as a kid, the way that girls treated friendships as these entities to celebrate and to talk about, like, we would exchange friendship bracelets, we would kind of honor the friendship, and that's a thing that can kind of fall away to some extent, I think, in adulthood.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  In general, we don't treat friendship as this thing that we are supposed to work toward getting better at or achieving, or that it's a mark of, like, a successful adulthood. But I think for men, there's even less emphasis than there is for women on having that as a big piece of their life.

• 15:11Ezra Klein?

  Tell me a bit about the story of Art and Nick.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Art and Nick are pretty remarkable guys. They met in a Christian college together, training to be youth pastors, both raised to be in conservative congregations. And over time, Art fully came to terms with the fact that he's gay, which created a real conflict for him because in his reading of the Bible, which he, like, literally sat down and read to try to interpret what it was saying, he did not believe it was okay for him to engage in same-sex, same-sex romantic relationships. So he decided that in order to reconcile his faith, which was so important to him and his sexuality, that he was going to be celibate. And he said that celibacy was the worst thing he could possibly imagine,

• 15:55Speaker 01

  not because of the giving up sex part, but because of not having a person to come home to at the end of the day, someone to hand him a warm mug of tea. And he had this friend Nick from college, who was his best friend, who is a straight man and came from this conservative background where he's very kind of concerned with, with doing what everybody else does. But he was like, this is not your problem, this is our problem. I want to help you figure out how to make this work. And suggested that they live together. They'd already, you know, talked about each other as being brothers to each other, that that's how they conceived of each other. And wanted to live as a family and that Nick expected to get married to a woman at some point. And that Art would be part of that family, that he would either live next door or with them.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  So they have had extraordinarily explicit conversations about the role that they are playing in each other's lives. And as it's evolved, and at this point, they live together, they recently moved to be closer to Nick's girlfriend, who, you know, they're very serious. And it's a very unconventional relationship that they have had to navigate all on their own.

• 17:00Ezra Klein?

  What was so striking about their story to me is that there felt to me to be multiple pieces of having to fight against both expectations and interpretations that would be put on you. These are two men in Christian pastoral circles, right? And for Art, he's already in a certain amount of conflict with a lot of the world of his faith. For Nick, right, to be living now with a professed gay man, that I'm sure creates a certain amount of friction to be meeting women and saying that, you know, if you're going to be in a relationship with me, in a way, you're also going to be in a relationship with Art. How did they navigate that pressure?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  They've run into a lot of misinterpretations and have faced really concrete consequences for people's misunderstanding of their relationship and judgment of it. Nick has tried dating women before the woman he's with now, who have been concerned that it is actually a sexual relationship or that there's too much room for flirtation. And also want, you know, more of Nick's presence in their life.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Nick also grew up in an environment where even having any kind of physical or emotional intimacy with another man was out of bounds for him. And in fact, like, there was a point where he wondered if he was gay because he liked to hug Art and missed him. And he had to go on his kind of own process to figure out, OK, if I'm not comfortable with Art putting his arm on my shoulder, is that because I actually don't like it? Or is it because I've been programmed to believe that this is not acceptable? And am I just afraid that people are going to assume that I'm gay? So there was a lot of deprogramming that Nick had to do and that Art kind of helped through the process because he comes from such a different vantage point.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  There have been professional consequences to their relationship because some people cannot seem to believe that it is a friendship. They've just sort of determined over time that it's worth making the sacrifices of, you know, maybe Nick not finding a romantic partner, though it seems like it has now worked out, and Art having to change professions, really, because of the way that people on the internet, in the evangelical internet, people in his denomination, found it unacceptable that two men, one of whom is gay, would live together.

• 19:21Ezra Klein?

  I understand how friendships that start early in your life escalate to this very high level. You just have so much shared history. And it was so much easier to become really close to somebody when, at least for me, when I was young, and you could spend this atmospheric time playing Tony Hawk after school and just, like, wandering around. But if you're somebody who does want deeper, closer friendships, put aside these platonic life partner friendships, just you want to be on the relationship escalator with friendships. Romantic relationships have this very structured way of doing it. I mean, there's this question eventually of do we move in together? Do we get married? Right? Do you leave a toothbrush at my house? And there's also a lot of space for having that conversation, the what are we conversation? What are we doing here? How do people escalate a friendship?

• 20:06Ezra Klein?

  Right? If you want to turn something that's, like, warm and close and has some chemistry to it to something more central, I think that's mysterious to people. What have you learned about that?

