Don’t Make Your Husband Be Your Best Friend

They were such a cute couple.  He was a youth leader at church, and she was his high school sweetheart.  They tied the knot with style: with singing attendants, recorded expressions of love to each other, loads of family participation, and really nice dresses.  About a year after the wedding, I stopped by with a few friends to visit their little apartment (how we all wanted our own little apartments with that special somebody!).  They were happy as clams.  “Marriage is supposed to be this big adjustment,” she told us.  “But really, we were best friends for so long before we got married, there wasn’t that much to adjust to.”

Best friends . . . that might have been the first time I heard that description of husband and wife.  It made an impression.  Marrying your best friend seemed like a foolproof formula.

It wasn’t too long after that—two years, at the most—when I heard they divorced.  The story was that she’d cheated on him with one of their “best friends” from high school.

Huh.

This little story is probably apropos of nothing, except that “marrying your best friend” is not a foolproof formula.  When it comes to marriage, nothing is foolproof, but here (in bullet points) is why I think we’ve oversold the spousal-best-friend concept:

• In general, men and women do friendship differently.  Guys are comrades, teammates, colleagues.  They bond over projects or goals.  They are capable of heart-to-heart talks, but only after establishing certain parameters.  The ladies, being more relational, always have their feelers out for attachment and the boundaries are much more permeable.  In a dorm room or a coffee shop or a late-night wine-and-chocolate fest with the gals, we tend to spill our guts.

• Related to that, men and women have different expectations of friendship.  With guys, it’s working together to get something done or solve a problem.  With women it’s talking through the thing that needs doing or working through their feelings over the problem.  Yes, I know that’s a bit of a stereotype, but stereotypes have to come from somewhere–usually from the facts.

• From eHarmony radio ads. I gather that everybody’s looking for a soulmate.  Whatever that is.  Soulmates are usually made, not found; made over a long period of time, with lots of patience and shared experience.  If you’re expecting, on the basis of a few deep conversations with your fiancée, that your souls will mate right along with your bodies, you’re probably in for a shock.

• Marriages are under enough strain without the burden of best-friend expectations.  You’ve promised to love someone for as long as you both shall live, to stay together through all the circumstances of life (good and bad), to go one way even when you both want to go separate ways.  Those are crazy promises and they require crazy commitment.  Sometimes you are not going to be friends.  That person who is thwarting your will, that person you are stuck to for life can sometimes look a lot like an enemy.  Those dilemmas can usually be worked through—unless you convince yourself that since your spouse is no longer your best friend, the whole relationship is built on false premises and is therefore over.

• Marriage and friendship are different relationships with different structures and purposes.  Friendship is side by side; marriage is face to face.  Friendship is cumulative; marriage is transformative.  One of the most striking insights I ever read about marriage was in a novel written by someone who wasn’t married at the time: “Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions.  Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.”*  Marriage is enjoying or suffering one another, not necessarily in equal balance.  And speaking of equal, the equality that’s a necessary element of friendship is the last thing a husband or wife should be concerned about.

Of course, friendship is a great thing for a marriage to be; it just won’t always be that, or only be that.  When the marriage is under stress for internal or external reasons, loyal friends outside the marriage (not of the opposite sex) can an indispensable means of relieving some of the pressure.  It’s hard to find such friends.  I’ve written elsewhere how churches that focus so intently on building strong marriages tend to neglect building strong friendships.  But we need a theology of friendship (do I feel a book coming on?) to help build those strong marriages as well as to serve members who aren’t married.  Good friendships may even be rarer than good marriages.  But that’s a subject for another post.

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*C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, Chapter 7 (“The Pendragon,” section 2)