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Shadowing practice: Happily Friended with author Rhaina Cohen | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

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  1. I've been single a lot of my life and people have criticized me for it.0:00
  2. I have a friend who's single.0:04
  3. We have a friendship that without sex is akin to some people's marriages and I would say better than some people's marriages.0:05
  4. The term relationship now has been monopolized by romantic relationships and that the only kind of relationship that is considered legitimate for the kinds of questions people are asking would0:11
  5. be a romantic relationship.0:22
  6. And otherwise it just doesn't count where your romantic partner or your spouse is supposed to be your confidant and your lover and your best friend.0:23
  7. That's what you're driving toward and otherwise it's a failure.0:31
  8. And this sort of success failure dichotomy rather than starting from a place of curiosity of like who do we want to be to each other?0:34
  9. I found great relief in catharsis in reading your work that there's nothing wrong with me.0:41
  10. And I find the intense emotional intimacy from some of my friendships satisfying and shouldn't that be enough?0:45
  11. Raina, I'm excited to talk to you because you wrote and I think it was an op -ed for the Washington Post.0:57
  12. I loved it.1:02
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  1. And what I really sort of zoned in on was that there are these friendships that are as intimate and as powerful as marriages, though they may not be sexual.1:04
  2. Pretty much everything else other than the sex is the same.1:16
  3. And I think the story you wrote about was a friend whose friend was going through cancer treatment.1:20
  4. It was there for her throughout the whole thing as a spouse and had no rights at the end.1:26
  5. But the thing that I found so appealing was the you raise the level of what friendship means and it really started asking like why is there so much pressure?1:33
  6. Like I have a friend who's single.1:43
  7. She's been single since she got divorced over a decade ago.1:44
  8. You know, I've been single a lot of my life and people have criticized me for it.1:48
  9. But if you look closely at our friendships, we have a friendship that without sex is akin to some people's marriages and I would say better than some people's marriages.1:53
  10. And yet that is not talked about or held up as a perfectly viable alternative or living alongside marriage.2:01
  11. So I wanted to talk to you about that.2:09
  12. Yeah, no, no, there's a lot there.2:11
  13. I think most people can't conceptualize that it is possible to be that close and that committed and have such an enduring relationship with someone who you aren't romantically involved2:13
  14. in.2:25
  15. I mean, even if the question was, have you had an enduring relationship in your life or what is the most devoted relationship in your life?2:25
  16. It sounds like you have an answer.2:34
  17. It's just that the term relationship now is has been monopolized by romantic relationships and that the only kind of relationship that is considered legitimate for the kinds of questions2:35
  18. people are asking would be a romantic relationship.2:44
  19. And otherwise it just doesn't count.2:47
  20. And, you know, absolutely what I'm trying to show is that there are other kinds of really abiding relationships that matter and that for reasons that I don't think people2:49
  21. have really questioned that they've privileged romantic coupling over the other kinds of ways that we can be bound to other people where your romantic partner or your spouse is2:58
  22. supposed to be your confidant and your lover and your best friend.3:08
  23. And that only in the last like 70 years or so have we expected that the only kind of relationship where you can discover deep emotional intimacy is within a3:13
  24. marriage as opposed to with friends.3:24
  25. And in the past, people saw their friends as the most important relationship in their life as, you know, the way that ancient Romans would talk about their friends as3:26
  26. the greater half of my soul.3:35
  27. So if you go really far back, it starts to look quite different in terms of how people valued platonic versus romantic relationships.3:37
  28. Your work on friendship is a common theme.3:45
  29. What specifically got you on this path?3:48
  30. Like, why did you find yourself so interested in in friends?3:52
  31. What set me on the path for writing about this is personal, but in a kind of different way of falling into a friendship that really scrambled to me what3:56
  32. the definition of friend is.4:06
  33. So this is a friend who I write about and refer to as M.4:07
  34. And she and I like, I felt like I'd fallen in love with her in a way that was not different fundamentally from how I'd fallen in love with my4:12