• 20:18Speaker 01

  So I talked to a researcher named Lisa Diamond, who's a psychologist. And one of the things that she told me is that for any kind of attachment relationship, it doesn't have to be romantic, that there are three magic ingredients, and those are time, togetherness, and touch. So what you're describing there of like spending boundless time, playing Tony Hawk or whatever, and maybe there's some kind of like roughhousing, or that as kids are in these environments like summer camp or in dorms, we are really naturally getting those ingredients to become really close to another person. So I think I would start from a place of figuring out like, how do you get more of each of those things? And one way to do it is to change your environment.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  And that could be a bigger project, like with the sort of co-living setup, or living within a neighborhood with friends where it's very easy to come by time and togetherness with another person. The other kind of thing that comes to mind comes from somebody that I interviewed, Art, who said that this really close friendship that he has with Nick made him start to think about what his other friendships could be. And he would ask himself, what is the fullest version of this friendship? And for any given friendship, that did not mean that he wanted to have like a partnership level friendship. I mean, there is, you know, love is infinite and time is not, as the saying goes, like that wasn't going to be possible. But he would think about and talk with the friends about, in a given friendship, you know, what would make it a richer friendship?

• 21:43Speaker 01

  And in one case, he decided with this couple that he was friends with that they were going to co-work once a week. And he, that meant he would be in their space, and he was sort of seeing how they interact more and with their kid. And if we could ask ourselves that kind of question, and really approach friendships with more curiosity, rather than these sort of hardened limits on what they can be, I think it is possible to move toward closer relationships.

• 22:07Ezra Klein?

  When you offered those three ingredients.

• 22:11Ezra Klein?

  Touch made me wonder if this isn't one of the difficulties for men, at least in the United States and sort of peer countries. I'm pretty far out on the bell curve of intense, close male friendships, and I am not particularly comfortable with touch within those relationships. And I always think of this moment in my childhood when I was pretty friendless when I was young, and this kid had moved to town and we became very close friends. It was third grade, I think. And I remember my mom was taking us for ice cream, and I held this kid's hand. And she's like, "Oh, boys don't do that."

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 22:45Ezra Klein?

  And my mom, it was not, I mean, she was right, right? Like, they don't do that here. And as a kid who got teased all the time and bullied all the time, trying to hold boys' hands at school would not have helped the situation. But that has always stuck with me. And not that many male relationships I know feature much touch, whereas a lot of the female friendships I know, touch is very normal. Like, they'll cuddle together, watching a movie on the couch. If that is so important, and I had not heard that in terms of friendship before, that does strike me as a genuine disadvantage that men have in forming close relationships in this society, where we've been socialized intensely against touch within these relationships.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Your mom is just channeling the culture and trying to protect you, probably. I'm like a very physically affectionate person, so the idea of being raised as a man in this culture is like, I don't know who I would be if that were a form of communication that was cut off for me. Men do, are physical. They cuddle with their, you know, straight men cuddle with their female partners. And yeah, it does feel like a disadvantage. I think what is so moving to me about Nick's story is he undergoes this transformation because of his friendship with Art, who not only is gay and has sort of different expectations around like physical intimacy because of that, but he's also Brazilian-American. So a lot of his norms are shaped by what he experienced in Brazil or among his friends

• 24:09Speaker 01

  from that part of the world, where men kiss each other, they, you know, they are much more physically affectionate. And this real linkage between masculinity and kind of stoicism and keeping space is not there. Like, I remember Nick told me that he noticed that his dad wouldn't even sit like right next to him on the couch. He like needed to leave room, and he couldn't remember the last time his dad hugged him. So, I mean, there are just like real cultural norms that you have to swim upstream for. And My hope is that, like, reading some of the history and realizing that, like, this is so culturally and historically contingent, the way that, like, men interact with each other and are very cut off, and, and just like seeing examples of men doing things differently, at least can maybe open conversations, because I suspect that, like,

• 24:53Speaker 01

  if three men were sitting in a row, the way that I was with my two female friends, that maybe some of them, like, would be interested on some level in, in physical affection, but are like, no, but they're, they're not, so I'm not going to make an overture.

• 25:29Ezra Klein?

