“I married my best-friend!” You’ve probably heard it a thousand times before. It’s become one of the most assumed catch-phrases about marriage for the last couple of generations. I remember the first time I actually put real thought into the assumptions behind this pithy phrase. It was our first year of marriage, and I was sitting at the table across from my wife after dinner. We were musing together, as we normally would do after a meal, talking about the day and whatever else came to mind. At one point, we were talking about some close friends of ours when the conversation suddenly turned inward. I remember my wife asking with genuine curiosity, “Are we best-friends?” I honestly didn’t know how to answer.
As an unmarried man, I had never had a second thought on the assumption that everyone who gets married is naturally the “best-friend” of their spouse. I could tell in the way my wife intoned the question, and by my immediate apprehension, that we both knew the answer. Somehow we knew merging these categories would spoil them both. But how is this the case, or is it the case? This question led me to explore for myself my own assumptions about friendship, marriage, and how my cultural lenses have warped the beautiful reality of both.
Giving Your Mom Dog Food
Basically everyone today would agree that, whether it’s your relationship with your mom, your dog, your friend, or your spouse, what we call “love” is the beating heart of that relationship. Christians know that this love is not some phenomenon humans invented. We know where love comes from—directly from the Father, the God who Himself is Love (1 John 4:8). In a mysterious way, the thick, dark vail between humanity and God shrinks and becomes see-through when we begin to really love.
Like God, love comes in all shapes and sizes—in fact, it has to in order to stay real love. You’d be certifiably insane if you thought you could love your mom like you love your dog and still call it “love”. While love for parents and love for pets are both real forms of love, they are forms that have to express themselves in different ways in order to stay what they are. Once the lines begin to cross and blur, we’ve strayed out of love into something unnatural. Of course, no one would disagree that feeding your mom kibble is a confused expression of love, but does the same apply to friendship in marriage?
Under, Over, Separate, One
The short answer is, no. A marriage could hardly be called a marriage without the kind of mutual good-wishing and supportive love that belongs to friendship. It goes without saying that if you cannot be friends with someone, your chances of having a healthy marriage with them is slim. But, does this mean we should call our spouse our “best-friend”? While there’s admittedly friendship in marriage, I think we make a dangerous mistake by combining the role of “best-friend” and spouse. In the process, we blur intentionally distinct categories which require distinct expressions of love. I think it’s in this combining of two distinct forms of love that a distortion of love takes place, revealing a warped cultural foundation of what we call love, friendship, and marriage. Let me explain.
Loving comes with a whole network of implied realities. In the way we express love of love we show our cards in the relationship. This can be felt in the astronomical difference between the phrases, “I love you” and “I love you like a brother”. The nature of the relationship and how we’re positioned in it is shown in how we love. The whole network of positioning in love becomes increasingly more complex and involved the nearer we come to the marriage relationship. Two lovers can teeter on the brink of obsession about what the other thinks of them, wondering how they’re positioned relationally in the mind of the other. However, while it wouldn’t be healthy for a mom to obsess over whether her son loves her like he loves the dog, it’s perfectly natural for lovers to draw lines between friend and “more-than-a-friend”. This is because the final marriage relationship is unlike any of the others.
Think of it this way, every expression of love in a different kind of relationship is essentially saying: I am under, I am over, I am near, I am far. Friendship is distinctive because it says, “I am separate, but we are close”. Close and healthy friendships happen when two separate individuals come near to each other while still remaining distinct. In fact, it’s often that separateness which gives good friendships their rich flavor. We’re aware something is off in a friendship when one person expects the other to be exactly like them. There must be a respect, and more notably, a love and enjoyment of the other’s differences. It’s why many good friendships begin with a common interest, something two individuals can gather around while staying individuals. It’s why we warn two friends not to live together in the same apartment, because the relationship will inevitably change when the amount of separate-ness changes. This kind of friendship is essential and grounding in the life of an individual. Marriage, as we will see, is a very different animal.
Two Become One
Christians have echoed through the centuries that the key distinction of marriage is oneness (Gen. 2:24; Matt. 19:5). Whereas in other relationships we can occupy the positions above, below, near, far, and beside, in marriage the whole compass goes haywire. In a mysterious way, which reflects God’s own mysterious oneness nature, the husband and wife really cease to be separate people and become “one”. This oneness becomes the grounds for their new expression of love, one that was impossible before in friendship. Marital-oneness was designed to be expressed in a whole expanse of unique ways, including: sexual union, sharing space, intimate curating of eachother’s hearts, remaining in mutal agreement, growing in like-mindedness, and sacrificing self-preferences. All these expressions then culminate into the one-of-a-kind parental love relationship. It follows our Maker’s prerogative to give of self and to “create” something that previously did not exist, and to do all this in love.
In a way, the husband and wife lose the ability to be “friends” in its most basic sense of being separate individuals brought together. They’ve gone beyond that, knowing full-well that by getting married they were surrendering a level of their individuality. Friendship-love continues to play out in the marriage, but on an advanced scale, accomplishing things which should never be expected in a friendship. But the question here isn’t whether or not there’s friendship in marriage—that’s like asking whether or not you can build a campfire on the surface of the sun. The question is whether or not you can consider your spouse your “best-friend”.