  35. husband.4:19
  36. It just didn't have a sexual component.4:19
  37. So I had so many questions that came up from that friendship around how do we decide which relationships matter the most?4:22
  38. Why do we set certain limits on friendship?4:29
  39. Why don't we have more terms to talk about the closest of friendships?4:31
  40. And once I started asking questions about our specific friendship, I found myself asking questions about all kinds of friendships and, you know, have an interest in men's friendships and4:35
  41. why, you know, it's especially hard for them to get the kind of intimacy that I was able to find so easily.4:45
  42. So a lot of the writing came from like this specific relationship that then made me look more broadly at friendships.4:52
  43. And then you went and the piece I found you was you wrote about the legal rights of friends where they have none.4:58
  44. Yeah, I mean, the point for me is not that we need to create like new categories for friendship in the law, which I think might be one one route5:04
  45. to go.5:11
  46. But instead to say, on what basis are we designating some types of relationships significant and others insignificant and invisible?5:12
  47. And when you look at friendships that have lasted 50 years, and these are people who are there for a year's worth of cancer treatments for their, you know, for5:21
  48. their friend and who are executor of their friends of state and have medical legal power of attorney rights, the kind of broader point that I'm interested in is how5:32
  49. we are so set on certain kind of categories for creating this hierarchy of which relationships matter and don't and are paying less attention to what is actually happening within5:41
  50. the relationships.5:49
  51. And can we be more, more expansive and open minded about how people set up their lives and who they're turning to?5:50
  52. I think it's such an interesting conversation about categories, right?6:00
  53. Because we're talking about marriage is a category and friend is a separate category.6:02
  54. And we're not talking about that friendships should necessarily have the same legal rights as marriages is not what we're saying.6:06
  55. But but rather like, why can't for me, it's a fascinating conversation from a societal pressure thing, which is I found great relief in catharsis in reading your work that6:12
  56. there's nothing wrong with me, right?6:21
  57. And I find the intense emotional intimacy from some of my friendships satisfying and shouldn't that be enough?6:24
  58. But in the talking of categories, you know, Europeans make fun of Americans, because in America, everybody you meet is your friend.6:35
  59. My friend, this my friend that you've like met them once, you know, and I do think there is the need for more, at least more categories of friends.6:43
  60. I don't like to use.6:52
  61. I like the term acquaintance.6:53
  62. Like, do you know this person?6:55
  63. Yes, they're my acquaintance, or I know them.6:57
  64. They're my work friend, because I'm it's helping me delineate intimacy or an emotional intensity, because I don't you know, from the language, from the category, I have no intimacy6:59
  65. with an acquaintance.7:10
  66. And so I do think that the categories of friend is should be normalized, like that we should use the word acquaintance and other words more than we do, at7:13
  67. least in America, everyone's a friend, which then blurs the lines, right?7:22
  68. I mean, it makes the word almost meaningless.7:27
  69. And I think it's, you know, this was one of the issues for me with my friend M that even the term best friend felt like it didn't actually describe7:29
  70. how close we were, where we were spending, you know, four or five days a week, we would stop by each other's houses.7:39
  71. And we were the default plus ones to each other's parties and were very intimately involved in each other's lives.7:46
  72. And I know people who talk about their best friend who they see twice a year, or, you know, they have, you know, not that frequent phone calls, but they7:53
  73. have a lot of affection for them, but it's not the same.8:00
  74. And, you know, and to say we were best friends felt like it wasn't actually conveying what we meant to each other.8:04
  75. So I think there is something about having more precision, because you, you know, you want people to understand.8:12
  76. I mean, one way this came up was, you know, I did an interview about my book and the interviewer talked about how he's described someone as his best friend,8:19
  77. but people and had to move away, move across the country from his best friend.8:30
  78. But nobody got it because it's his best friend, not a spouse.8:34
  79. So maybe if he had another term, like this was my platonic partner, this was, there was some kind of legible category that maybe people would have understood.8:38
