Building your village: The importance of family and other significant others

A decade ago, I was sitting on the edge of my college best friend’s bed, upset about another night out ending alone. “My mom says this is our loneliest decade,” she said. That’s always stayed with me, the idea that the start of adulthood, our romanticized 20s, is our loneliest decade.

Don’t get me wrong — I slayed my 20s. I try to come up with a word to describe each of my decades. While I seek to focus my 30s on creation (of enduring brands, new family structures, and financial independence), my 20s were focused on exploration: of education (in getting my Bachelor’s and MBA), the world (I lived abroad for four years and visited 30 countries), and relationships (I dated around before meeting my husband at 29).

But the decade still had a sense of suspension. I have amazing friends, but, as my college friend outlined, it was a decade “between families.” I went from the structure of nightly home-cooked dinners to ad-hoc plans.

I recently read Rhaina Cohen’s The Other Significant Others, which reimagines life with friendship at the center. I loved so much of this book, including the anecdotes of pairs of committed friends who decided to coparent, cohabitate, and co-care for each other. She mentions that so much of our legal and social structure fails to give space, much less the dignity of a label, to those ride-or-die friendships. Friends cannot accompany friends to the hospital without paperwork or inherit property tax-free or get a plus-one invitation to a wedding or live together without rumors of sexual involvement. They cannot enjoy bereavement leave, something I experienced first hand when I lost my best friend to breast cancer nearly three years ago. I found myself insisting, “She’s like my sister,” to get others to grasp the gravity of the loss.

I’ve also recently read critiques of marriage, from This American Ex-Wife (although her husband just seems like an asshole who used marriage as cover for his patriarchal behavior) to All The Single Ladies to, my favorite, Fleishman is in Trouble (people think I’m sick in the head when I insist this book is an essential premarital read). All of these books paint pictures of marriages plagued by contempt and a desire to cut their partners, usually the woman, down to size. Who the hell would want to be in a relationship like THAT? A bad relationship is clearly worse than no relationship.

I’m writing this on a flight back from a friend’s wedding Sydney, a three-day extravaganza with Yoruba, Western, and Hindi ceremonies. I was struck by how their love was the genesis for a new family. I loved seeing Nigerian and Indian aunties clad in patterned head wraps and bejeweled saris exchanges moves on the dance floor, from hip circles to shoulder bounces. It was beautiful to witness the alchemy of two proud cultures. I felt love as I looked at my introvert husband, who used his scant vacation days to travel to the other side of the world to be by my side for the celebrations.

I was speaking with a single friend whose parents live abroad, and she mentioned feeling untethered, a feeling I knew all too well living in East Africa. As I reflect on all of this, I’m of the opinion that marriage is not for everyone, and a bad marriage just to check the box is definitely to be avoided, but everyone needs a family. We thrive when we have a lifelong ride-or-die. An emergency contact. A witness to your life. Someone who you can turn to and ask, “Remember when?”

And we also need an A-team, a group of close friends and family who can illuminate one’s whole being and provide fresh voice, perspective, and experience. We need other significant others.

For instance, my husband and my mom, my two ride-or-dies, are not entrepreneurs. Whenever I bring new ideas to them (a multiple-times-a-week occurrence), they ask grounding questions, trying to assess the viability of the ideas and how they would be executed. That’s often not what I need. I need a hype person, a “yes, and!” reaction. My friends who are artists and entrepreneurs understand the emotional volatility and know what to say to keep me going. I’d also love to cohabitate with friends. My dream is to buy a multi-family home in New York City, so everyone has their own space but we have a shared yard, as some of my friends have done in D.C.

I think in marriage, there’s a risk of focusing so strongly on your nuclear family that everyone else falls away and your world gets smaller. I’m realizing that the beauty is in both having a nuclear family or person, not necessarily romantic, who can be a reliable source of love, joy, and mutual support, while also having a life full of other long, joyful, supportive friends, or, as Rhaiana says, a life of “other significant others.”