My brother’s wife often refers to him as her best friend, and for some reason I find that term so completely inadequate. DH is …everything. I have friends, and so does he. I love him AND I like him, it’s not that. In Game of Thrones terms, he is my sun and stars.
I put “DH” and “best friend” in different categories. To me he is my husband, my family but I have a number of incredibly close girlfriends, who I consider my besties. A couple from HS but also from adult life. This is making me think about how DH and I communicate.
My DH traveled extensively for work over the past few years, and I think that impacted our communication. He is here now, mostly retired, while I have returned to the office a few days a week. I tell him almost everything, but certainly there are some things that girlfriends have asked me to keep confidential, so I do. Would those of you that tell you DH everything not be willing to do that?
We are on the same side politically, passionately so. I would find it very hard to be married to someone that was on the “other side”, as my politics reflect my world view.
I am fairly private and keep some things to myself or within the family, in part because friends have told me things that I don’t think should have been shared. Not in a malicious or gossipy way, but reduces my trust.
I am also not that much of a talker, more of a listener. I sometimes struggle to find things to talk about with DH and even my kids, but less so with friends, because most of them are talkers. While DH and I get along great and have fun together, I think we definitely need to work on our communication.
H and I share everything, so no “secret” would be guaranteed not to be shared.
That said, there are some things he doesn’t really care to know about in other people’s day to day lives and I don’t “force” him to hear those things. He’s ok with my saying “typical female stuff” or “typical day to day stuff” as a summation if he asks what _____ and I were talking about on the phone or at lunch or similar.
In the same way he sums up a bit of his talking with work buddies or high school friends.
He’d be disappointed if something “big” happened to people we both knew and he was left in the dark while I knew about it ahead of time, so that will never happen. (Divorce, cancer, cool award coming, etc)
DH took his time before telling me BFF’s husband confided in him that he was going to leave her witihin a year. These two guys weren’t close, at all. I never revealed to BFF that I knew. Had the situation been that I knew first, I think I would have shared it with DH- for the discussion of what to do, how to support her. (She was his friend before I met him.)
He used to forget to tell me things like a friend’s wife being pregnant or someone in the hospital. Def put me in an awkward position. But, so be it. In retrospect, he needed his own processing time on some subjects, before putting them, so to say, on the table.
It wasn’t the talking, per se, that bonded us. It was the teaming. The reliability of that, the trust, and more. Helped that we had buckets of “like,” not just love.
Interesting thread.
Is best friend the same/similar to soulmate or is that an entirely different topic? I saw the new tv show “Soulmates” on AMC and thought of this thread.
What best friend means to me doesn’t say enough about our relationship — borrowing the words of the Bard, he is my bright particular star. He is the person that I trust the most and the one with whom I would share the most intimate thoughts. We enjoy our time together but we also do things separately. There are things that he enjoys that I would not and vice versa but we complement each other to make a great team.
I have one BFF whom I have known all my life; other than that I’m close with my D, my sisters/-in-law and a couple of friends. Being an introvert, I don’t make friends quickly nor do I open up easily.
In my small circle of friends I can see perhaps one couple who would call themselves one another’s best friends.
doschicos I’m sorry your child is going through a breakup. I can only imagine how difficult it is as a parent — neither of my kids has yet had a serious relationship.
These lines of poetry came to mind as I was catching up with this thread.
And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also,
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?
Seek him always with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
Edited to fix typo
I am a great confidante. If a friend tells me something and asks me not to say something to anyone, I won’t, and that includes my H. That said, my friends know H and I are generally a package deal and I can’t imagine any of them telling me something that would be hurtful to my H if he didn’t know, if that makes sense.
I likely would not share a confidence with hubby/best friend (or any other best friend). But since I mostly hang with him and don’t have other pals that talk about highly personal matters I don’t really have an example to validate the answer.
For the record, when I say my husband is my best friend, he is - but he’s a whole lot more, too. 
My kid has been very heartbroken. Lots of sadness and self-blame. For the first time today, though, I’ve seen some anger about it as well which I take to be healthy and moving on to another stage in the grieving process.
I’m glad my husband and I can be there with support for our kids when they go through things like this - that’s what family is for. But, I’ll tell ya, it’s exhausting at times.
I’m a good secret keeper but I will tell my husband many things but he’s a great secret keeper, too, and doesn’t engage in gossip or chit chat at all so…
I miss my high school best friends. I went to an all girl’s school and we were very close knit - read the same books, watched the same TV shows, had the same weird interests. I’ve never had that kind of closeness again.
My brother married my best friend from college. I still like her but she’s prickly and managing. I mostly don’t mind being managed but my husband and kids hate it. (DH gets along with her fine mostly now.) She tends to get super interested in things and it’s fine when I think it’s interesting too (right now it’s a lot of urban planning and form based code stuff which is right up my alley), at one point it was becoming an Episcopal priest (not so much.)
DH is my best friend now. We like the same books, TV shows, movies and games. I’m happy to watch Sci Fi and superhero stuff, he’s happy to watch Rom-Coms. He reads way more non-fiction and a lot of stuff that treads the line between philosophy and science. I like getting the Cliff Notes version. He’s happy to look at gardens and go to museums. We both love Chinese painting as well as western art. We both love traveling and easy hiking.
Hah, lots of yellow flags in the Chatte House if we’re talking about interests in common. Husband and I are more a mutually supportive Venn diagram than anything else. A few things we’re both really interested in, then a hilarious disparity in the ideal level and type of (in)activity on a free day.
