The economics of building a life around friends

Make Me Smart June 18, 2024 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams

Alright, let’s go.

Kai Ryssdal 

Thorp, over to you. Charlton’s in charge, as always.

Kimberly Adams 

Like a TV show.

Kai Ryssdal 

Just like. Whatever happened to Scott Bailey? Anyway. Hey everybody, I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us,

Kimberly Adams 

And I’m Kimberly Adams. It’s Tuesday, June the 18th. Friendships are often considered a little less important than romantic and marital relationships to some folks, not others. But a lot of people are starting to push back on this idea from a policy and economic standpoint. They’re choosing to build their lives around friends, and in fact, a study from earlier this year found that almost 15% of Americans have co-purchased a home with someone other than a romantic partner, and almost half said they’d consider it.

Kai Ryssdal 

So, we’re going to dig into that a little bit today, why it’s happening, what it means and where it might be going. Rhaina Cohen is a journalist at National Public Radio, NPR, and the author of the book “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center.” Welcome to the pod. Good to have you on.

Rhaina Cohen 

Good to be here.

Kai Ryssdal 

What does that mean? Reimagining life with friendship at the center.

Rhaina Cohen 

So, as you were just setting up, friendship is seen as a peripheral relationship for a lot of people, that it stands behind a romantic relationship, and it is not what you build your life around. But what I was finding with people who really stretched, I think what we think of as possible for friendships, really treating a friend as a life partner, that you can have a platonic relationship that is just as grounding, as committed, and contributes as much to your life as we have been told only a romantic relationship could. So, buying a home together, raising kids together, taking care of each other through sickness and illness, that is all happening, even if it’s hidden in plain sight.

Kimberly Adams 

As I understand that you have kind of a combo of both of these worlds in your relationship. You’re married and you live with friends.

Rhaina Cohen 

Yes, I had actually a bit of a change in my housing setup recently, but still live with a friend, in addition to my husband. For three years, my husband and I lived with two of our close friends and their two children, or at the time there was one child, ended up being two, and they recently had to move away. But it absolutely solidified for my husband and me that we love having our close friends around, and that you end up getting to know people and having deeper relationships than you would if you weren’t running into each other in the kitchen and hosting dinner every week together.

Kai Ryssdal 

While respecting everybody involved privacy, what were the conversations like that led you to find that solution?

Rhaina Cohen 

Well, I mean, it started from my husband and I talking about buying a home with friends, and we ended up in conversation with a different pair of friends, the ones who we ended up living with, and saying that we were planning to do this. And I kind of dropped well like, of course we would love to live with you too, and I didn’t want to offend them and be like, oh, look at this. This whole dream that we’re planning with these other people who are not you. And it was pretty unexpected to me that these particular friends, who I refer to in the book as Naomi and Daniel, that they were willing and excited to live with us, which was their reaction, partly because they are religiously observant. They keep a kosher kitchen. Observe Shabbat so, you know, Jewish and observant, and already had a kid. And so, you know, they don’t fit the profile of, like, some kind of commune dreamer, but they were really excited about this way of life. And we kind of took things from there and found a way to do it. But I think it came down to, we are people who love each other’s company. One of the friends who I lived with officiated the marriage between my husband and me, and we sort of knew that life would be fuller. My husband loves children, so getting to live with a child was a big plus for him. So there, we just sort of knew our lives would be fuller, and we wanted to try that out, and knew that it would be, you know, one-to-three-year kind of commitment, most likely, given our friends living or rather career situation.

Kimberly Adams 

Can you walk us through sort of what the different economic setups are when you’re talking about relationship centered around friendship versus relationship centered around marriage and romantic relationships.

