Life Partner? My mom was married to my dad. I know this because on all paperwork she ever had to complete, she always checked the box that said wife. My dad? He always seemed to check the husband box. There never was a partner box. I don’t even know if we can say husband or wife in a sentence anymore. I always understood once you hit a certain age that boyfriend or girlfriend did not work. But one day I woke up and was told it’s correct (not politically) to just say partner. I asked why. This was the reply.
After Gavin Newsom was sworn in as the governor of California (not during the recall, the first time), his wife, Jennifer, announced her decision to forgo the traditional title of “first lady.” She will be known, instead, as California’s “first partner.”
Oy vey. This is not what I was intending to write about but I have no words. I’m sure Gavin’s like, “Look if that makes you happy, cool.” But now if I don’t use this term I’m what? Old? Old school? Selfish? A chauvinist? Does anyone even use that word anymore?
Anyway
That wasn’t my point. I just think I’m getting a little slow on the draw in trying to keep up. But, I did have a point. I want to clear this up.
Think your wife is your best friend? Guess again. You’re wrong. It doesn’t mean your marriage isn’t wonderful — it’s just a recognition that friendship and marriage, while they share key areas of overlap, are fundamentally different relationships. And conflating the two can cause far more problems for your marriage than your friendships.
In most cases our friends do not live with us, are not financially, legally, relationally entwined with us. Our friends are attached to us because they want to, when they want to. They have volition and empowerment to leave or at least take space from us when necessary. Our partners are connected to our homes, family, schedules, life.
It makes sense that marriage and friendship might be confused with one another. It’s well-documented that marriage is good for individual health, well-being, and longevity, and the same is true of friendship. Married people also tend to rely less on friendships than single people do. But that’s not because their spouses have stepped into the best friend role — it’s because everyone else has. When married, you also have each other’s parents and siblings as sources of support — or even children. Married people tend to have a broader pool of potential supports.
However, that’s different from friendship, and mistaking one for the other can cause conflicts in marriages. Husbands who expect their wives to be their best friends may develop impractical expectations of how they should support them and their decisions. If a man were to quit his job to pursue a passion for carpentry, a friend could easily be his cheerleader. But his wife? She’s going to have questions.
When we mistake our partner’s own questions, fears, concerns as a lack of support, we are holding them accountable to a friend standard that does not exist for our partner. When we get too disappointed or resentful, we end up eroding our relationships.
It’s important to note that mistaking friendship for marriage won’t always harm your well-being. One study found that men who reported their spouses were their best friends were twice as likely to report high life satisfaction. This is likely because men tend to have fewer friends. And for people who don’t have a lot of friends, let alone a best friend, a spouse becomes more important for their health because that role may not have otherwise been filled.
But not a true friendship and keeping that in mind could be the difference between a successful marriage and a life full of disappointment. If it helps to think of your spouse as a best friend who happens to be financially and legally tied to you, go for it. But keep in mind that, when you heap best-bud expectations onto your wife, nobody benefits.
There are exceptions
The phrase has become so ubiquitous that we almost don’t hear it anymore. “You’re still my best friend,” Michelle Obama effused to Barack Obama in an Instagram post celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary.
It’s common at award shows, as when Justin Timberlake said, “I want to thank my best friend, my favorite collaborator, my wife, Jessica.” It’s common on how-to sites, where authors write articles on “nurturing a friendship” with your spouse.
Like the living dead, another oxymoron, spouse-friends, are all around us these days. Maybe it’s the heightened attention on friendship in social media; maybe it’s the decline of actual friends in our lives; maybe it’s because we all have access to public declarations of once-private relationships. Whatever the reason, referring to your spouse as your bestie, your bud, or your #BFF has become rampant.
So rampant, in fact, there’s even a backlash. “Why Your Spouse Shouldn’t Be Your Best Friend” one marital advice blog declares.
So, which is it? Is considering your spouse your closest friend a sign of hard-earned intimacy, attachment, and trust, or is it a sign you’ve become so enmeshed in the day-to-day logistics of managing your lives that you’ve given up sexual attraction, passion, and erotic play? Has marriage become little more than benefits with friendship?