  80. Oh, this is actually really devastating that, you know, you aren't in the company of this person who you have, have really built your life around and best friend, let8:46
  81. alone friend is not communicating that.8:56
  82. I do think language matters because language creates the, the, the category of possibility.8:59
  83. Even if a failed romantic relationship, it allows a new category.9:06
  84. If, you know, let's just be friends is like, oh my God, that's like a death sentence.9:10
  85. You know, when somebody says, I want to just be friends with you.9:14
  86. I mean, that's like seven levels of demotion.9:16
  87. You know, and so it does need a new word.9:20
  88. Well, let's just be best friends.9:22
  89. Even that, that just sounds like, you know, ego stroking.9:23
  90. That's, you know, it's awful.9:25
  91. The thing that I found so interesting about my, my friendship with M is that it, it had some of the kind of flutters, like infatuation that I associated with9:27
  92. romance.9:36
  93. But again, there was no sexual component.9:37
  94. And I've heard many people talk about it.9:39
  95. I was talking to these two women last night who were saying they experienced love at first site and their friendship.9:41
  96. So I was interested in how within a platonic relationship, it is actually possible to have these feelings of excitement that we've been told are only possible within a quote,9:47
  97. unquote romantic relationship and that it, it blurs categories that are really seen as distinct.9:59
  98. But if you think even about romantic relationships, so there's a whole spectrum for the emotional experience people have, some people have very passionate romantic relationships and others have more10:05
  99. companionate ones where it does, it might feel more like a familial relationship.10:16
  100. It doesn't feel kind of out of place to me that we could both be talking about really close friendships, but the, the kind of emotional experience might be a10:20
  101. little bit different.10:30
  102. Let's change tax lightly.10:32
  103. We see an increase of loneliness, anxiety, depression, and in some demographic suicide in the United States and actually indeed around the world.10:33
  104. So you can have friends and be lonely or depressed.10:44
  105. You know, why are we struggling?10:48
  106. Why are we struggling to make the kinds of friends that we could call in darkness and say, I need you or who would be aware enough to, to, to10:50
  107. show up and say something's wrong?11:00
  108. Like what, what's happening in our society today that we're struggling to make those kinds of friendships that you write about?11:02
  109. I'm thinking of the, you know, one of your first comments about how you are scrutinized for, like you have been scrutinized for being single, essentially, like, if you don't11:12
  110. have this one kind of relationship, then what's going on in your life and what's wrong with you?11:21
  111. And I think there's this phenomenon of what's called compulsory couple dome, like that there's so much pressure to be coupled, which means, you know, you're putting so much effort11:26
  112. toward this one relationship.11:37
  113. And we're not saying what does a good life look like?11:39
  114. A good life looks like one where you have a community, where you have a bunch of friends who you are investing in.11:42
  115. And I think that, you know, we get into these sort of feedback loops where we don't open ourselves up to other people and then think, okay, there's just this11:48
  116. limit to how close a friendship can be because I've never felt any closer rather than understanding that maybe what we refuse to give over to what we refuse to11:57
  117. show makes it impossible to have the kind of closest that actually is there's potential to have within friendship.12:07
  118. And I, you know, recently was kind of witnessed a friend, she was going through a real crisis and she let me into her home.12:13
  119. And like, I just held her as she heaved for several minutes and she's the most together person I can think of and having getting to see her in that12:22
  120. messy state brought us so much closer.12:33
  121. And I'm not sure that many people would have the courage to let someone in at that moment and would instead wait until everything is all tidied up and then12:35
  122. they can tell them what happened after the fact.12:42
  123. So I think that that's, you know, probably a phenomenon that's going on for a lot of people that they don't want to let people in when when there's so12:44
  124. much that's that's not all pieced together neatly yet.12:51
  125. What's interesting as you're explaining that, you know, the thought that came to mind was its goal setting in some weird shape or form, which is when I was a12:55