  So we track back to 1990 a minute ago, but, but your book throws the ball backwards further. You know, I appreciate, because this is always on my mind, as somebody who ends up, for political reasons, reading a lot of history from the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries. And you'll have these male legislators professing their unbelievably ardent, undying love to each other in completely banal letters, right? There'll be a bunch of things about how the farm is going that year. And it's like, and as a person who keeps the other half of my soul, know that I think about you. You know, it's just really, I mean, Jefferson and, and Madison, they, they really have a, like, a deep romance going on. And you talk about this going back. I mean, you talk about how in Rome, people

• 26:11Ezra Klein?

  talked about their friends in ways we now talk about spouses. They would call them the better half of my soul, the better part of my soul. The letters you read, what happened to drain so much of the, the ardor out of friendship? Male friendship and, and female friendship alike, but I think even more male friendship. I mean, I think it's still quite common for female friends to profess a kind of love to each other. It's not that common for male friends.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think seeing some of this history is kind of astonishing to a lot of people and often requires like a whole string of like context and caveats because it is so unfamiliar to our eyes and ears. Like, one of the letters that I cite here as from the 1700s where this man was talking about his heart, like his physical heart, which is was not in good condition. And he was like, however, soon so ever my feeble heart shall stop, its last pulsations shall vibrate for you. That sounds like a love letter to a lot of us now, but I don't actually think contextually, we have any reason to believe that that was necessarily about like romantic or sexual love. And that, as different historians have put it, it was not understood in the past that in order to love someone, you also

• 27:20Speaker 01

  had to lust after them. And a big factor that matters here is that there were not these categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality as we understand it now as these sort of fixed identities, homosexuality being stigmatized. So it was very possible for men to say and do all sorts of things that we now code as sexual, and it was seen as totally innocent. So like, when people speculate, for instance, about Lincoln being gay because he shared a bed with a man, it was very common for men to share beds for, you know, practical reasons. Like, that in and of itself is not necessarily an indication of someone's desire. So it really has to do with kind of the introduction of the stigmatized identity

• 28:04Speaker 01

  of homosexuality and concerns about sodomy that took away the innocence of what had been totally normal behavior among men.

• 28:14Ezra Klein?

  How much of it is also about the rise of marriages that are for love? And not just for love, but what I guess the sociologists now call assortative. It used to be, I mean, in a lot of cultures still is, that you married people who your family found for you, approved for you. There's obviously arranged marriages, but there's also just the You married the person down the block, right? You married somebody who made sense. You married the first person that you wanted to sleep with when you were of age for that kind of thing. You married somebody who your family could use, like the, the union with their family. And so it wasn't expected that the person you married would always be your deepest intellectual partner, the person with whom your, your soul would vibrate.

• 28:57Ezra Klein?

  And so there was a, a reason, like an obvious reason that you would look for that externally. And that as marriage became the, the site of love, these friendships became competitive with it, right? I mean, you're supposed to have one soulmate. So how much is that a, a dynamic here?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think you're, you're describing the like other part of the twin trends here. So you have the, the decline of friendship, but also these changing expectations of what a good marriage was supposed to be. And we went from marriage really being this pragmatic union that was very much about like joining families to one where love was supposed to be the basis. And then, you know, more recently, what Eli Finkel, who's a psychologist at Northwestern, has called the self-expressive marriage. So, you know, he says basically like, we want our spouse to be the Michelangelo to our stone and unlock the best version within us. And that is very different from a time where you have tons of sex segregation, where you

• 29:55Speaker 01

  have inequality between the genders, where when men own their wives, like how much emotional and intellectual connection are they really going to have? I mean, it makes a lot of sense under those circumstances to find greater intimacy with your same-sex friends than you would with your partner to whom you're not an equal. And, you know, as you mentioned, there are still like lots of people who have marriages along these lines that are arranged. And I remember talking to a friend of mine whose mother had an arranged marriage in India. And her mother and her female friends, who had all had arranged marriages, they didn't expect their husbands to be the most important person who filled all these roles. Like, you know, to go back to your first question, and their female friendships were so important, and I'm sure kind of the same thing was the case for the men too.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  So the marriage expectations really have crowded out the room for friendship to be as significant as it once was.

• 30:47Ezra Klein?

  So it feels like that would all be fine if we all had these super successful, self-expressive, soulmate-level marriages. But the stats here are rough. The divorce rate for first marriages, it keeps hovering around 50%. The rate for second and third marriages is even higher than that. The average divorced marriage lasts eight years. For first marriages, 40% of kids are born to unmarried people. I'm a child of parents who eventually got divorced.

• 31:15Ezra Klein?