Research
There is some research into this question. John Helliwell is a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics and the editor of the World Happiness Report. As he researched social connections a few years ago, he found that everyone derives benefits from online friends and real-life friends, but the only friends that boost our life satisfaction are real friends.
“But while the effects of real friends on your well-being is important for everybody,” he said, “they are less so for married people than for singles. That’s how we got to the idea that marriage is a kind of ‘super-friendship.”
Dr. Helliwell and a colleague discovered that a long-running study in Britain had data that may illuminate this question. Between 1991 and 2009, the British Household Panel Survey asked 30,000 people to quantify their life satisfaction. In general, married people expressed higher satisfaction, he said, and were better able to manage the dip in well-being that most people experience in middle age, as they face work stress, caring for aging parents and other pressures.
But an entirely separate part of the study asked people to name their best friend. Those who listed their spouse were twice as likely to have higher life satisfaction. Slightly more men than women made that choice which makes sense, because as we said, men tend to have fewer friends.
Is feeling this way about your spouse necessary for a good marriage?
Absolutely not. The benefits of marriage are strong even for those who are littered with outside friends. It’s just bigger for those who consider their spouse their closest friend. It’s a bonus.
Others are not so sure. So, I dug deeper.
Amir Levine is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia University, and the co-author of “Attached.”
A student of social relations, Dr. Levine explained that everyone has what he calls a hierarchy of attachment, meaning if something bad happens to us, we have a ranking of the people we call. In our early decades, those on the highest rungs are usually our parents or other family members.
“The problem as you grow older is, how do you let somebody get close to you who’s basically a total stranger?” he said. “Nature came up with a trick: It’s called attraction. Sexual attraction brings down all the barriers, lets you get close to a new person in a physical way that you don’t get close to your family.”
Over time, of course, this physical connection wanes. While many bemoan this loss of titillation, Dr. Levine celebrates it. “It’s smart,” he said. “If you’re going to be crazy about the other person all the time, how are you going to raise kids? How are you going to be able to work?”
Instead of complaining, we should view this new phase as an achievement: “O.K., now I have this person I’m attached to. I have the feeling of security. That’s what allows me to be an individual again and self-actualize.”
It’s this feeling of security, Dr. Levine says, that leads us to describe our spouses as “friends.” But that language is not quite right, he says. First, couples still need what he calls “maintenance sex,” because it re-establishes physical closeness and renews attachment.
Second, the term “friendship” is “an underwhelming representation of what’s going on,” he said. “What people basically mean is, ‘I’m in a secure relationship. Being close to my partner is very rewarding. I trust them. They’re there for me in such a profound way that it allows me to have courage to create, to explore, to imagine.’”
Dr. Levine summarizes this feeling with the (somewhat awkward) acronym Carrp; your partner is consistent, available, responsive, reliable, and predictable. But don’t we already have a word? Spouse. It fits this description. Why are we suddenly using the expression “best friend,” when that doesn’t seem to fit at all?
Because not every spouse provides that, and we’re indicating we don’t take it for granted. What we should probably be saying is “secure spouse.”
There’s yet another problem with calling your husband or wife your best friend. The words mean totally different things.
So, back to the drawing board
Peter Pearson and Ellyn Bader are founders of the Couples Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., and the authors of “Tell Me No Lies.”
They’ve also been married for more than 30 years. Dr. Pearson said there’s a critical difference between a best friend and a spouse. “One of the criteria for a best friend is you feel unconditionally accepted,” he said. “Do I care if my buddy Mark is messy in the kitchen, leaves his bathroom a shambles and doesn’t pay his income taxes?”
But with a spouse, you can’t avoid these topics.
Dr. Bader said that when couples are just getting to know each other, they often say they’re companions, and she’s fine with that. When couples have been together 30, 40 or 50 years, they use similar language, and that can be the mark of a healthy relationship.