But we’re dead on in agreement about how to use resources such as money and power.
The parents’ reaction to a child’s break-up can have a very significant impact on the child. Probably best to offer non-judgmental support.
The only couples we know who are not also best friends refer to each other with the prefix “ex”.
^^^ Haha, gotta laugh I guess. Wow that’s a bold statement. What a wonderful world we live in.
It may depend upon how one defines “best friends”.
My definition focuses on trust & respect.
The answer probably also depends on whether you live near your close childhood and college pals. In Colorado, in many ways I’m a situational loner. That’s fine because H and I share so many interests and views. But if old time pals lived here too, likely I’d have multiple best friends (H and them).
Neither dh or my kids are my best friends though I love them more than anything. For me, husband and child are elevated statuses, in a class all their own.
I have tons of friends. Dh says I am good at building community so, yeah, I have lots of villages. I would say that I have three bffs. One is a guy who I went to junior college with. While we don’t see each other for years at a time, he is someone who knew me best in my formative years. I know that I could depend on him for anything. I stayed with him and his wife when he was recovering from cancer. The next one is someone I met in my 20s, a former co-worker. We are so similar in our interests and have a special connection in thoughts and feelings. She’s now a therapist and probably truly understands me more than anyone. We used to have lunch once a month but thanks to Covid now we don’t and have to do with long phone conversations.
My third bff is probably what most would consider a conventional relationship in terms of lots of phone calls and texting (she lives 1,400 miles away now). She also is a former co-worker, and we were pregnant together. Our older sons were born a week apart. In some ways we have so much in common – sports and politics and kids – but we also are really different. She’s very religious, and I am not. I’m an optimist, and she’s a pessimist. Dh and I went to Italy to visit her and dh when they were there for a year. We share just about everything, the good and the bad, and we are able to tell each other the hard stuff, too.
Sounds like you should arrange an outdoor lunch on a nice day while they last. BYO. I bet it would be great to see each other in person, even if socially distance.
You are fortunate to have 3 friends like that. Most people won’t in a lifetime, I think. Probably speaks to you being good at being a friend.
Thanks, @doschicos I like to think that I am.
I like to talk, but I also like to ask a lot of questions, and people love to talk about themselves so it works. Also, I think lying is the worst thing in the world and am excellent at holding a confidence. I think people just know that they can trust me.
Amen. I wish more people thought that.
Interesting question.
Don’t exactly know what best friend is. ShawWife and I are in some dimensions opposites. She is a visual artist – expressive rather than conceptual. She’s extremely social and generous to a fault. She will have an enormous funeral. She has a magnetic personality and meets women regularly who later say they want to be her best friend. She already has a couple of those – but has many others. She’s gifted with her hands and mechanically. She can assemble Ikea products without looking at the directions – she just sees how it has to be.
When I met her, I was just completing my PhD in a STEM field and transitioning in a post-doc to a new field and began my career as a professor. I grew up in a family of academics where Aspergers was definitely present and so I learned no social skills. I skipped grades and entered an Ivy two years early. When I was trying to figure out my career, I saw a career counselor who did a lot of psychological testing and he said I was off the charts on abstract conceptual thinking (compared to other folks from the Ivy where I was a professor). I was painfully shy and taught myself social skills by studying, asking for help, and seeing a cognitive behavioral therapist (from one of the pioneers in the field as it was not at all well-known then). You would probably not know that I was shy. I am terrible with my hands. ShawWife would assemble something before I could have finished trying to comprehend the directions.
But, we’ve been married 36 years and mostly very happily. I have traveled half the time since I left academia and worked very hard to build a financial foundation. This year, we are together every day and really enjoying spending every day with each other. We bicycle together, go hiking together, make cappuccino for each other every morning, do a lot of things together. I skipped a lot of the art openings and museums ShawWife was going to. Both kids had serious problems growing up and we made a great team in solving them. Lots of work on those things together. We take great joy in that both kids are doing extremely well.
I made a couple of very close friends in grad school. Both are extraordinary individuals. I do a three-day “strategic planning for life” retreat with one of them every year in the mountains. We have always talked over our key life decisions (jobs, mates, pro bono activities, etc.) He is an unusually wise individual who regularly gets called by the rich and powerful to help them think through their biggest problems. He spends his time these days trying to get out ahead of the biggest problems the world will face, building teams to try to find solutions and then helping to get the solutions implemented. And, he tries to stay under the radar. I talk with him about all important decisions. Sounds ridiculous but is very impressive. The other has been my co-author since graduate school and my business partner. Incredibly smart guy. He is a professor at the place I used to teach. His wife is a little jealous of our relationship which has over time reduced our interaction from what it would have been. But, we also talk over lots of key life decisions. I have other friends who tend to be more situational – if we weren’t bumping into each other for other reasons (sports, wives, etc.), we might not see each other. There is one other guy, whom I met through ShawWife and his wife knowing each other, who I think I will try to draw in from the situational to the deeper level.
ShawWife draws on her friends for emotional insight and I draw on mine for long-term thinking. But we keep no secrets from each other. When people ask her to keep something secret, she tells them that she will tell me but that I can keep a secret (as I have to do that as part of my work). We trust each other and are/will be there for each other for anything important. We are deep partners in life. Is that a best friend? If so, yes.