  It doesn't seem to be working exactly. I mean, you just had this big book by Melissa Kearney, who's an economist, making the point that stable marriages are really good for kids. But I think that the weakness of that book, because I buy the data in it, is that she doesn't have, and nobody else has, a theory or a program that seems effective for what to do about this. Like, even if you believe the marriage should be the central unit of society, what to do about the fact that they seem to keep breaking up really feels to me like a deeply unsolved problem. You have this lovely line in the book where you say, "We both hold dual citizenship in the kingdom of the single and in the kingdom of the coupled." And that that reality of people's lives, that you might put everything you have into finding, you know,

• 31:59Ezra Klein?

  the single partner, and then you get divorced, or they die, or something happens, that feels like a real issue here, that marriage is a wonderful institution, but literally, on the face of everything we know about it, it doesn't survive. It doesn't provide everything for most people.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, really, marriage is a temporary status of our adult lives. And just look at the kind of marriage trends. People are getting married later. So let's say you get married at 30 or 35. What do you do for 10, 15 years of your adult life? Like, who is your next of kin? Who's going to make decisions on your behalf? And then, yeah, like, as you pointed out, how many marriages dissolve? But like, let's say it's a great case, and your marriage survives until one spouse passes away. And if you're in a heterosexual relationship, it's likely to be the woman who's outliving the man. And the stats are pretty startling. Like, a third of women over 65 are widowed, and almost half of women over 65 are unpartnered. So it is okay to say that marriage is meaningful,

• 33:03Speaker 01

  but we also need to be thinking about these other periods of life for people outside of marriage, or if they don't get married at all, which a lot of people are not.

• 33:12Ezra Klein?

  Tell me a bit about Barbara and Inez.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Barb and Inez are a pair of women who I profile in the book, a couple of the first people I got to talk to, who I met at a home that they share in the suburbs of St. Louis. And they have been best friends for more than 50 years. And in Inez's case, she did the marriage thing in the way she was supposed to. Like, she got married very young, back in the 1960s, had two kids by the time she was in her mid-20s, had a house in the suburbs and all that. But her husband was like, not a great husband, not great to her sons. And she, despite it being, you know, relatively rare at that time to get divorced, she did. And started a job to take care of her kids, to provide for them. And she met a woman named Barb.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  And Barb herself was in a place where she didn't expect her life to go. She had moved back home to take care of her parents' finances. And she couldn't have children biologically. And she's an only child, had always wanted biological children so that she could see another human being who looked like her. And her desire for marriage really waned because of that, not being able to have a child of her own. And the two of them basically became like family. Barb took care of the kids, they went on vacations together.

• 34:28Ezra Klein?

  But how did the two of them become family? Like, I'm interested in that turn.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Well, they started doing things that friends don't often do. And I think one key moment began with Barb being a little forward and just asking if she can join a trip that Inez was going on with her sons to Washington DC. And Barb was like, I've never been, can I come? And Inez said yes. So that was a two-week trip where Inez and Barb had a long road trip with these two kids who I think were around, you know, pre-teens. And that gave them a sense that they could camp together, share space together, that the kids respected her. Barb loved kids and she really connected to them. And at points where maybe people would not have, I don't know, made the decisions on behalf of a friend, they did.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  So Barb, as I mentioned, had only moved back to the St. Louis area with her family for a temporary reason. She decided to go back to Phoenix, where she had been living. And Offered for Inez and her kids to move and said that they could stay here until you find a home. And that's what Inez did. So there was some kind of like leap of faith there to follow the other person.

• 35:37Ezra Klein?

  I was so struck by a stat in that chapter. We write that friendships are actually more predictive, or at least a little bit more predictive of mortality than marriage. I mean, at a certain point in your life, whether you still have friends tells you a little bit more about how you're doing than whether you're still married. One thing I found affecting about the Inez and Barb story, is there are a lot of stories in your book, and we'll get to some of them, where people are living out something that they understand to be counter-cultural, right? They have to put work in against societal expectations, sometimes against legal structures. That's not true for the two of them. They have this real practicality about it. We did this because it made sense. Inez has children, and she has a completely useless husband in that respect. And Barbara Lee On becomes

• 36:21Ezra Klein?

  helpful. I mean, when you were saying Barb invites herself along on a trip to Washington, DC, as a parent of some kids, if I were taking my kids alone to Washington, DC, and anybody, no matter whether I like them or not, was willing to come along and help, I would say yes to that offer. And it did seem to me some of the reciprocity of their relationship was built in early co-parenting. They may not always have called it that, but that clearly seems to me to have been what it is. And this is a space where I think like my interest is bigger than in any other space here. I mean, because the part of life I'm going through right now, it's very clear to me that you're not supposed to raise multiple kids with two full-time working parents. It's say nothing of just one parent. You

• 37:06Ezra Klein?

  need a lot more help. And that ability to give and give back help, it really does bond people together. I mean, it's bonded me closer to family who I wasn't as close with before, but the way they've shown up for us and our children has meant the world to me. It's bonded me with the friends who have been there in that way for us. But it still feels like there should be more possibilities here. So I wanted to ask you about another of the stories, which is Natasha and Linda. Can you tell me a bit about them?

