game while the women gab in the kitchen knows this to be true.
The fight escalates. There are tears (mine) and heavy sighs (his). Matt says I’ve become obsessed with this friendship thing and have let my search spiral into the notion that my life here is empty when we actually have a lot going for us. I yell something about how I know I have friends but not the friends I need, and that it’s not a reflection of my feelings for him.
I’m worried this last point might be hard for my husband to believe. Research has found that both men and women get more emotional satisfaction from their relationships with women. Studies show that men think their wives are their best friends, and women think their best friends are their best friends. When marriages break up, social scientists say it’s the men who have the harder time. They’re suddenly left with no one. Women, usually, have friendships to fall back on that are nearly as intimate as the romantic relationships that failed them.
While I can help Matt stave off loneliness, my own protection must come in the form of some local BFFs.
There are, of course, plenty of people—male
and
female—who tout the idea that “my spouse is my best friend and the only one I need.” It’s one of those romantic notions that has been perpetuated by our mothers and grandmothers and every movie in the Meg Ryan canon. It’s a myth that has probably been responsible for thousands of unhappy marriages. Imagine the sense of failure a woman must feel when she enters into this covenant, expecting to be rewarded with a whole new level of bestfriendship, only to realize that her husband will never beher Callie or Sara. It’s enough to make her feel far lonelier than when she was alone.
A husband can fill many vital roles—protector, provider, lover—but he can’t be a BFF. Matt is my most intimate companion and the love of my life. But I can’t complain about my husband to my husband. That’s what friends are for.
It’s like what journalist Ellen Tien wrote in
O, The Oprah Magazine
about her self-proclaimed “mid-wife crisis.” “Your husband is not your best friend. Your best friend is your best friend. If your husband were your best friend, what would that make your best friend—the dog?”
Or as an old colleague once told me of her significant other: “He can’t be my girlfriend, he’s my boyfriend.”
I’m not sure where the husband-as-best-friend myth came from, anyway, but I imagine it began as a story women told themselves to ease the pain of giving up friendships for marriage. Loneliness in matrimony isn’t a new phenomenon. Back before women were liberating themselves and taking back the night, they were doting on their husbands and children 24/7. That didn’t leave much time for BFFs. “Wives are lonelier now than they ever used to be,” wrote Nora Johnson in “The Captivity of Marriage,” her 1961
Atlantic Monthly
article. “Great numbers of friends are a luxury she can no longer afford; old friends often diminish in importance, which she is sorry about. But there is a limit to her capacity for giving affection, and maintaining old friendships at their original intensity requires an effort she hardly has the energy for. Besides, she is often forced into unwanted and demanding friendships with the next-door neighbor, the boss’s wife, or the ladies’ club chairman, and she must learn to cover up her real feelings … It can be painful to find oneself isolated, in marriage, with problemsthat have always been shared with mother or girlfriends, and to realize that there are some things that even one’s husband cannot be told.”
I can’t necessarily relate to being forced into friendship with anyone at a ladies’ club, but the isolation Johnson writes of is still very real almost fifty years later. The problems that I’ve always shared with girlfriends cannot be foisted on Matt. Not because he doesn’t want them, but because I need to sort through them
The fight escalates. There are tears (mine) and heavy sighs (his). Matt says I’ve become obsessed with this friendship thing and have let my search spiral into the notion that my life here is empty when we actually have a lot going for us. I yell something about how I know I have friends but not the friends I need, and that it’s not a reflection of my feelings for him.
I’m worried this last point might be hard for my husband to believe. Research has found that both men and women get more emotional satisfaction from their relationships with women. Studies show that men think their wives are their best friends, and women think their best friends are their best friends. When marriages break up, social scientists say it’s the men who have the harder time. They’re suddenly left with no one. Women, usually, have friendships to fall back on that are nearly as intimate as the romantic relationships that failed them.
While I can help Matt stave off loneliness, my own protection must come in the form of some local BFFs.
There are, of course, plenty of people—male
and
female—who tout the idea that “my spouse is my best friend and the only one I need.” It’s one of those romantic notions that has been perpetuated by our mothers and grandmothers and every movie in the Meg Ryan canon. It’s a myth that has probably been responsible for thousands of unhappy marriages. Imagine the sense of failure a woman must feel when she enters into this covenant, expecting to be rewarded with a whole new level of bestfriendship, only to realize that her husband will never beher Callie or Sara. It’s enough to make her feel far lonelier than when she was alone.
A husband can fill many vital roles—protector, provider, lover—but he can’t be a BFF. Matt is my most intimate companion and the love of my life. But I can’t complain about my husband to my husband. That’s what friends are for.
It’s like what journalist Ellen Tien wrote in
O, The Oprah Magazine
about her self-proclaimed “mid-wife crisis.” “Your husband is not your best friend. Your best friend is your best friend. If your husband were your best friend, what would that make your best friend—the dog?”
Or as an old colleague once told me of her significant other: “He can’t be my girlfriend, he’s my boyfriend.”
I’m not sure where the husband-as-best-friend myth came from, anyway, but I imagine it began as a story women told themselves to ease the pain of giving up friendships for marriage. Loneliness in matrimony isn’t a new phenomenon. Back before women were liberating themselves and taking back the night, they were doting on their husbands and children 24/7. That didn’t leave much time for BFFs. “Wives are lonelier now than they ever used to be,” wrote Nora Johnson in “The Captivity of Marriage,” her 1961
Atlantic Monthly
article. “Great numbers of friends are a luxury she can no longer afford; old friends often diminish in importance, which she is sorry about. But there is a limit to her capacity for giving affection, and maintaining old friendships at their original intensity requires an effort she hardly has the energy for. Besides, she is often forced into unwanted and demanding friendships with the next-door neighbor, the boss’s wife, or the ladies’ club chairman, and she must learn to cover up her real feelings … It can be painful to find oneself isolated, in marriage, with problemsthat have always been shared with mother or girlfriends, and to realize that there are some things that even one’s husband cannot be told.”
I can’t necessarily relate to being forced into friendship with anyone at a ladies’ club, but the isolation Johnson writes of is still very real almost fifty years later. The problems that I’ve always shared with girlfriends cannot be foisted on Matt. Not because he doesn’t want them, but because I need to sort through them
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