Rhaina Cohen 

Well, our financial and legal system, not to mention our cultural norms, are really built around marriage. And it is much harder to do the same kinds of things between friends. So, I’ve talked to a lot of people in different kinds of living setups where they have chosen to live with friends and to give you know, a couple of examples. Some things that come up are one that housing is meant for a couple usually, and maybe their children. So, there aren’t what a lot of people would love to have, which might be separate wings of a household where there are, you know, two big bedrooms and maybe a smaller bedroom and some shared space, rather than one giant master bedroom and some smaller bedrooms. So, finding the right housing is an is an obstacle for people who either want to, you know, join up with friends or a combination of couple or couples and friends. And then there are financing issues. One woman who I spoke to, who lives with her husband, and another couple she’s very close with, and then each of their two kids, talked about how the bank treats the debt differently if you are married or not. So, even if you know you have your name on the mortgage, that the bank would sort of read between the lines and see the debt as half of what is on paper because you’re married, whereas she said that the debt is for the entire house is viewed as being on each person. So, like, if they want to go out and get a loan on a car, or they would want to get a second home, it looks like they have a lot more debt than they are actually responsible for as individuals. And then there’s just the legal frameworks that people who are trying to make these big purchases as friends have to get these bespoke legal contracts. They can’t just get married. I mean, I think in DC where I live, it was $35 for me to get a marriage license, and that would have all these stipulations for if something goes wrong, and how does property get divided? But instead, for friends, you have to go to a lawyer and have someone figure that out specifically, which might have some advantages for the conversation, but ends up being much more expensive.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. So there, there are, obviously, as you were just talking about, economic ramifications to this, but I guess there are social ramifications too, right? I mean, I imagine, you know, people would look at a an arrangement like this, and say you’re doing what? And just not quite get it.

Rhaina Cohen 

Absolutely. You know, I’ve heard all sorts of reactions to my own situation and also to other people I’ve talked to. So, the woman who I explained, who lives with her husband and another couple who they’re close to. Even though they live in a liberal part of the country, had heard that there were, you know, these somewhat disapproving gossip around, like, are these people swingers? That they couldn’t understand that you could possibly want to do this with friends. Also had heard in my situation that my friend’s parents’ initial reaction was like, oh, is this some kind of, like, polyamorous arrangement? Which is not, I don’t think there has to be judgment attached to that, but I do think that it speaks to how it is so incomprehensible to a lot of people that you would entangle your life and get rid of, you know, your privacy for friends. When we would readily do those things for romantic partners or family. I mean, there are certainly people who are excited by the arrangement, but I think it depends on often how much privacy there is. So, when I’ve talked about these three couples I know who bought houses side by side, people will say, that’s the dream. I think people are less likely to say that’s the dream and be more scrutinizing if you are actually occupying the same house.

Kimberly Adams 

You know, you mentioned polyamorous relationships and things like that. And it’s important in this conversation that the efforts made by the LGBTQ+ community to get their own rights are some of the reasons that even a lot of these setups can work. Can you talk about how the queer community has influenced the way we think about lives that don’t have marriage at the center since they had to work with that framework for so long?

Rhaina Cohen 

A lot of the lawyers who have any kind of specialty in helping people who are unmarried also do work for LGBTQ clients, because the things that people are up against are very similar, that in in the US, in nearly every state, there is no legal alternative to marriage. It’s marriage robust. And so, if you want to give rights to somebody in your life to make medical decisions on your behalf, or you want to buy a property with or have legal rights, they’re not straightforward ways to do that. And certainly, queer people, whether because the romantic partners were not recognized by the state, or they had chosen families so their friends, who they considered family, who didn’t have any rights, they had to find ways to get whatever protections were possible. I will say that one kind of big part of history that I did not know and discovered during this process was, while it is a huge victory for I think, everybody in the LGBTQ community that that marriage rights have been extended to same sex couples, for a lot of people, there had been vast skepticism about making that the priority of the movement because of this gap between unmarried and married people. That it wouldn’t fundamentally solve the inequality there, it would just entrench the importance of marriage. And I think what kind of came out afterwards has shown that that is a little bit true, at least, that a lot of the domestic partnership laws and civil unions that had been on the books ended up being thrown out after the Supreme Court case that made same sex marriage legal. So now, if you are unmarried, you in some ways have fewer options on the table than you might have previously. So, the LGBTQ community has really, I think, shaped policies and the conversation around what might happen next for making sure marriage isn’t the be all and end all.

