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

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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Something you should know.

Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today.

Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.

Here's a little piece of intel you can use in your life, if not today, someday.

And that is 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.

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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.

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.

Thank you very much for having me.

It's a pleasure to be on.

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 50, 100 years?

Or is it still kind of we don't we don't really know?

So I think so.

I think over the last, say, 50 to 100 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, 13.8 billion years ago, until now.

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.

So it's true that lots of things had to happen.

And so without going through them all, but 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, 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 some of the

likelihoods of some of these events occurring on the grand scale of the entire universe.

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

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 neighborhood, 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, as far as we can tell, don't have liquid water.

And we think that liquid water

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.

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.

I think it's the latter.

And so one of the challenges is we don't know how long intelligent life lives in civilizations where they're capable of sending out signals for other intelligent life to

detect and then respond to.

So all of the civilizations that have appeared on Earth before, so the ancient Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, the Aztecs, etc., they've only survived for a few hundred, possibly a few thousand years.

Our current civilization is a few hundred years old,

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, so a couple of thousand years is but a blink of an eye.

And so the likelihood of two intelligent civilizations being closer 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, living on other planets.

And there is even some space probes that have gone out to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn to look for evidence of bacterial lives on those moons.

Because what we do know is liquid water does exist on those moons.

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 that's the name of the book,

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 purpose do we serve?

Are we part of this or are we an accident?

So I think

the way that I would answer that question is probably in a couple of parts.

We understand what had to happen for life to get started.

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 copies of itself.

And there are actually quite simple reactions that can make copies 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.

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 are 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 life gets 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 commonplace.

Now,

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.

We just haven't studied enough other planets yet.

So in terms of why we're here, do we have a purpose?

Well, biologically, the purpose is to replicate, so 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 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 it's been absolutely fantastic.

And so I think we can give ourselves, so I think we're here 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.

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?

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.

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 organic, for intelligent aliens on other planets to get here.

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 within 60 light years of Earth, which is a tiny number

compared to the stars in the universe.

So it's possible there's

intelligent aliens making their way to us now, but they're probably not going to arrive for a while.

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 the Universe from the Big Bang to Consciousness.

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So Tim, what about this whole journey that you went on to explore why we exist?

What about it boggles your mind?

So I think one of the things that I, you know, I...

I was really amazed at, I didn't know, is our moon is getting further away.

So 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 moon formed, when the young Earth, when it was about nearly about four and a half billion years ago, it collided with another planet that's been called Theta.

And that melted 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, life probably would never have got going.

So we probably owe our existence, well, we do owe our existence to a collision 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, A, the dinosaurs died, and then at the end of the Permian,

you know, nearly 300 million years ago, there was a

mass extinction that killed

over 85% of organisms in the sea and over 70% on land.

And if these violent events hadn't happened and these great extinctions

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.

But what's truly stunning and what's truly staggering

is 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.

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.

You're right that there are a number of things that if they didn't happen, we wouldn't be here.

As an example, at 66 million years ago, an asteroid collided with the Earth.

It caused a mass extinction and

it caused the death of all dinosaurs except birds.

So birds are the few dinosaurs that survived the extinction and they've radiated and spread and become 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, 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 13.8 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 they say is the universe is deterministic.

And with a big enough computer, we would be able to predict the behavior 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.

There are other scientists that say, actually, no, I don't believe that.

I think we've won the cosmic lottery.

There have 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 quantum mechanics.

And it's the fact that these tiny particles behave like waves as well as particles.

And I won't go into it, it's quite an abstract concept, it's a very powerful theory and it's almost certainly correct.

And the question is, is is how does that randomness at the very, very small scale of tiny particles translate to random behavior 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 free will is an illusion.

It was inevitable that we'd be having this wonderful conversation now at the birth of the universe.

But some scientists believe that it's deterministic and for a reason known as something as quantum entanglement.

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.

So you had mentioned in the beginning that there's 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.

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 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 4 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 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.

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.

Well, it's always fun to explore those deeper questions.

Why are we here?

Why do we exist?

are we doing?

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.

Wonderful.

Thank you very much for having me on, Mike.

It's been entirely my pleasure.

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I am 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 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, Reina.

Welcome to Something You Should Know.

So glad to get to talk to you.

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

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.

Does that happen very often?

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 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 case may be.

So I think it's more often than we probably think.

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?

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

What's the difference?