• 37:34Speaker 01

  So Natasha, when she was 36, decided that she was going to have a child on her own. So she had an anonymous donor sperm, was pregnant. Her friend Linda, who she knew as a fellow law professor where they worked, wanted to be the birth coach and kind of help her through her pregnancy. And Natasha ended up having an emergency C-section. Linda was there, you know, the first person to hold the baby. She described, I think, seeing the boy, Alon, as some like marvelous love mom or something. Like, she's just so effusive and really fell in love with the baby immediately and slept in the same bed as Natasha, waking up every three and a half hours to feed Alon, and continued to have

• 38:14Speaker 01

  this really important role in Alon's life. But it took years to figure out that she was really acting as a co-parent and that she wanted to have legal recognition as a parent. And ended up asking Natasha if she would go along with it, which she would. And there were some obstacles along the way that I can talk about that point to the very limited ways that we think about who can be parents. But Linda just was there for the kid and provided support to Natasha in a way that really parents do. And maybe we don't necessarily expect friends to.

• 38:47Ezra Klein?

  Well, I think it's worth talking about at least some of them. I mean, I found the story so affecting. Something you didn't mention is Alon has significant health challenges. And you have a beautiful line in there where he didn't just need two parents, he needed all the parents he could get. I see this in my own older son, who will be five around when this comes out. And the degree to which he wants other figures in his life, it's so obvious to me. I mean, a big part of the reason we moved across the country was to be near to my wife's parents, his grandparents. And he is so delighted to be near to his grandparents. It means so much to him. He loves him so much. He loves all of his grandparents so much. But also just other figures, right? Loves my best friend back in SF so much, right?

• 39:29Ezra Klein?

  Kids feel very tuned to me to have a lot of allo parents, as they're called in their lives. I mean, there are, again, the idea there would just be two is weird. But it then gets to what I think of as the oddity of these legal obstacles. So it is one of the most common concerns in American politics, that so many children grow up right now in single parent families. And single parents do amazing, heroic, and to me, genuinely unimaginable work.

• 39:56Ezra Klein?

  But if they meet somebody, a stepfather or a stepmother potentially, the path there to that person becoming a recognized parent to the kid in legal ways is very smooth, very straightforward, right? The braiding of the romantic relationship without any biological relationship is very accepted. Your mom has divorced your dad, your mom has a boyfriend, the boyfriend becomes a partner, and now that's your new stepfather. And we think, great, a two-parent family again. That there's no way to do that, that it's so unusual and weird to actually say, oh, my best friend, or actually like another family member, or will become part of this child's life in a legal, factual way. Again, just strikes me as a kind of poverty of imagination, right?

• 40:40Ezra Klein?

  We want children to have more adult figures in their life who are emotionally there, who are financially there, who are just there with time. I mean, time matters in many ways more than anything else. And yet, we really only create a speedway for one kind that has to clear a sexual romantic test first, no matter whether that person is a good father or a good mother to that child. It seems strange. We've worked backwards from a problem, but only if we can solve a secondary problem along the way.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Well, there's a law professor, I think, puts this nicely, named Sasha Coupet, that she says that the law puts misplaced emphasis on eros, so like sexual love, and not enough on agape, so self-sacrificing love. And if it were possible for people to maybe disconnect the sexual part from the parenting, then the law and our society might recognize that there are more kinds of people who could be wonderful parental figures. So Natasha and Linda, who are both legal scholars, they don't understand the emphasis on romance. I mean, Linda said that it's an irrational test for parenthood, that she said romance is lovely, but really what feels like it matters is compatibility and trust and all of that.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  And then on the flip side, there were people more on the right or the center, like Brad Wilcox, who literally has a book called Get Married that's coming out, and he really is trying to prevent divorce and so on, and says that, again, like... Focusing so much on romance from his perspective makes relationships more fragile. And that if people focused more on the raising of the children, then that would be a stronger foundation for forming families. Like, these people have really different outcomes that they're looking toward. One is trying to push toward one specific kind of family, and the other is trying to broaden them. But both have arrived at this idea that there are other kinds of characteristics that really matter when it comes to raising a child.