Kai Ryssdal 

You know, unwinding a marriage can be messy and difficult and bureaucratic and all those things. What do you know? What can you tell us about unwinding one of these friendship-based relationships or arrangements?

Rhaina Cohen 

So, the people that I know who do work on this where, you know in the law, where they are trying to help people bind themselves to each other, whether it’s to raise children together or to buy a home together and so on. You know they will also see their job as doing counseling to make sure that people are thinking ahead of time about what the commitment looks like. So, you know, I don’t have, I guess, specific examples that I can give where people had this sort of legal entanglement, and it all went terribly, because one of the things that people would do on the front end is create these legal contracts where you have some stipulations over who, you know, how do you deal with if one person wants to exit? So, at least that’s on paper. But certainly, from a social perspective, when I have talked to people where there have been falling out within friendships, even if they’re not quite this involved, there’s a total lack of understanding about how devastating that can be. And you know, we don’t have the support system or even a term like divorce that can help people understand how much is needed for somebody if their entire world is unwinding because the person that they had built a life around or set of people are no longer there in the same way. So, I think there’s certainly more that we can do to understand both the potential for friendship to be larger, and also that, just like any close relationship, when it dissolves, it really can be world shattering, and that we need to find ways to support people in that.

Kimberly Adams 

So, what can we do as you know, individuals as a society, especially in our local communities, to make things more equitable? Like, what policy changes should folks who want to, you know, make these relationships more equal, especially from an economic standpoint? What needs to change that people can actually do?

Rhaina Cohen 

Well, there are policies that have been started on the local level that I think are going to be maybe coming up in more places. So, in a couple of cities in Massachusetts, there’s been a domestic partnership law on the books, or ordinance that does not stipulate that you need to be romantically involved with each other, which has not always been the case with other domestic partnership laws. Also, there’s an the first piece of legislation that bans discrimination on the basis of family structure, which is a form of discrimination that maybe people have not thought about, but certainly, you know, I can say, in my own experience and looking for a house with my friends, we had landlords say like, this is, you know, not a house that’s not. I’m not going to show you this house because it’s not suitable for two families. And I think that if it was probably, maybe the same number of people, but the arrangement looked different than they would have said otherwise. So, I mean that kind of, even being able to get a home, for instance, or being able to talk about your life set up in your job without fear that there will be repercussions potentially. You know, those are things that would come up there. And, you know, one of the kinds of legislation that I find really interesting is a legal alternative to marriage. There’s currently a kind of model for this in Colorado that would give people a lot of the rights, the boilerplate rights that you would get in an estate planning, would have to pay maybe thousands of dollars to a lawyer for, but you can instead get for a few dozen dollars and a two page form that are, you know, medical and legal rights that are pretty fundamental. So, I think it would help if people looked beyond romantic relationships as the only kind of relationship that might be there for you and see where the gaps are in what kinds of rights people have, and then look at what we’ve already done or we’ve discarded after Obergefell. The Supreme Court case that legalized same sex marriage because some of these ideas have been around for decades, and we can recover them.

Kimberly Adams 

Rhaina Cohen is a journalist at NPR and author of the book “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center.” Thank you so much. I learned a bunch of new things.

Kai Ryssdal 

Thanks, Rhaina. Really appreciate it.

Rhaina Cohen 

Thank you for having me talk about this.

Kimberly Adams 

You know, that’s really interesting about how we design houses. Like, yeah, I never really thought about it. But yeah, you design a house with, like, a bigger room and then smaller rooms. But if you’re living with friends, who gets the big room? You know, you want more. You know, equal spaces and you know, attached bathrooms and a little distance, like at opposite sides of the house. You’d literally have to build homes differently for these kinds of arrangements. In the suburbs of DC, I’m seeing more and more of these massive houses going up that are clearly meant for multi-generational families or multiple families. Like there’s one out near my uncle’s house that must have like 10 or 15 bedrooms in it, but it’s also got like 10 cars outside, and not like super high end fancy cars, but just like people’s cars because I think, just like, a giant family lives there, and you know, that would help with childcare and all those things. The other thing that I thought was interesting in some of the research that Courtney sent over to prep for this conversation was this idea about health insurance, right? In your employer health insurance, if you’re lucky enough to have it, you can add a spouse or a child, no problem for not that much extra money. But if you have a friend who needs health insurance, you can’t, which I think is kind of wild.

