I think trying to be my wife’s best friend was unhealthy for the marriage. Perhaps because she’s a little nuts, too. I don’t know. When I hear/read the phrase it makes me think of people who don’t really want to have sex and are trying to justify it by claiming that being friends is a better base and strategy for a long term relationship. I have tried it both ways and everything in between, and in my experience women resent and prefer not to be in a relationship with a man who doesn’t want to fuck their brains out as the primary motivator.
I know for sure soulmates do not exist, and in my experience the people who most believe in soulmates always have just 1 example (for example, parents) that they/no one will live up to and for all their belief in a special 1 person they sure do get around trying to find that person.
As far as best friends go, I think it’s probably better to have as many outside interests and get your needs met from a variety of sources, and that part of why marriages fail is because people expect to get too many different things out of them when they chances are it will be impossible for 1 person to be your best friend, lover, chef, maid, doctor, lawyer, travel companion, shrink, handyman, interior decorator, seamstress, secretary, tennis partner, co-parent, babysitter, extra mom/dad, mechanic, mentor, spiritual advisor, accountant, dance partner, and drinking buddy.
Since I just saw the posts about female friendships, I would consider it a huge red flag if someone does not have any same sex friendships. Though this is colored by my experience with certain mental illnesses and the benefit of hindsight.
I had a friend and he told me his wife was his best friend and it meant he trusted and felt safe with her more than anyone else . I said had b/c my friend had dies and his wife told me she was blessed to had been married to her husband for 34 years. The two were sole mates . I dated him first and he ask me to married him and I said No b/c I wasn’t ready to get married and I am glad I said no b/c the two belonged with one another . Their marriage lasted that long b/c they were ‘best friend’ and very much in love with another .
And that other one, which is the one bothering Shagnasty, to think that by placing their fingers in their ears and going lalala, the Bad Things will just go away. It’s got many names: denial, positive thinking, fake it till you make it… while there are times that getting the right attitude does help improve things, a complete fix always takes more than that.
I don’t think any of us who consider our spouses our best friends are saying that we are joined at the hip. My husband and I have each our own friends, hobbies and interests. We give each other some space, and try to figure out when we are getting in each other’s hair.
The same can be said of my relationship with my friends.
I think this question is due to the OP’s peculiar view of marriage. Elsewhere, he has stated that marriage is primarily for procreation, and once that is accomplished, marriage is pointless. With that in mind, it is makes his confusion about spouses as best friends a little clearer.
And in my anecdotal, but extensive experience it is difficult for couples to stay close friends with singletons over time. And it gets tougher over time. It has nothing to do with “cleaning, fetching his pipe and slippers” or whatever offends your overly PC sensibilities. Married (even coupled) people and single people have different priorities and demands on their time. And I feel like it’s statistically difficult for a couple to find another couple where everyone is BFFs.
Ergo, over time your spouse becomes your closest friend.
I had a male best friend in high school. The reason we were friends was because there was no sexual attraction (yes, really, on either side), but we still got along great, had similar interests and intellectual curiosities, etc. Now, my male bf was ( and still is) in some ways more ‘feminine’ than the average dude, but he isn’t gay. It was and is a greAt friendship, but when we went off to college, my friend met his future wife almost immediately, and that obviously changed everything! They have been married ten years now and have three kids.
I don’t see much similarity between that friendship and my relationship with my husband. My husband and I got to know each other through dating, not friendship, and I do think those are very different processes. The initial basis of the relationship is so different, but it also evolves differently. My husband and I were together almost six years before we got married, so friendship-like things had plenty of time to develop, but we never saw each other as simply “friends”, always some form of partnership.
If someone says their spouse is their best friend, in lieu of any other evidence, I tend to assume just that the relationship developed differently than mine.
It makes sense that if you see marriage largely being a transactional arrangment, the whole “he is my best friend” thing will be wholly foreign to you. But not everyone’s relationship is like this.
The way you describe your relationship above doesn’t really compute for me. I’m more emotionally detached from work friends than I am non-work friends, because being emotionally detached prevents the type of intimacy that can get in the way of professionalism and objectivity. This detachment would be detrimental to the bond I have with my husband, which requires intimacy and emotional availability to thrive. In addition, our relationship isn’t a project we’re managing–as if our relationship exists outside of us–but rather our relationship is us. When we do nice things for each other, it’s not with the aim of “keeping the peace at home”. It’s because his joy is my joy and vice versa.
If what I’m saying doesn’t apply to your relationship, that doesn’t mean mine is wrong (or yours is wrong), but it does make it significantly different than mine. So it should come to no surprise that whom we consider our best friends would differ too.
But your previous post was all about how shallow and catty female-female relationships are, as if to explain why wives latch on to their husbands as best friends. If you’re now saying this is a general phenomenon not restricted by gender, does this mean you also think men have shallow relationships with other men?
