In this episode, we welcome Rhaina Cohen, who literally wrote the BOOK on intimate friendships. "The Other Significant Others" profiles several friends whose relationships challenge us to rethink the default choices around sex, romance, intimacy, and family.

How can these friendships help us escape the metaphorical escalator that pulls us to the choices we're "supposed" to make, instead of the ones that we really want?

This is a podcast on intimate friendship, and on today's episode, we strip that down to the basics. A breezy summer confection of just us two, dishing as we love to do: ...debating where to stand at a concert; yearning for a Gen Z selfie consultant; reveling in the pleasure of being RIGHT (dammit); and giving heartfelt advice to our younger selves.

Soon, we'll be opening up the season to talk about chosen family and community building, featuring some GREAT interviews with authors, experts, and icons (from radical friendship idioms to senior centers, to communal living, to nightlife). But before we head out to explore all that, we get back to basics: just two friends...being friends.

Amrita and Andrew invite six friends around the dinner table to discuss friendship and intimacy: our co-host Marina, plus college friends, an ex-boyfriend, a neighbor...all with different perspectives on romance and family. We talk about what makes people get close, the difference between friend-intimacy and romance-intimacy -- plus, some personal tea spillage...just between us buds. Pull up a chair!

One of people's first questions is "how do your families feel about all this?" --so we decided to ask them ourselves. Andrew and Amrita had one-on-one phone conversations with our parents and siblings to talk family dynamics, and then sat down with Marina to hash it all out.

Our families have plenty of feelings about being joined together by the appearance of our son Aadi a year ago. We get into it ALL, no holds barred.

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Don't Think Twice is a podcast on intimate friendship. Amrita and Andrew are writers and creative collaborators, platonic life-partners, and parents to a 1 year old son. Our friend Marina Weiss, poet, and clinical psychologist, hosts these conversations.

Keep in touch at emergencycontacts.substack.com

We've made it to our baby's first birthday (!) and we're celebrating with a new season of Don't Think Twice. How has the past year been? What are the expectations versus reality of parenting as friends? Did things shake out as we imagined in last year's Season 1 episodes? Join us and find out!

Amrita and Andrew are creative collaborators, platonic life-partners, and co-parents to a very good baby. You can keep up with them at emergencycontacts.substack.com

Poet and clinical psychologist Marina Weiss joins us again as moderator and host.

We've come full circle in our tale of preparing for co-parenting: FAMILY. Andrew and Amrita's biological families will be fused together by this new baby -- what will that look like for a platonic couple? How will our very different religious and cultural upbringings come into play for our new family unit?

Host Marina Weiss helps bring this series home.

Want more updates from our nontraditional family? Let us know what you'd like to see from future episodes!

We're nearing the end of our Baby Episodes! But we can't leave without confronting how sex and dating will work in Amrita and Andrew's new roles as friends raising a child together.

Host Marina Weiss does a little after-hours therapy and guides us in an open and vulnerable conversation about our ideal romantic partners, and how they might fit into our unconventional family. We all learn a lot.

In this week's exploration of nontraditional family, we look at a male perspective on parenthood.

Andrew sits down with our friend JR Andre - an educator and school administrator who is on the pathway to parenthood along with his husband.

We talk gay fatherhood, navigating relationships with the women involved in the process, and the importance of queer community and queer legacies.