Kai Ryssdal

Totally, totally. Look, things are changing.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah. And things can change. What do you think? Could you ever do something like that?

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, I’m old now, and probably not, but in my younger days, you know, who knows? Who knows?

Kimberly Adams 

Well, what about like a Golden Girls type situation in retirement or something like that? With your buddies?

Kai Ryssdal 

I don’t know. I don’t know. Look, I’m a fairly traditional kind of guy. So maybe not, but maybe so. Who knows?

Kimberly Adams 

All right. Well, we want to hear from you all. Have you ever bought property with a friend? Did you live in it? Would you consider it? Tell us about that. 508-827-6278, also known as 508-U-B-SMART. We will be right back.

Kai Ryssdal 

All right, time for some news. Kimberly Adams, what do you got?

Kimberly Adams 

So, speaking of friends and relationships, call your friends and relatives, especially older folks, and check on them if they are in this heat wave this. These high temperatures throughout the country are super serious, so if you have folks in your life who are vulnerable, who maybe don’t have access to air conditioning, or who you know are in whatever situation, just check on them. Just check on them. Which leads me to the story I saw in Bloomberg. It’s an opinion piece that points out that heat waves aren’t considered disasters in the federal level, like in terms, in the same way that hurricanes and tornadoes and things are. And I’m reading here: “Unlike other natural disasters, extreme heat doesn’t topple buildings, flood streets or turn road signs into missiles. It doesn’t provide a dramatic backdrop for daredevil weather reporters. What it mostly does is kill people quietly and efficiently. It’s long past time we respect its destructive power, which will only grow as a warming planet makes heat waves more frequent and intense.” And so, this week, you know, there’s maybe 150 people, 150 million people, who are going to be subject to these really high temperatures. But as you know, in terms of federal disaster aid, the federal government doesn’t consider heat waves or wildfire smoke events, major disasters worthy of federal relief. And a lot of folks are saying that’s an oversight because one of the heat waves in many ways are some of the easier things to help people keep safe from. You put them someplace cool. And if you had access to federal relief, you might be able to set up more cooling centers and vulnerable communities. You might be able to subsidize AC for elderly folks. Like there are things you could do with federal dollars to help people not die of the heat. And so, the in reading here again from Bloomberg: “On Monday, the Center for Biological Diversity, along with the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union and dozens of other unions, public-health groups and nonprofits, petitioned FEMA to change its policy.” And this author advocates that the agency should listen. So there’s that.

Kai Ryssdal 

Agencies should listen. Agencies should listen. Okay, here’s mine. It’s good news, bad news thing, or it’s good news, incomplete story thing. So, there’s a piece also in Bloomberg today, the headline of which says, “US Retirement Accounts Are Flush for Millions of Older Americans.” Vanguard has done some research on retirement readiness of baby boomers since they’re the ones who are retiring now find that and here’s the challenge: The top 5% of income earners had a savings surplus of almost 30% that is to say, the richest Americans are doing fine in retirement. Here’s the next sentence: “The retirement outlook improved for all but the bottom quartile of wage earners.” This is probably the challenge of this economy, right? It’s the wealth, and while there are many challenges of this economy, but the durable, structural one is the wealth gap, right? Is the income gap, and it’s the rich having just an enormous slice of the wealth in this economy, and the lower end of the income spectrum, not. And here it is, now in retirement. The data shows it. Vanguard says so, and that’s not great at all.

Kimberly Adams 

I was just doing some reporting on credit card debt and how delinquencies are on the rise, but overall credit card debt is, you know, kind of trending a bit downward. And I was talking to Silvio Tavares, who’s CEO at VantageScore, which is one of these credit scoring companies, and he was telling me it’s because wealthier people are paying off their debt and like improving their credit scores and just clearing out the debt because they don’t want to carry it in this high interest rate environment. But lower income people because of inflation and everything else, they’re actually putting more debt on credit cards and going into delinquencies. That’s why delinquencies are going up. It’s a reminder of the K shaped recovery situation we had coming out of the pandemic at the beginning.

