“Today I’m going to marry my best friend!”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that announcement or something similar to it (“today my best friend asked me to marry him,” etc…) on Facebook. That’s why I was so intrigued to read this article from Marjorie Campbell on why she’s glad her husband is NOT her best friend:
I need to get this off my chest: my husband is not my best friend. He’s never been my best friend and never will be. I experience some envy of the young brides and long-married wives who contentedly call their spouse “my best friend.” Facebook has a site called “My Husband Is My Best Friend” with over 170,000 “likes”! I don’t doubt that some husbands are capable of female-friendly friendship. But mine is not and, well, his relation toward me is not anything I recognize as friendship, not in terms I understand. I am not complaining. For me, not being best friends is the cornerstone of our marriage – and I love my marriage just the way it is.
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Husband is a verb – “to manage, especially with prudent economy” – that describes mine better than the noun. Just calling him spouse, partner or companion says nothing about him. He could call me the same, his “spouse or partner or companion,” as if we are just alike, friends who got married. Husband, in its verbiage, works better by hinting there is difference between us. In my marriage, it works especially well because my husband wears his tendency to manage, direct and control all things with pride and tenacity. He is stereotypical “male” in this way – the kind of overbearing Alpha male that caused my own mother to comment “I’ve never cared for men like that.”
What do you think? Is your fiancé or spouse your best friend? Do you think that is important for marriage or are some couples just “lucky” that way? Does it all depend on your definition of friendship?
4 Comments on “Is Your Spouse Your “Best Friend”?”
Mine is. Not the way my best girlfriends are. But he’s the person I like to spend time with and do things with. We talk every night. Give me the pick of anyone in the whole world to sit down with over a cup of coffee, he’s the one.
Um, but no, I don’t let him come clothes shopping with me, consult on hairstyles, or any of that girl stuff. I guess he’s my best guy-friend.
My husband is definitely my best friend. He understands me better than anyone else ever has. He trusts and respects me, even when he doesn’t understand. We share so many interests and outlooks that I don’t share with many of my women friends. I would rather spend time with him than anyone I know.
My husband and I are each other’s best friends. It probably helps that we were friends before we started dating. We’ve been a couple for over 11 years now and married for 3 of those years. Our friendship is probably what got us through the 8 years of separation we experienced while in college and graduate school. These is nothing that I couldn’t tell him, and no one I’d rather tell things to. I might help that I have had a few guys through the years who I would consider my closest friends.
Hello- found you thru Captive the Heart.
I don’t really understand her argument that being best friends somehow means that you’re essentially THE SAME. She also seems to suggest that there is no overlap in his masculinity and her femininity, thereby making it only natural that they don’t have the capacity to be “best friends.”
That may be so for her, but let’s be clear: I am a homemaker. I cook, I clean, I live the traditional feminine role and allow my hubby to wear the pants, as it were. My husband makes ALL of the money (or at least, I make so little that I am usually not even taxed at the end of the year).
We are best buddies before anything else. When I first met him, I knew that we would be friends for life. My husband often calls me “pal” or “buddy”- because we can say or do anything around one another without fear. We can also correct one another without fear. That is friendship. I have never and will never have a friendship with another woman as deep as the one I have with my spouse. I would never tell my best girlfriend half of the things I tell my spouse, because the deepest recesses of my heart are for my spouse alone. To me, that is enough to call him my “best friend.”
The argument is interesting in the sense that we so often hear that our children should not be our friends. Perhaps she is looking at the spousal relationship through a similar lens?