An Unholy Matrimony
I remember attending a friend’s wedding and feeling a twinge of dissatisfaction when the father of the bride gave a toast. He said something along the lines of, “Although you are brought together today in marriage, don’t forget that you are still two individuals.” I’m sure he meant well, but I couldn’t get over the confusion of the statement. It sounded more like what I would call a close friendship than a marriage. I have felt a similar kind of moral vertigo on the opposite hemisphere of the question, seeing people treat friendships like they are meant to have the same self-giving potency of marriage. It seems to me to be the spirit of the times that people want to maintain their isolated individuality while also demanding deep relational intimacy from friends.
I think this bleeds over into what we mean when we say, “I am married to my best-friend”. On the one hand, maybe it is just a benign statement about closeness and trust. But on the other hand, you can see the implied separation from the other, the tacit rejection of the natural intimacy of marital oneness for the sake of maintaining personal independence. I don’t think I’m splitting hairs here, I think this gets at something rotten in our culturally socialized understanding of marriage and friendship. Namely, the warped view that friendship needs to contain marital intimacy and that marriage needs to resemble friendship.
There is an assumption today, both inside and outside the Church, that the marriage relationship is supposed to fill in all your relational gaps. Especially in the Church, we overburden marriage to serve purposes it was not intended to fill. When Hannah and I got married, we were still in college and all our undergraduate friends were still single. At the time, I had some half-formed idea that after getting married, we would collectively have double the friends we had before as we both inherited each other’s friend groups. What turned out to be the case was quite the opposite. It felt like a heavy, stifling curtain had dropped between us and many of our friends. Suddenly our old friends weren’t sure how to relate to us. We’ve since learned that this was because of an unrealistic vision of marriage in their eyes. In our evangelical context, marriage had become seen as something like a miracle-drug, healing all relational needs. There was even a time in my single years when I would have assumed the same thing from what I was hearing from the pulpit. In reality, the ache for friendship and comradery remains even in the midst of a happy marriage.
A friend of ours recently commiserated how, growing up in a Christian home, her mom had very few friends. When she asked her mom, “Who’s your best-friend?” Her mom replied, “Your daddy’s my best-friend.” Even as a child, our friend understood it was unnatural to not have close friends as a wife and mother. We are right to assume we need both expressions of love, the intimacy of marriage and the comradery of friendship, but we are wrong to look for those things in the same person. When we do, we end up with neither, and we end up cheating ourselves and the other out of the life-giving love we were intended to experience. You were designed to be loved as a separate individual, as well as a unified one, in different relationships.
Why You Should Have a Best-Friend
Something I wish I had heard more from the pulpit growing up is how to make a best-friend. The term, “best-friend” might conjure up juvenile images of slumber party debates over who is who’s “best” friend. But, for me as a grown adult today, the term has taken on new value and significance. Beyond family and marital relationships, I believe we still have a God-given ache to be loved by a separate individual, one with no other ties to us except they enjoy our company and are interested in our life. The position of a best-friend is beside you, on level ground. You and your best-friend experience things separately but together, and because of that you experience things in a richer way together, the same way two distinct eyes are only able to see depth when looking together.
I cannot help but think of these kinds of deep friendships in the stories I grew up with, like Frodo and Sam or Jane and Elizabeth. In great stories of friendship, there is always a unique kind of affection distinct from any other. In my own admittedly limited experience with deep friendships, I’ve found they don’t have the same emotional weightiness of family or the marriage relationship. The love of a best-friend speaks a different language, communicated through subtleties and gestures, through understated allowances of confidentiality and attention. They build up your individual character and do not absorb you into theirs. They give from their pocket and their time without a sense of duty or obligation, doing so only because of their consistent concern for your good. The whole tone of the relationship is conveyed in a continuous mixture of genuineness and jest. They make life, even at its worst and most painful, light and pleasant by their very presence. The moment the atmosphere of friendship is touched by anything like marital intimacy is the moment it is spoiled. C.S. Lewis described this point well,
Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros [sexual love] betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. (C.S. Lewis The Four Loves)
There is a sacred place for best-friendship in our lives. It is a position every love touches to a degree, but none can replace. To have our sister or brother “from another mother” is more than a nice addition to life, it’s fundamentally necessary for fulfillment. Remember earlier, how I talked about love being one thing which must be expressed in many ways. I think we can conclude that love cannot be complete in someone’s life without there being a best-friend in the picture.
This is exactly why you should not ignore your need for a best-friend, or try to outsource the role to your spouse. In the absence of a best-friend, I know for myself you will always try to fill in that vacuum with other relationships that cannot replace it. There is much more that can be said about the value and distinctiveness of best-friendship, and I hope this can serve as inspiration for other articles and sermons talking about this neglected expression of love in the Church. For now, it is enough to seek after and cultivate those friendships wherever we can, because they are rare and beyond value today.
That You Might Know (Exodus 9)