Pitfalls of Marrying your Best Friend

Marrying your best friend romantic partner can be a wonderfully validating and rewarding experience. It has the potential to give you someone who is always there for you no matter what. The intimacy can be amazing. If a couple is lacking the closeness of a best friend relationship, they probably need to work on liking each other more. Perhaps they can figure out what they have in common, how they can spend more time together and what new subjects they can discuss. In other words, do what friends do. In my experience, the way married best friends are most likely to go wrong is in defaulting to be just best friends. When they get overloaded with the stress and complexity of married or family life, they tend to let the romantic, passionate and sexual parts of their relationship go. They seem to believe they can just pick up where they…

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Comment on marrying your best friend

I’ve noticed that more and more women are becoming practical about the realities of love and marriage. If they want to be married and have children,  they need to do more than just marry in time to accommodate their biological clocks. They also need men who can share the child care priorities and responsibilities. This requires the couple to be able to talk, discuss and negotiate as friends. There appears to be less risk of divorce, or at least ugly expensive divorce, between people who value each other’s friendship and plan to co-parent. With or without children in the picture, marriage is a big deal because of its social, legal and financial implications. It’s generally smarter and safer to tie yourself to someone who is your lover and your best friend.

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Marry your best friend?

I think there are multiple factors that have contributed to the trend of the last decade that has seen women combining the ideal mate with the best friend. Online dating, social media, texting and sexting have ironically made people feel more disconnected and anonymous in some ways. It’s entirely possible to link up with others and present yourself to the world without anybody ever getting to know who you really are. Life can be very lonely unless you have family or friends who know you and love you. We’ve also had the phenomenon of friends with benefits for quite some time. It doesn’t work for everybody. But I think the idea of combining friendship and sex has filtered into our consciousness. Our divorce rate has been soberingly high for a long time. It might now be starting to go down. The upsetting and expensive reality of divorce has made many…

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