“It’s the in-between ones, when they use the language of friendship, my stomach turns,” Dr. Bader said. “It’s a red flag for a lot of conflict avoidance and intensity avoidance. It often means they’ve given up on the complexity of being with somebody. Instead of saying, ‘Oh, well, that’s who they are,’ it’s better if they try to work things out.”
Dr. Bader said that she wished popular magazines would challenge the notion that you shouldn’t get married to change someone. “I think that’s what marriage is about,” she said. “It’s where some of the juices come from, and it’s also how you get the best out of the person you marry.”
Dr. Bader said that when couples are just getting to know each other, they often say they’re companions, and she’s fine with that. When couples have been together 30, 40 or 50 years, they use similar language, and that can be the mark of a healthy relationship.
“It’s the in-between ones, when they use the language of friendship, my stomach turns,” Dr. Bader said. “It’s a red flag for a lot of conflict avoidance and intensity avoidance. It often means they’ve given up on the complexity of being with somebody. Instead of saying, ‘Oh, well, that’s who they are,’ it’s better if they try to work things out.”
Millennials
Perhaps you’ve noticed the popular recasting of marriage as primarily a very close friendship. Young couples (frequently when posting photos of each other on social media) will say, “I married my best friend.” They intend this as a very high compliment to their spouse. Those who say it typically mean their marriage is a continuation of a companionate relationship that already existed, and that transcended sexual attraction. Going to the altar with their “best friend” meant adding a layer to a relationship that was already well-established and was primarily platonic.
There’s something to be said for this attitude. But contrary to what many think, there’s also something problematic about treating friendship as the pinnacle of married love—something that is a symptom of our cultural confusion about the meaning of love.
When Marrying Your Best Friend Is Good
I’ve known several couples who genuinely did begin their association as friends. They enjoyed common interests, pursuits, or places of worship. They gravitated toward one another in conversation because they found each other interesting. Only later did something else develop.
Frequently, attraction begins in one of them before the other. At some point, the fact becomes obvious, and since it’s never wise to leave such powerful forces dormant and unaddressed, the two must decide: either to close off the possibility of a romance, or to embrace it. Couples who choose the latter (especially men) often report a sense of epiphany.
“I’ve been enjoying this woman’s presence and company for so long, the fact that she’s an eligible person escaped me.” Sometimes, this is because his friend is not what he would’ve previously described as his physical “type.” I’ve heard women say the same of their husbands.
It could also be that one or both were so absorbed in other pursuits, including other romantic interests, that the friendship never had a chance to develop in a new direction. For an old friend of mine, who took years to realize and admit his attraction to his future wife, who he worked with for years, it seems romance simply wasn’t on his radar (or hers, for that matter).
Nonetheless, the business friendship gave birth to something new and beautiful. It’s not a bad thing to marry your best friend. I dated a friend whom I met at work. We were very good friends and our time together was nothing less than breathtaking. In retrospect, I made a mistake.
Confusing Our Love Categories
It is bad, however, to treat friendship as the pinnacle or ideal of married love, or else to imply that marriages not based on very close friendship are deficient. To suggest, even unintentionally, that marriage is or ought to be a kind of very intense friendship (with the benefits of sex and family thrown in) is to seriously confuse the different words and concepts scripture uses to describe love—or, more precisely, loves, as CS Lewis describes. Lewis gently reflects on the four basic kinds of human love—affection, friendship, erotic love, charity.
Most marriages throughout history have not been based first and foremost on friendship. Many of history’s greatest marriages were based on economic, social, or even political necessity. The marriage of Mary to Joseph, arguably the most consequential union between two people ever established, was likely arranged by fathers. And nowhere in all the instructional passages about marriage in the New Testament do we find spouses commanded or encouraged to cultivate friendship.
What we do find is a rapturous vision of partnership in dominion and glory—of man and woman together showing forth the image of God and embodying a sacred mystery at the heart of both creation and redemption. What we find inaugurated in Genesis, celebrated in the Song of Solomon, confirmed, and defended in the Gospels, sanctified in Paul, and fulfilled in Revelation is so much more than a companionate rooming arrangement. To describe marriage—Eros as God intended it—as primarily a type of friendship is to risk cheapening both it and friendship love.