• 42:59Ezra Klein?

  I know so many people who want to have children but haven't met the right partner. I know people who've had children, got divorced, then met people who are a good partner for them but not a good parent for their child. But because they need to braid those roles, they can't be in this partnership that might be fulfilling. And I know people who have great relationships with other people in their life and would probably be really good at raising children together and can't do that. And what it also means is you can't distribute weight. What I was thinking about when you're bringing up Brad Wilcox's book, and Wilcox is, I think, a very important scholar of marriage and family breakdown, is that we know that children put incredible stress on a marriage.

• 43:40Ezra Klein?

  And I see it in my own life, like, the fact that we can pay for care, the fact that we can do something financially that relieves some of that stress. So my wife and I can have a date night every two weeks, so that we can occasionally go away together, right? And we also move closer to family in part for that reason. It relieves stress on our marriage. There was an Atlantic article a couple of years ago about a couple that raises their children in throuple with one of their best friends who's asexual. And I read that, that sounds wonderful. It does seem to me that even if the only thing you really cared about in life... Was getting people back into stable romantic partnerships. That being more imaginative about it, take the pressure off of those partnerships.

• 44:24Ezra Klein?

  And particularly to take some of the pressure of parenting off of those partnerships, which, again, richer families do with money, but you can't do that if you're, you know, middle class or working class. It just strikes me as a place where our cultural expectations have come into conflict with the things that we now say we value.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  I don't know if this is a place to say that I live with a couple of my friends and their kids, so I get to experience a little bit firsthand what it looks like to have other adult figures in the picture.

• 44:52Ezra Klein?

  Right, tell me a bit about how that began. You, you mentioned this at the end of the book, and I'm very curious about it.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, my husband and I are very interested, like, have been interested for a long time in living with friends, and we ended up in a conversation with a couple of our friends where the idea of living together came up. They were, to our surprise, very interested, and they did not think that we would be interested because they already had one child at the time and were planning to have more children. In addition to other things, like, my husband and I are relatively secular, they are observant Jews, so like, you know, keep a kosher kitchen, keep Shabbat and all of that, and kind of figured we wouldn't be, want to deal with all that. But we were really excited to live with these particular friends, and we have been for about two and a half years. And, you know, I think one of the fun and apt ways I've heard someone else describe the relationship that my husband and I have to our friends' children is as grandparents,

• 45:41Speaker 01

  where your pure existence just makes them attach to you. My housemate was telling me last night that as his older son was going to bed, and he said, "I love you, Abba," which Abba is, um, he preferred dad, and he was like, "And I love Imma," so like, "Mom," and "I love," and he's like, you know, goes, talks about his brother, and then he says, "And I love Coco, and I love Reina." Coco is the nickname that this, like, kid has for my, my husband. And he, as a three and a half year old, like, sees us as part of this sort of same household unit, and, I mean, there are, there are all sorts of ways that I know that, that my life isn't rich by having access to these kids, but also that my friends... Enjoy our presence as other adults in their kids' lives. And I think pressure on them is relieved. A couple of weeks ago, my housemates were trying to figure out whether to take their

• 46:25Speaker 01

  older son to the hospital, to the ER. And one of them, you know, went to my husband and was like, can you hold the baby for 10 minutes while we go and figure this out? And that's not co-parenting, like, holding a baby for 10 minutes. But they had somebody that they could just sort of relieve them of responsibility while they were in this really hectic moment. You know, it's just like one of the many ways that just simply having more people around, even if they're not rising to the level of being equal co-parents, can make the parenting experience so much less stressful. And I think that the kids love to have other adults who love them. There are just so many ways that my life has been enriched that, yeah, like, there are toys on the floor and there are, particularly with two kids, I feel like there's a bump

• 47:10Speaker 01

  up in chaos.

• 47:11Ezra Klein?

  That's also how I felt about it, yes.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  And I just think that everything comes with the pluses and minuses and that it is so much easier to overweight the negatives of the unconventional decisions and to overlook the negatives of the conventional decision.

• 47:26Ezra Klein?

