TED Talks Daily
Sunday Pick: How to be a better friend (w/ Rhaina Cohen) | How to Be a Better Human
20 Jul 2025
What would it look like if we took friendship as seriously as we take romance? Rhaina Cohen, author of the book The Other Significant Others: Reimagine Life with Friendship at the Center, talks to Chris about the value of platonic relationships. They get into everything from offloading expectations from a romantic partner onto a friend can help improve relationships to how to cope with the loss of a friend to what to do when politics divide friendships. If you want to develop your friendships, Rhaina has tons of practical tips and advice.This episode originally aired on May 19, 2025.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hu. Today, we're bringing you a Sunday pick where we share an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you. What would it look like if we took friendship as seriously as we take romance?
To explore this question, we're sharing an episode of How to Be a Better Human featuring Raina Cohen, author of the book, The Other Significant Others, Reimagine Life with Friendship at the Center.
She sat down with host Chris Duffy to talk about the value of platonic relationships, and they get into everything from what it means to offload expectations from a romantic partner onto friends instead, to how to cope with the loss of a friend, and what to do when politics divide friendships. If you want to strengthen your relationships of all kinds, this episode is for you.
How to Be a Better Human is a show that looks in unexpected places for new ways to improve and show up for one another. If you want to hear more insights like this, listen to How to Be a Better Human wherever you get your podcasts. Learn about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.
You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. My college friends always make fun of me for describing pretty much everyone I've ever met as one of my very best friends. They're like, I actually don't think it's possible for a person to have 10,000 best friends.
One time I got into an argument with someone and when I told them about it, their immediate response was, oh no, are they no longer one of your best friends and now they're just one of your very good friends? Which I have to admit is an excellent roast of me, a very precise and cutting zing. But it also taps into something sort of essential about me. I have always cared a ton about friendship.
I'm really interested in how friendships work. There's so much that I want to unpack and to understand. What are the unspoken rules when it comes to friendship? And should those be the rules or do we need to re-examine them?
We're going to be talking all about platonic relationships with Raina Cohen, an award-winning journalist and the author of The Other Significant Others, Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. To get us started, here's a clip from Raina's TED Talk.
Regardless of whether we are partnered now, we need to rely on more than one relationship to sustain us throughout our full, unpredictable lives. We need other significant others. And there's an overlooked kind of relationship that we can turn to. Friendship. I got the sense that friendship could be this stronger force in our lives because of a friendship that I stumbled into.
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