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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Anita Chaudhuri

‘She’s my sacred other’: is friendship, not romance, the key to a happy and fulfilled life?

‘The term best friend was inadequate’ ... Rhaina Cohen hugs a friend.
‘The term best friend was inadequate’ ... Rhaina Cohen hugs a friend. Photograph: Sara Wight

Rhaina Cohen was at a party one night when, on the other side of the room, she saw another woman she found magnetic. “In her pastel sleeveless blouse and snug pencil skirt, she had the posture of a dancer, if that dancer was also running a boardroom meeting,” she writes in her book, The Other Significant Others.

Soon after they parted that night, she and the woman she refers to only as M began exchanging messages. “Between us was a blizzard of ideas toggling easily between the interpersonal, emotional and intellectual. It took us little time to introduce each other to the people and spaces that mattered to us. We dropped by each other’s homes with the effortless frequency that before then had only seemed possible on sitcoms.”

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