  I have a friend who both lives in what I would kind of describe as a commune. I think that the modern term that gets used is intentional co-living community and also helps set them up. And I was asking her about this once, about these trade-offs. And she said something that has always stuck with me, which is that she's decided to choose the default in her life, being the problems of community, as opposed to the problems of not having community. She wants the problems of connection rather than the problems of how to find that connection. And it seems so obvious when she said it that way, but I'd never thought of it that way.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  I think what's interesting there is that she is saying something that people are maybe making decisions around but don't realize that they're making decisions around. Like, you know, when I have toured through my friends' beautiful houses that are far away from all of their other friends. I sometimes wonder, I'm like, oh, you've got this gorgeous kitchen, but what are you giving up to have this beautiful kitchen island and this renovated home? And I'm not going to be obnoxious and start that conversation with a friend there. But I do think that people are creating conditions where they are disconnected, but are so focused on maybe the benefits that that look like the shiny forms of success. That you have this nice house that you own and it's your lawn that you get to mow and you don't hear anybody else.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  And privacy and control has a lot of benefits. But like when the car breaks down and you need to get your kids to daycare and you don't know any of your neighbors and you're cul-de-sac of five houses, like, well, you've like given something up in the process.

• 49:03Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about the idea of an invariable. I found that to be helpful language.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is from Sheila Hetty's novel, How Should a Person Be? And she is writing about people who have this kind of really intimate and separable friendship. And these two women are kind of repairing their relationship. So one of the characters tells the other, "Well, it's like in life, you have the variables and you have the invariables. And you want to use them all, but you work around the invariables. I thought you were an invariable. And then you left without saying a word." Then the other friend thinks, "Very deep inside, something began to vibrate. I was an invariable, an invariable.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  No word had ever sounded to me more like love." I think an invariable is really the opposite of the way that we think about friendship, that friendship is peripheral and is fungible, dispensable. You know, you can move across the country from your friend and you'll make new friends. And an invariable is somebody who is going to be at the center of your life and that other things work around.

• 50:12Ezra Klein?

  This, to me, is one of the tensions of the book, which is there is room, really, only for so many invariables in life. What my children need is an invariable. What my wife needs, to me, is an invariable. And one of the challenges, it seems to me, is what happens when invariables clash and collide? It's all great to talk about having more wonderful, deep, intimate, caring, interdependent relationships, but they take a lot of management. They can fall into conflict with each other. It's like an almost inhuman level of communication. How do you think about the downside, the dark side of this? The, you know, I mean, we talked earlier about control and that being a push towards

• 50:56Ezra Klein?

  small nuclear families and single family boxes. But there's also just simplicity. How many people's needs are you really balancing? How many people do you have to answer to? How many people can you really answer to with a busy life and a job and all the rest of it? How do you think, I guess, about the skills and to the trade offs here? And then what happens when, you know, it turns out somebody felt like an invariable and now they're not? Or they are in your heart, but you've got to make choices. Tell me a bit about the conflict at the heart of a lot of this.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  We are used to dealing with conflict between the needs of people that we love and that we think of as, well, absolutely, I have to meet this need. Children, spouses, aging parents. It's not like we are freed from this conflict if we only have a romantic partner. It's just that maybe those are different categories of people. And I think like, we're going to disappoint people in our lives. We're not going to be able to be there for everybody at every single moment. And it would be a sad thing to proactively withdraw from relationships because you think that at some point, there might be some conflict that's not resolvable, where you have to make a choice. And sometimes these things are difficult and people have to put one person in front of the other.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  But I feel like the first thing I'm just trying to get people to do is realize that you can add more people as factors. You can treat more people as worth making these decisions around. Maybe you're going to have to have hard conversations with people and develop those communication skills that we sure can use, where we are honest about what our bandwidth is or where our priority has to be for some portion of our lives. But, you know, I'm reminded of something that Nick's girlfriend told me, where she also has this kind of chosen family that she, last I know, anyway, was living with them, had moved across the country with them. When I had brought up this question to her about like, is it exhausting, basically, to negotiate all these relationships and so on? She was like, well, of course it's exhausting. Like, family is exhausting. People you love are exhausting.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  But the 5% of the time that it's complicated and hard is so outweighed by every other moment where you're getting so much for it. Like, we are making our lives unnecessarily deprived by hoping that simplicity will solve us of having to make these trade-offs. And I think for a lot of people, at the very least, they're gonna have to make trade-offs about, do they take care of their aging parents or take care of their kids? Like, the math here is not straightforward, that sometimes having more people means that you are giving more, and other times it means you're getting more support. So, in the case of Art, when he had this big falling out at his workplace, it was Nick's girlfriend who was also supporting him, in addition to Nick. So I think it's also worth paying attention to the ways that it can add to your life and not just the conflicts it creates.