  126. young entrepreneur and I just started my business, every networking, anything I did, I felt like I had to close a deal like in that in the first meeting, like,13:03
  127. you know, I had to like the first phone call I needed to like get a deal.13:14
  128. And obviously I got none because I showed up guns of blazing and so much pressure that I put on myself because I thought a successful entrepreneur was somebody who13:19
  129. closes all the deals.13:28
  130. So I was just trying to live up to this image that I had of of what it needed to do.13:29
  131. And it wasn't until I completely changed the goal of an initial interaction.13:34
  132. So for example, if I have a first meeting or a first phone call with somebody new, my my only goal is to create an environment in which if I13:39
  133. call them back, they'll take the call.13:48
  134. That's it.13:50
  135. That's it.13:52
  136. I don't care about closing a deal, getting anything just and and and I think about that really relative to what we're talking about, which is, you know, we go13:53
  137. on dating apps, we're set up on a date, our friends that we have the societal pressure, we have the pressure from ourselves, pressure from our parents, you know, all14:00
  138. of the things that make the interactions that the goals are too much too soon, and they're not allowed to evolve and gestate.14:06
  139. And so what a magical thing to go on a first date and say, I hope I make a friend.14:14
  140. You know, I think the goal setting is part of the problem.14:18
  141. But how we show up profoundly changes if we simply downgrade our ambition for this new relationship, taking the pressure off is what it is.14:21
  142. Yeah, I mean, I feel like maybe I'm reacting a little bit to downgrade because of the way that people think of friendship as itself a downgrade from the real14:29
  143. thing, which is romantic.14:38
  144. I don't like the term.14:39
  145. But what you're getting at is that we conceive of only one kind of relationship that can be container for the many things that we might be looking for in14:41
  146. our life, like somebody who is going to be there to talk to you at the end of a hard day, who knows when your plane lands, who's going to14:50
  147. hand you a mug of tea, and that if we could can understand that there might be other kinds of relationships like friendships could be a sibling relationship.14:58
  148. I've also encountered a number of lifelong sibling relationships where that is the anchoring one.15:07
  149. Then we could just be thinking about what what a loving relationship is, because otherwise it feels like there's only one form of success and that that's what you're driving15:11
  150. toward.15:19
  151. And otherwise it's a failure and this sort of success success failure dichotomy rather than starting from a place of curiosity of like, who do we want to be to15:20
  152. each other?15:28
  153. And how might that the answer to that question change between the first time we meet a year from now, 10 years from now, and it might be we don't15:29
  154. want to be anything to each other.15:37
  155. Like we never clicked, whatever.15:38
  156. But I think the like the impulse toward curiosity could solve a lot of problems here rather than trying to box people in.15:40
  157. There's an there's an eerily and uncomfortable similarity here when you talk about the definition of success of a relationship, which is even the definition of success of a career15:50
  158. or a life, which for too many years was associated almost entirely with rank or money.15:57
  159. And we're having that conversation now.16:04
  160. COVID, I think, was a catalyst, but that conversation was already beginning of what are the other definitions of success?16:06
  161. And I may want to pursue a different kind of success.16:13
  162. You know, my parents may still put pressure on me to make more money by a house, but I am exploring a different definition of success that works for me.16:16
  163. And I think that's where your work lies.16:23
  164. It's I think it's very contemporary that we're exploring different expectations and different definitions of what is required of a good life.16:26
  165. And this different definition, these new definitions of what success in relationship looks like, which is it's not always, you know, the metaphor carrying over money, you know, marriage, you16:32
  166. know, tradition.16:44
  167. I find very interesting.16:46
  168. And I wonder I wonder these challenging of all these definitions of what's expected of our lives from our careers, our friendships, our romances.16:47
  169. I wonder what the common thread is that we're pushing against all of these definitions.16:57
  170. I think that the common thread here is intentionality and that we have been put on a kind of conveyor belt in different areas of life where we've been told17:04
  171. that there is one type of success and that a lot of people, you know, hit a point where they're like, I've tried this and it's not working or I'm17:13
