For those that are married/partnered, is your spouse/partner your best friend?

Do you believe spouses/partners should be best friends in addition to partners?

I feel like this debate comes up every so often in various circles and friend groups of mine and it’s always a bit of a hot button topic.  There’s never really middle ground to it because you either think of your spouse as your best friend or you don’t; and you think it’s normal for your spouse to be your best friend or you don’t.

Without fail, there’s always a few people that say, “nope, I have friends, my spouse is my spouse, not my friend”.  But most recently when it came up in this group of friends, I think I was amazed at how many people were VEHEMENTLY against their partner/spouse being their best friend.  I think I was one of the few that was like “spouse and best friend are one in the same”, which was odd to me.

 

Now, I preface the rest of this by saying, however everyone manages their relationships is everyone’s personal business.  If you believe that your spouse and your friends are separate, power to you, I’m not judging, I guess I just don’t understand it (and please feel free to enlighten me).

Devon is my best friend, but then again he was before we were a romantic partnership (sounds romantic right?).  We were best friends for almost a decade before going into a relationship; that didn’t change just because we were suddenly more touchy-feely with each other.  We’re still just as goofy and silly with each other as we always were (if not moreso) and I feel like we wouldn’t have that if we weren’t friends, too.

I feel like our friends’ wedding this weekend really drove this point home for me.  There was a point in the ceremony where the officiant talked about not only joining in love and marriage but also joining in friendship with each other.  She also said that they were vowing to not only be spouses but vowing to be confidants and friends.  Now, that might have just been the ceremony that our friends did but I definitely think it adds merit to the side where your spouse is also your friend.

I think it’s really important to love your spouse and to like your spouse; and the “liking” is where I feel like friendship comes in.  You marry someone because you love them and want to spend your life together and when you like them that life is just even more fun.

Maybe that only makes sense in my head, I don’t know.

But I love Devon and I like him.  I’m marrying him because I love him; I spend a lot of time with him, by choice, because I like him.

This is not to say that we don’t have other friends or other people we would consider to be close friends; we both do, but at the end of the day if you ask one of us who is our best friend or who we are closest to; we’re going to say each other.

I was talking to Devon about this concept on the way home from the wedding this weekend.  He’s like, “real question, do you think we could have the wedding we’re planning if we weren’t friends?”

Our wedding is really far from traditional in a lot of ways at this point.  We have the ceremony for the loving and sentimental part but our reception is going to be a party, like a weird, semi-nerdy, odd party.  Like one thing he would love is for us to have our sweetheart table at the front, but for it to be like a throne where we can just randomly say “okay, we wish to be entertained” (it’s probably not actually going to happen).  And he’s like, I wouldn’t even think of suggesting crazy shit like that if I was marrying anyone but you.  And honestly, I wouldn’t be okay with half of it if it were anyone but him.

What does everyone think about this issue?  Is your spouse also your best friend? Do you think the two should be mutually exclusive?