I have been divorced for about 8 years so, if that feeling has a shelf life, it is a lot closer to an MRE than bananas. My ex-wife may find another partner at some point but it hasn’t happened so far and I doubt it will anytime soon because the dating market for 43 year old female business executives with an Italian temper and unreasonable expectations aren’t quite as hot as you might think (she is related to Mussolini and it shows when she gets mad). If that did happen in the next 9 years, I would have to buy another house in my daughters’ school district, they would live with me during the week, and we would have to reverse the current custody arrangement because their is a strict no stepparents rule in place at least until they are grown.
We still make good co-parents though. I have a key to her house and even stay overnight sometimes with the kids and her parents let me use their houses whenever I want. I wouldn’t call us friends and I doubt that we ever were but I can get along with her and especially her family.
I found out the hard way that I am just not the marrying type. Being a good father comes naturally but the husband role always seemed like slavery to me but even more pointless than that. I am not going to explain where I am and why multiple times a day, be dictated chores or expose my bank accounts to abuse. I know I am eccentric and have odd views on the subject but I know for a fact that other people have similar ones because they tell me and yet they can’t get out of it because they are trapped for whatever reason.
For those of you in happy and healthy marriages, I am honestly happy for you. I just know that will never apply to me so I like to give the other side a voice every now and then. I believe lots of different types of arrangements can work but there is no reason to assume that the current, default model is the best one for all or even most people.
It is just an informal agreement that I came up with and got my ex to agree to at least until the kids graduate high school. I had stepparents when I was a teenager and I think it is a horrible idea in general and still hold it against both my parents so I am not going to let anyone repeat that mistake. It is bad enough to expose kids to a divorce but it is possible to make it work fairly well as we have done but introducing stepparents and, most likely, step-siblings is unthinkable to my own kids.
It may work for some people, but it will not in this case. I already made a promise not to do that and I will honor it. My ex-wife said she wouldn’t either but there is a backup plan if something unexpected happened. I would have to move and then the kids would live with me and she could have them on the weekends or whenever she could fit them in.
That isn’t going to happen though. The serious dating market for a woman that makes as much money as she does and has her temperament is extremely small. She can’t move by legal order and she won’t support anyone that makes less than her. She also doesn’t want any stepchildren around.
I’m sorry that you had a bad experience. My (step)dad was the best parent out of the ones I had. I don’t even want to imagine how much worse I would have turned out, if it weren’t for him.
Now, admittedly, I have no small level of antipathy for my older step-sister, but that is largely due to the fact that my first impression of her (she was 21 when we first met, I was 9) was her accusing my mom of breaking up her parents’ marriage, even though my dad had been separated from his first wife for four years before he even met my mom. We got off on the wrong foot and, in 32 years, our relationship has never improved. But, that’s not my dad’s fault. AFAIC, step-parents are awesome.
Wow. I’ve been a step parent for almost 22 years and think it’s been an awfully nice relationship. That’s cool if you don’t want it personally, but you seem to make sweeping generalizations about what is or isn’t good- period- based on your singular experiences. My husband divorced when he was 25. I can’t imagine him not being allowed to remarry for fifteen more years.
I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I know some stepparent relationships can work. My true Best Friend’s father died when he was very young and his stepfather stepped in to pick up the slack before he was even old enough to understand what happened. He has always treated him and his younger brother (his biological child) exactly equal even when it came to dividing up shares of their lucrative family business.
However, that isn’t the rule. I got my first stepmother when I exposed my father for having yet another affair at age 14. He married the whore and I mean that almost literally because she was a former stripper that aged out of her calling. Obviously, that didn’t last and he had to divorce her when she opened fire on him one day but had bad aim. My stepbrothers and stepsister from that relationship weren’t that bad but they simply disappeared like lots of members of my “family” have through the years once the honeymoon was over. I have said it before but my family is really good at divorce (or bad at marriage depending on the way you look at it). The current record holder, my uncle, is 7 divorces and still hasn’t gotten the hint. I told my father that marriage is like baseball and its 3 strikes and you are out. He striked out and that is the end of it for good. Oddly enough, he actually listened. I already know I am not good at it so I quit after 1 for everyone’s sake.
My mother re-married a talented person who is now an esteemed college professor with an endowed chair appointment but he has incredibly serious anger management issues. He had an outburst at a restaurant so bad in front of me and my daughters a couple of years ago that I honestly thought I was going to have to forcibly subdue him. He was threatening and abusing everyone in sight for bringing one of his orders out late. I had to put a stop order on anymore contact with him until he got that under control and he had to go into anger management classes for it. It didn’t work and he had a couple of other violent episodes before other family members had a ‘last chance’ intervention that seems to have worked to so far. He isn’t a bad person in general. He just has very unusual anger issues that neither me nor my kids are going to be exposed to anymore. I avoided it in high school by working all the time and only coming home to sleep and often not even that. I am not exposing my own kids to the risk of that.
Again, I am honestly thrilled and uplifted when I hear about good experiences with different types of relationships. I have had some good ones myself but also many really bad ones. That is the reason I am so cautious about them in general. I want everyone to be genuinely happy and not need to cover for any deeper problems but I know for a fact that is isn’t the case much of the time.