  172. starting to question for the first time the thing that I've been told to do and that if you instead, you know, look at the ladder you're climbing without having17:22
  173. actually asked if you want to get to the top.17:32
  174. I live in DC, there are a lot of lawyers and I feel like their their their job is to like, or a lot of people who are attracted to17:35
  175. the law like like to climb ladders.17:40
  176. And I just have seen for people, you know, a few years after law school, they're still at a firm and then they're like, I did all the things I17:42
  177. was supposed to do.17:49
  178. Why am I not happy?17:49
  179. But if you hit a point where you're dissatisfied and start to ask, like, are there other other ways that I might find meaning, then you might realize that the17:51
  180. kind of singular path is not the only one.18:00
  181. Ooh, this is interesting.18:03
  182. Okay, so if I've been climbing the ladder of rank and money, and I've made the money and I've made the rank and I'm still not happy.18:04
  183. So I'm challenging that.18:10
  184. And now we see, you know, the divorce rate in the United States can remains at 50%.18:12
  185. It has not gone down.18:18
  186. It's not getting better.18:19
  187. Second marriage is even worse.18:20
  188. I think it's 60 or 70 % for second marriages.18:22
  189. And so maybe there's a similar thing happening here, which is I keep trying the relationship that, you know, I was told that I would find whatever the thing is18:24
  190. I'm looking for happiness, joy, companionship, safety.18:32
  191. And I haven't found it and I've done it your way.18:34
  192. So I'm questioning the alternative ways.18:37
  193. Are these new definitions of friendships being challenged by people from the beginning, you know, like what the definition of success is, or is it after they've tried the tried18:40
  194. and pursued way?18:49
  195. In other words, it's only because things aren't working that we're now exploring alternatives.18:50
  196. Yeah, I would say I think that actually this is coming from two directions.18:55
  197. Like maybe the best example of this would be like parents who are overwhelmed and are like, I did that, like I have a two -parent household, I have a18:58
  198. nuclear family.19:06
  199. That is supposed to be the, you know, the gold standard.19:07
  200. And yet I am totally exhausted and I don't feel satisfied.19:09
  201. I think there's a sense that like I, like I've been duped.19:14
  202. Something I'm working on right now is about parents who raise their kids among friends and in these like larger networks, you know, some of the people who end up19:18
  203. doing that have seen how exhausting it is for other parents and don't want to like get themselves into that same trap.19:26
  204. Then there's the sort of positive thing that gets people to come off course, which is not unlike what happened with me in M, where we fell into a friendship19:32
  205. that nobody had told us you could find.19:41
  206. There was no dating app to find a platonic partner or whatever we wanted to call ourselves.19:44
  207. But life happened.19:49
  208. And then we're suddenly questioning, well, why is it that only a romantic relationship is supposed to be the thing that's going to, you know, make us complete?19:51
  209. A successful person in the eyes of others where no people be asking us like, why are you still single?20:02
  210. You can stumble into a relationship that's really important or stumble into a career that, you know, nobody told you was going to get you status points and find that20:07
  211. it's meaningful and then start pushing back at everything else that people have been telling you.20:17
  212. And I think on the flip side, you can try the thing that you're supposed to.20:22
  213. You know, when I think about somebody I'm close to who grew up Mormon and one of the ways that she felt like left Mormonism was that she had felt20:27
  214. like she had done everything she was supposed to and yet she still was not hearing, you know, the voice of God in her head.20:35
  215. She was not getting the result that she was going to have.20:40
  216. And I think that those kind of opposite pressures can lead to the same place of questioning.20:43
  217. So can you tell me something that you've done over the course of your professional career that you absolutely loved being a part of, that if every project you ever20:49
  218. worked on was like this one project, you'd be the happiest person alive specifically?20:57
  219. I mean, I loved working on the book.21:02
  220. There's some stressful parts of it, but I love being led into people's inner lives and getting, I know an interview is good.21:03
  221. If I get chills in it, which is not a totally infrequent experience.21:13