To say “I married my best friend” may be true. But to leave it at that is to demote my spouse from her rightful and highest titles of bride and helpmate.
Don’t Eroticize Friendship
Our modern habit of making friendship the gold standard in marriage parallels other serious but popular confusions or conflations between types of love. Consider the opposite phenomenon, in which friendship is eroticized. I recently saw someone on Twitter repeat the tired and obnoxious claim that The Lord of the Rings has undertones of same-sex attraction. “[J. R. R.] Tolkien,” he claimed, “only wrote two kinds of dudes: beaming wife guys and yearning foxhole homosexuals.” A much wiser Twitter user replied by quoting Lewis’s book, The Four Loves, “Those who cannot conceive friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a friend.”
In the book, Lewis continues the quotation, explaining something about the difference between friendship and romantic love, or philia and eros, to use the Greek terms.
The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; friends hardly ever about their friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends’ side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for friendship, is not even the best.
Demisexuality and the Death of True Eros
Or consider the effort to rescue Eros itself from mere animal physicality by redefining it as a sexual identity or orientation akin to “gay,” “lesbian,” or “
bisexual.” Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo, the 24-year-old daughter of New York’s former governor, recently posted an interview to Instagram in which she described herself as “demisexual.” For those unfamiliar with this neologism, a Guardian columnist defines demisexuals as “people who aren’t sexually attracted to others unless they form a strong emotional bond with them first.”
The same columnist rightly notes how unremarkable this so-called orientation is, and how Cuomo’s declaring it an esoteric sexual identity smacks of attention-seeking by an already rich and privileged young woman. She goes on to observe, though, how sexualized and lascivious our culture must be for anyone to feel the need to declare that emotions and relationship play some role in her sexuality. I would suggest Cuomo’s need to reintroduce actual Eros into the conversation about sex is yet another example of how we’ve confused and conflated the various types of love.
Redeeming Love
So, here’s where we are in our culture. Now more than ever, we have no idea what “love” means. At times, we treat love as little more than a synonym for genital arousal. At other times, it offers a gnostic ideal in which all love—even the love between husband and wife—is nothing but an intense form of friendship between people who’ve decided to live and sleep together. We vacillate between Playboy and Hallmark, exalting animal lust at one moment and sentimental schmaltz the next.
In the crossfire, concepts like real, disinterested friendship are slandered as “repressed homosexuality,” if not forgotten entirely. And the greatest of all loves—agape—the divine and spiritual charity that drove Christ to lay down his life for the church and which God intended to vivify and sanctify the other loves—is nowhere to be found.
Lewis’s Four Loves presents a grand vision that helps us see how rightly distinguishing between Storge, Eros, Philia, and Agape can repair the damage our culture has done to our understanding of each. But even more important, Lewis points us to the scriptural well from which he drew his rich and satisfying knowledge of the loves—and to the lover in whose relationship with his people we experience all four perfectly, yet distinctly.
So?
I should mention that I’m single. As such, some might say I’m not qualified to speak on this topic. Maybe. But I was married for 16 years to a well-qualified narcissist. In fact, as I look at it now, she is the poster child for narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissistic personality disorder (narcissism) is a psychiatric disorder characterized by a pattern of self-importance (grandiosity), a constant need for admiration and attention, and a lack of empathy for others. Because of this lack of empathy, a narcissist cannot really love you. And yes, yes, she demanded she be known as my best friend. I must add that by the end she was my best friend because she woke m
e up one night to tell me, “I am your best friend. What don’t you get about that? But you have to put everybody ahead of me.” She was also my worst enemy. She had destroyed my life, so I had no friends. I had nothing but whatever she wanted me to believe I had to tell her I believed. That is called survival.
Prior to The Narc, I was in relationships where a partner had declared that I’ve become her best friend. In one such coupling, I got a Valentine’s Day card to that effect: You’re not only my boyfriend, but you’ve also become my best friend. It was supposed to be romantic — the highest compliment — but it filled me with dread. My best friend and I broke up a year later.
By the way: the person I complained to about the card? My best friend.