Kai Ryssdal 

Still do. Still do. Very much so.

Kimberly Adams 

All right, well, that is it for the news. Let’s move on to the mail.

Mailbag

Hi Kai and Kimberly. This is Godfrey from San Francisco. Jessie from Charleston, South Carolina. And I have a follow up question. It has me thinking and feeling a lot of things.

Kimberly Adams 

Last week while Kai was out, Kristin and I talked about Apple’s new AI-powered emoji generator, ‘Genmoji,’ that’s expected to be released later this year. We wanted to know what you thought about it, and we got this message.

Brian Crabb

Hey Kimberly. Hey, Kai. This is Brian up in Sonoma County. I’m very excited to be able to generate my own personal emojis. My last name is Crabb, and there are not enough crab emojis out there. So, now I can add a crab to pretty much anything. For example, my profession is, I’m a firefighter, so now I can create a firefighting crab to send to my friends and family. I love to cycle, so a crab riding a bike. You get the idea that possibilities are endless. I’m very excited.

Kai Ryssdal

Well, there you go.

Kimberly Adams 

You need to move to Maryland. You’ll find crab everything.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’m sure you would. All right. So, one more. During Half Full/Half Empty last Friday, we had all y’all weigh in on people using their speaker phones in public for phone calls, FaceTime, watching YouTube, all that stuff. Overwhelming majority, 99% to 1%. I think that 1% was a rounding error. We’re not fans, but we did get this.

Beth

Hi, this is Beth from New York. My exception to not really liking FaceTime in public is when deaf people use it to sign to one another. FaceTime has been great for people who communicate using American Sign Language and other sign languages, so I say they should FaceTime away. But the rest of you all hearing folks, let’s put our headphones in.

Kai Ryssdal

Yep, yep.

Kimberly Adams 

Agreed. That reminds me about I haven’t seen as much the phone lines, the TTY phone lines, that used to always be advertised. You’d have that number that you could call if you were deaf or hard of hearing that would allow you to sort of type out, they’d write out what people were saying for you. And I wonder what’s happened to those lines now that FaceTime is a thing, and you know, people can text so much easier.

Kai Ryssdal

Yeah, that’s good question.

Kimberly Adams

I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that in a while, but that was a really good point. Before we go, we’re going to leave you with this week’s answer to the Make Me Smart question, which is, what is something you thought you knew but later found out you were wrong about? And this week’s answer comes from our intern Thalia, in honor of her last week with Make Me Smart.

Thalia Menchaca

Something I thought I knew but later found out I was wrong about is my relationship with my curly hair. Growing up, I always found my curl to be too big and too frizzy. Plus, I didn’t like it when strangers wanted to touch it. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I finally started taking care of my curls. I went from watching my hair every day to watching it every few days. I bought a wide-tooth comb, which helped with some of the fizziness. And I learned that the most expensive curly hair products aren’t always the best ones for my hair. Eventually, I realized that embracing my curl would be the biggest confidence booster. I’m so comfortable with my hair now that sometimes I wish I could meet my younger self and tell her that one day you’ll learn to love your curly hair.

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, that’s lovely.

Kimberly Adams 

Oh, I love that. That’s great. Thanks for everything, Thalia. Good luck.

Kai Ryssdal 

Fabulous. That was fabulous. We want to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question. Our number is 508-827-6278, you can get us there. You can get us at 508-U-B-SMART. Same phone number, just spelled differently.

Kimberly Adams 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Today’s program was engineered by Charlton Thorp with mixing by Juan Carlos Torrado. And our intern, for the last week, is Thalia Menchaca.

Kai Ryssdal 

Ben Tolliay and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital. Since this is Tuesday, Neal Scarbrough is working. He is Marketplace’s Vice President and General Manager. I wonder if somebody in St Paul’s going to hear this and go, Neil, what is going on?