  222. I will say there are these women, Barb and Inez who are in their 80s and have just lived a lot of life together.21:19
  223. And they met when they were around 30 at a point of transition in each other's lives.21:28
  224. A couple of things I love about their story, like one is they didn't expect to fall into the kind of friendship that they now have where they have lived21:34
  225. together for 25 years in a house that they bought in their retirement.21:41
  226. They didn't plan on this, but life took them by surprise.21:45
  227. And they found a way to adapt to it, adapt to getting divorced when that was never, I think Inez would have expected, especially coming from a religious family.21:49
  228. In Barb's case, she'd really wanted to have biological children.21:59
  229. She's adopted and had never gotten to see anybody who looked like her and then had emergency surgery in her late 20s that made it impossible for her to have22:01
  230. biological children.22:09
  231. And after that happened, her desire to marry really dropped off.22:10
  232. And so she's never been married, but she's had this relationship with a friend that has has outlasted, I think, most marriages.22:14
  233. So the level of their devotion, the many ways they've showed up for each other over the course of 50 years, the fact that they're not even trying to do22:21
  234. anything radical, but their mere existence as these friends, I think challenges.22:30
  235. A lot of people's unquestioned ideas about what is partnership, which relationships matter, what can a friendship be, all of that I really love about the two of them.22:38
  236. Tell me an early specific happy childhood memory, something specific that I can relive with you?22:47
  237. Maybe one of the early moments of experiencing nostalgia for childhood, even though I was still a child.22:53
  238. So I was in high school, and a friend and I decided that we were going to make a pillow fort and make s'mores over the gas stove.22:58
  239. We lived in the suburbs.23:07
  240. I mean, this was as rustic as I guess I was going to get.23:08
  241. And we watched Schoolhouse Rock.23:10
  242. So like we were having this call back to childhood and a way of just like kind of aimless fun together at a stage of life where we must have23:11
  243. must have been like, I don't know, sophomore junior year, where we were really worried about all of our AP classes and getting into college and SATs and ACTs and23:21
  244. that we were getting to coexist together in a way that had already been a little bit taken away from us as teenagers.23:29
  245. As you tell those two stories, I'm sort of struck by a lot of the, I'm realizing a lot of the language that you've used and that we've used over23:38
  246. the course of this conversation.23:45
  247. There's a hearkening back to innocence and curiosity of childhood.23:46
  248. And there's an innocence in the approach to the making of friends that is free from expectation, free from conditions, free from definition even, you know.23:51
  249. And it sounds like a lot of your thinking and work is sort of just at least from this conversation is that struggle of the magic and beauty and innocence24:03
  250. and curiosity that we have as children that for some reason is forced out of us, that we have to let go of it as adults.24:16
  251. And then we're supposed to have all these quote unquote adult relationships and adult this and adult that and adult responsibility.24:23
  252. But in reality, one of us still has that kid inside of us.24:29
  253. And the question is, is why can't we be kids in a modern responsible world?24:31
  254. Why do we have to let go of this beautiful innocence, magic and curiosity that would allow for the kinds of friendships that you've written about as well.24:35
  255. Yeah, I mean, magic is a term that has come up in a lot of the conversations I've had with people who have who have these extremely intense friendships, like24:46
  256. there is something that they can't quite explain about it and that they enjoy.24:54
  257. I think, yeah, the sense of possibility and like the sort of unconstrained possibility for kids feels right to me.24:58
  258. What you know, one of the tensions that that like is very apparent to me in these sorts of friendships that I look at is like, on the one hand,25:06
  259. they are beautiful because they are free of expectations.25:13
  260. Like there's no social script for these kinds of friendships.25:16
  261. So people have to kind of imagine what they're going to be for themselves, have conversations for themselves.25:18
  262. And that coexists with, well, if your friend is in the hospital, you want someone to take you seriously.25:23
  263. Of course, it's not the rejecting of adulthood.25:30
  264. And so what I don't want to do is say, okay, here's a new box that these fit into because that'll help them get recognized.25:33
  265. It's how can we start from a place of questions rather than these little discrete boxes.25:40