A person that you treat as a platonic partner, we can use that term,

is someone 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.

You're building a future together.

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.

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 set up 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 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 you 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 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 address is 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 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.

Do you find when you talk to people,

because

it would seem like

these things kind of happen rather than they're very deliberate and intentional.

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, 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 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 intentionality can come in, but,

you know, again, it's often arising because someone is being forced to be a little bit more creative to get core needs met in their lives.

And I think just as often 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 after being this kind of birth coach.

And the mother needed a lot of help because the child had complex disabilities.

And she ended up functionally becoming a second mother and legally eventually becoming another mother to this child.

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 wasn't a straight line like that.

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 Kivo with somebody that you love, like you're just going to build intimacy and trust and, you 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 that person in your will or to designate them as the medical power of attorney.

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

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?

It can go in different directions.

I've certainly seen cases where a romantic relationship crowds out the friendship.

And I've, I mean, I've had a number of people write to me about how hard that has been for them.

And there's a psychologist named Robert Dunbar at Oxford who does a lot of research on friendship.

And he's found that in general,

the beginning of a new romantic relationship crowds out two of the five closest relationships in a person's life.

So it really can take up a lot of space and can lead to a kind of demotion of close friends.

I have also seen cases where there's kind of competition and jealousy often on the part of the romantic partner and that can be a real source of tension.

Something has to give.

So either the romantic relationship ends 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'd mentioned 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.

Nick was introduced to a woman who herself had what she calls the 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.

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

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 um

what is uh

more or less common but i can say sort of anecdotally from what i was able to find um it was certainly much easier for me to find women who had these friendships um than men and that men ran into issues that women didn't in the same way.

So specifically,

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, 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 and physically close and to not be suspected of having romantic involvement.

There isn't that kind of disapproval.

So it is so it certainly was less common for men.

And I think that there's men are swimming against the tide even more than women are.

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 romance enters the picture for one of them, that could end the relationship because romance is going to often win.

You know, not always, but yeah,

I, you know, have seen friendships that have lasted decades, but I think it's,

if you were to ask the same question about what is the lifespan of a marriage or of a romantic relationship, you're going to get a ton of variation.

And I think that that 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 taking away from dating or a

taking care of family,

and those can be really

intense and they can flame out, or people make different decisions.

So, I think some of the younger ones might be less likely to sustain versus people who are

maybe meeting a little bit later in life when things are more settled and they would have to potentially work more to maintain the friendship.

But yeah, I just have interviewed people where in the course of a year, like they had been, they'd gone from being very close to having a falling out.

And I have interviewed people who have been, you know, best friends 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.

Like, there aren't any.

There's no kind of structural support for these relationships, and yet they persist.

I would imagine that one of the real problem, or I don't know how big a problem it is, but one of common problems with those kind of relationships is how do you explain it to other people?

When you tell somebody, this is my soulmate, the assumption is always that this is a romantic relationship.

It's not.

And we're just friends.

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 the two of us had trouble naming it.

And we thought that best friend was inadequate and we you know were 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 and we're kind of assumed to you know if one person is invited you invite the other

so we were playing around with with what language we could use and then as I interviewed people like everybody had their own terms that and

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 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.

And, you know, when you like, I think about people who told me they didn't know what to do when they were filling out their emergency contact on the doctor's office and

came up with different terms each time.

So it can feel really invalidating to not have language for you and the person in the friendship, but it also

can

make it really

inexplicable and confusing when you're trying to tell people what a person means to you.

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.

But as again, as you're talking, 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,

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.

Well, I think what you're saying there, like the roommate examples, 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

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 are this kind of euphemistic language that makes it more legible what the relationship is.

But what it ends up doing is that we all have a kind of obscured sense of reality.

So 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,

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,

it just cracks open lots of stories, past and present, that people have that they didn't realize anybody else would understand.

Well, I think everyone listening to this, if you think about it long enough,

you know somebody, if it's not you, you still know somebody who's in a relationship like Raina's been talking about.

And how great to bring it out in the open and talk about it because it's a reality of life that 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.

Well, thank you for giving it attention.

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 a hundred 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 are asleep.

That's because the nerves that stimulate that sneeze center are also at rest while you are sleeping.

The reason we sometimes sneeze multiple times right in a row is because the first sneeze wasn't 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.

Sneezes 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.

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.

You might think you know fairy tales, and you might think that they are cute and sweet and boring.

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