Is your spouse your best friend?

No, but a very, very, good one and becoming better all the time.

If you’ve ever divorced, did you ever consider your past spouse to be your best friend?

My previous SO – not divorced, but only because we understood that our relationship and bond wouldn’t survive marriage before we actually tied the knot – is my best friend.

Is friendship essential to a long-lasting, healthy marriage?

Absolutely. The two aren’t that different save for the depth of compromise. The same things that make a loving friendship work by and large make marriage work too.

I’m not married, but still want to proudly declare that my girlfriend is my best friend as well as my lover. :D

Yes, he’s my very best friend. My girlfriends that I call my bff’s are one step beneath my hubby.

Oh, yes.
We love to travel together, talk together, laugh, watch TV or movies together, listen to music together.

Yes. He is my very best friend because he knows everything about me, and I trust him completely. I trust him even when he is telling me something I don’t want to hear. I love being with him every day. I look forward to seeing him every day.

I do have some very close girlfriends who sometimes are more able to empathasize with me at times during certain situations, relate on a female level, amd they have more tolerance to hear the same thing over and over when I am having trouble getting past something. But, still, my husband is the first go to person for me. I want to share with him my happiness and my pain first.

If we divorced, losing his love would be profound, and losing his friendship and company just as devastating.

I am the cheese.

My husband is my best friend and he was my best friend before we got married. He’d tell you the same thing about me. We both share things with each other that we don’t share with anyone else and we know that each of us will be there for the other whenever needed to the best of our ability. I love that we have the connection that we do.

I was married before and my ex-husband was not my best friend before or after we got married. He just wasn’t as open to some things that I had going on as my female friends were. I think that definitely played a role in our relationship and probably had a good bit to do with why I didn’t try to stop him when he left.

Yes. For 46 years we have shared everything together.

She is my best friend.

My wife.

Yes. There’s no one I’d rather spend my time with. It has always been this way, even before we were married.

Looks fade.
Money is stressful.
Sex comes and goes.

Friendship is forever.

I have never thought of my spouse as my best friend. I always put the two in separate worlds. There is the world of friends and the world or romance, and to me, it makes no sense to conflate them. What’s the point?

Your spouse, I would think, is your closest confidant and the person you share pretty much everything with. Your best friend is the person who is the next closest confidant and the person with whom you share the things you don’t or can’t share with your spouse. I think that some people have the idea that you should share everything with your spouse, as if you are one person.

Personally, I don’t think that is necessarily healthy. I think people should have their own lives and identities and should choose to be together as independent people, not as codependent people who can’t be apart without losing their identities, or without freaking out because their spouse keeps secrets.

My bond to my wife is the deepest bond I have. However I also have very deep bonds to others. Each is a different kind of relationship. Each is necessary to me. The bonds to my friends are different than those to my wife. My wife may do many of the things or even all of the things my friends do in my life, but I don’t consider her eligible to be a friend. She’s in a different category of people, and to call her a friend is to diminish her real significance in my life.

That’s why it always kind of kills me when people call their spouses their friends. I feel like arching and eyebrow and saying, “Really? Is that all?” For me, a spouse is special in a way that friends can never achieve. To call a spouse a friend is to take away their specialness. That, of course, is just me, and I’m sure others may not see it that way.

I’m not married, but I wouldn’t say your spouse is your best friend. I think the relationship level of “friends” is completely different than that of a spouse, so they can’t really be compared in my opinion. Your spouse should be higher in “rank” than your friend, so then your spouse is always your friend. However, a “best friend” is the highest rank for a friend, so it’s reserved for those friends who are closest to you. Your spouse should be more important to you than your best friend, so if your spouse was your best friend, you’d be “stuck” at the level of best friend. Just my opinion….

My wife was my best friend when I fell in love with her, which was almost 8 years before we got married.

She would be my best friend even if we weren’t married, and she’s my spouse because she’s not only my best friend, but because I love her too.

I considered my ex to be my best friend at times but sometimes I was so drained by the relationship, that my time with other friends was more enjoyable because of the relief that it gave me.

From my experience, friendship is essential to my wife and I having a long-lasting, healthy relationship. We not only have strong romantic feelings for each other, but we also enjoy doing things together very much, and have a lot of respect for each others feelings and opinions. I’d say that greatly enhances the vitality and therefore the health of our marriage.

For an alternative example, being emotionally addicted to someone whom you don’t respect or truly like, isn’t healthful and it isn’t love anyway.

People have had long-lasting marriages without friendship. It doesn’t seem that those marriages would have been very healthy, but I’m not really qualified to judge any of them except for the ones with which I’m familiar.

Not at the moment.

Yes, they are. They were before I got married. Though I always had a best friend (who is still so) before I met my partner.

Yes, he is.

Yes. She was before we got maried and she is now we are married.

I am leaning towards @wundayatta‘s feelings on this one. My best friend is a woman I have known for a lot longer than I have known my husband. She knows secrets about me because we were partners in crime, so to speak, for many years. My husband and I know each other’s soul because for a couple of years before we met face to face, our thoughts and words were all we had to share, but still not to the depths of me that my bff knows. My husband is my partner, my love, an integral part of my life, I don’t want to think about life without him but he cannot replace my best friend.

I’m not married but my boyfriend and I have been together for a long time. He became my best friend before we got together and he still is now although, he has always shared that position with a girl who has held the title of my best friend since we were 8 years old (17 years ago).

My late husband was never my best friend. He wasn’t a nice person.