• 53:44Ezra Klein?

  One thing that struck me in your book was that there's actually research on this, on marriages in the context of many friendships, survey research. What does that show?

• 53:52Speaker 01

  That, basically, the same principle that applies to finances also applies to relationships, that it's good to diversify your portfolio and have multiple people in your lives. So, to name a couple of studies on this, there is one that shows that people who have more close relationships are happier in their marriages than those who have few close relationships outside their marriage, so, you know, friendships. And another that was, as you were alluding to, measuring cortisol, so like a stress response, and found that people who were married and were more satisfied with the level of social support they had outside their marriage had less of a cortisol spike than those who weren't as satisfied with the relationships that they had outside of their marriage. So, there is, like, indications, besides maybe your intuition, that distributing the

• 54:37Speaker 01

  load across multiple people and not having this kind of like one-stop-shopping approach to relationships can actually make the romantic relationship stronger.

• 54:46Ezra Klein?

  It feels so intuitive to me on one level, which is that, and she's written about this before, so I'm not speaking out of school, but my wife went through four, five years where she was very sick and we didn't really know what was going on, and was just exhausted, I mean, truly clinically exhausted all the time. And that was an incredibly hard period in my life. And I've thought a lot about what that period would have been like if I didn't live physically near deep support. And that also changed my feelings about a lot of this. Like, it made it clear to me how other important relationships end up being fortifying for a marriage.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, there are like more people to, to hold your hand, or more people to vent to, or more people to send you food. And it is not the way that maybe we're told to set our priorities, because you're really supposed to funnel so much energy in one person. But there is fragility there. I mean, a very formative experience for me was watching a relative of mine who had gone through two successive, long-term relationships, like four or five years apiece, and was all consumed in them, and, you know, had his confidant and lover and intellectual partner and all, all in one. After each of those relationships ended, he really didn't have anybody around. And it made me, even as like a teenager, decide like, that's not what I wanted. Like, I wanted to have multiple people in my life,

• 56:08Speaker 01

  both to enjoy the richness of each of their kind of personalities and experiences, but also so that like, when things are bad, you aren't down to one person, or if things end, down to zero.

• 56:21Ezra Klein?

  So then, always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 56:25Speaker 01

  So my first book is by Andrew Solomon. It's called Far From the Tree, and it made a huge impact on me. It's a nonfiction book about parents who are fundamentally different from their child on some dimension. And every chapter is about a different one, like children who have dwarfism, who are deaf, who are prodigies, who are trans. And he's like, looking at the extreme for a situation that I think is true of all parents, that you are raising a child who is not you, who is a different being. And that, especially with these parents and these children, that they have to learn to love their kids on their own terms. And it's really a beautiful book. The second is a novel called We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman. Are you laughing because you know this?

• 57:09Ezra Klein?

  No, I just love that. I just love the title.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Oh, and the, and the cover is great, too, because it has like a soda can in it, and there is both a flower in the soda can and a straw. It is a hilarious book, which you might not expect, because it takes place in a hospice. And it is about one friend taking care of the other at the end of her life. And it just does this beautiful job of showing the kind of intermingling of existential dread and the pain of losing someone, but also the kind of absurdity of the end of life and the mundanity of the end of life. And, and the writer's hilarious. I almost never reread books, but I reread We All Want Impossible Things, because I was like, I want to make sure that this is like the recommendation I'm going to give. And I, and I just like laughed my way through it. And I was like, yep, yep, yep. This is, this, people should read this book.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  My third book is Thy Neighbor's Wife by Gay Talese, which is about 40 years old. And it's a book that's looking at these twin impulses in American culture to be both sexy obsessed and also very puritanical. And he writes with a level of like intimacy about people's lives that is pretty astounding. And as somebody who's obsessed with narrative journalism, it is one of the most originally structured books that I've, I've read and woven into all these narratives. You're like learning about utopian communes and anti obscenity laws and Supreme Court cases. So there's a lot of meat in there, too.

• 58:29Ezra Klein?

  Raina Cohen, your book is called The Other Significant Others, which I loved and recommend to everybody. Thank you very much.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 58:48Ezra Klein?

  This episode of the Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin. We had fact checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Martz-Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing from Mafim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Michelle Harris, Roland Hu, and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina C. Maluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andy Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.