  266. And I think the ability to shapeshift, to have conversations with each other, to play is a really beautiful thing that we can learn from these sorts of friendships that25:48
  267. don't fit inside the lines.25:57
  268. And the recommendation is to start from a place of questioning and start with a place of questions.26:00
  269. And I think it's a perfect place to end to, which is to end with the questions, which is, why can't we have the kinds of relationships that fulfill us26:05
  270. in any way, form that we want?26:12
  271. And just that's the question that we should be showing up with.26:16
  272. The closest person in my life is my sister, not a friend or a spouse.26:20
  273. And some of my friends are so close to me that it's been said to me, like, you know, Simon, if you ever get married, they're going to have to26:23
  274. deal with the fact that you have these close friendships.26:30
  275. But why not?26:32
  276. You can have all these people in your life and you can all enjoy each other's company at the same time.26:35
  277. If you are somebody who has a lot of deep relationships, then the person who's going to be most compatible as a spouse is someone who's going to see that26:39
  278. as a bonus and not as a negative.26:47
  279. A friend of mine who is newly in love and a new relationship was contrasting and it has this really kind of very big and tight friend group was saying26:50
  280. that his previous romantic partner really didn't see it as a positive and just like was an introvert, wasn't into it.27:01
  281. And what's so wonderful about his new partner is that she wants to get to know everybody, that this is something that really draws her to him, makes her love27:07
  282. him.27:17
  283. And so, you know, I think that the right, if you were going to end up in that kind of relationship and that's the thing that matters, it's going to27:17
  284. be a plus for someone.27:25
  285. Love.27:26
  286. Rana, thank you so much for taking the time.27:27
  287. I really appreciate it.27:28
  288. Thanks for the questions and getting to think about my, you know, childlike disposition, which sometimes I'm accused of being too serious.27:30
  289. So this will, you know, be my pushback against that.27:38
  290. Take care of each other.27:59

A fast paced C1 American interview on friendship and marriage

This clip is a two person interview from a business podcast: Simon Sinek talking with author Rhaina Cohen about friendship. It runs at 203 words per minute, faster than 64 percent of the catalogue, so it is good english listening practice once you can already follow standard American speech without subtitles. The level is C1: expect abstract vocabulary like catharsis, conveying and societal dropped into ordinary sentences.

There is no scripted narration here. This is two people thinking out loud, correcting themselves and building on each other's points, which is closer to daily english conversation practice than a monologue. If you want english speaking practice for daily use with real hesitations and interruptions rather than a clean broadcast voice, this is a better model than a scripted lecture.

The lines to study in this friendship interview

Cohen's most quotable lines carry both stress patterns and content worth shadowing this clip for.

  • "I've been single a lot of my life and people have criticized me for it." Notice the stress falls on single and criticized; practice slowing the second clause down without dropping the final it.
  • "We have a friendship that without sex is akin to some people's marriages and I would say better than some people's marriages." A long sentence built from two clauses hung on marriages; read it as one breath group the way she does, then split it in two if the 203 words a minute pace is too fast on a first pass.
  • "I found great relief in catharsis in reading your work that there's nothing wrong with me." The word catharsis sits mid sentence with no pause around it, worth isolating on its own to get its pronunciation right before rejoining it to the full line.

How to shadow this interview clip line by line

Work the opening exchange before the guest's longer answers arrive.

  • Start at line one, "I've been single a lot of my life and people have criticized me for it." and shadow it five times before moving on.
  • Take the repeated line, "We have a friendship that without sex is akin to some people's marriages and I would say better than some people's marriages," and compare your two takes against each other, not just against the recording.
  • Slow line nine down first, since catharsis is the one C1 word in it, then bring it back up to the recording's own speed.
  • Once the opening ten lines feel steady, keep going into the rest of the interview at full pace; the accent and rhythm stay consistent through the clip.
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