Rethinking Calling Your Spouse Your Best Friend

Friendship is a beautiful strand in marriage—but it is not the loom. When friendship becomes the primary frame for a romantic union, the marriage often flattens into a pleasant partnership that lacks the awe, gravity, and spiritual depth that matrimony requires. Calling your spouse your “best friend” sounds tender, but it can quietly reframe a covenant as a convenience, a sacrament as a social bond, and a life binding vow as a lifestyle choice. Friendship should be present; it should not be first.

Why this matters

Language is a steering wheel. What we repeatedly call a thing subtly steers how we live it. Call marriage “friendship plus” and you will curate expectations of ease, mutual hobbies, good conversation, and low friction. Those are lovely—yet the core work of marriage calls for more demanding virtues: vow anchored fidelity, reverence, fruitful self gift, and a shared submission to something higher than both partners. Friendship can support these; it cannot substitute for them.

Friendship and marriage have different purposes

- Friendship’s telos is affinity. It thrives on chosen common interest, mutual pleasure, and symmetry.

- Marriage’s telos is covenant. It binds two into one flesh and one household before witnesses and, in many traditions, before God. It is ordered toward exclusivity, permanence, kin making, and sanctification.

Confusing these teloi invites disappointment. If you expect your spouse to be a best friend first, you’ll be surprised by the seasons when marriage asks for obedience to vows over preference, costly forgiveness over harmony, reverence over familiarity, and self sacrifice over self expression.

Covenant versus preference

Friendship is elective and easily exited; it rests on preference and reciprocity. Marriage is vowed and publicly accountable; it rests on promise and grace. When “best friend” is the primary identity, the relationship can remain secretly contingent—“as long as we get along.” But matrimony binds precisely so that the union survives the times you don’t get along: illness, disappointment, dry spells, conflicting callings, the bewilderments of raising children or caring for aging parents. The covenant secures the space where love can be rebuilt when it has been exhausted.

Reverence versus familiarity

Friendship excels at familiarity. Marriage requires familiarity and something rarer: reverence. Reverence is that stance of awe toward the mystery of the other, the sacredness of the bond, and, for many, the presence of God between you. Over familiarity erodes eros; reverence tends to it. When you primarily relate as “best friends,” you can drift toward roommate energy—pleasant, gentle, and gradually unmoving. A marital union needs tenderness and the trembling that remembers: this person is not my project or possession; they are a mystery I vowed to serve and to guard.

The erotic and the fruitful

Marriage is uniquely conjugal. The bodily union, its delights, its vulnerabilities, and its potential for children, distinguishes it from friendship. Friend first framing can unintentionally over intellectualize or domesticate the erotic. But eros cannot be managed like a shared hobby; it asks for pursuit, differentiation, and holy play. When spouses treat one another primarily as best friends, desire often fades into comfort. Comfort is good; consecrated desire is better.

Conflict and forgiveness

Great friendships often avoid deep conflict by drifting apart when values diverge. Marriage cannot. It asks for durable practices of confession, forgiveness, repair, and renewed trust. If friendship is primary, conflict can feel like a failure of the relationship; if covenant is primary, conflict becomes the forge that tempers love. The question shifts from “Are we still best friends?” to “How do we keep our vows right now?”

Household and mission

Friendship is largely about two individuals enjoying life side by side. Marriage creates a household with a mission: to become a generative cell of the common good, a sanctuary for each other and for the vulnerable who may be entrusted to you, a workshop of virtue where both are formed into truer selves. This mission asks for rhythms of duty, shared sacrifice, and leadership that friendship language rarely evokes.

Spiritual order

A deeply spiritual marital union orients both spouses to a transcendent source of meaning and moral authority. Whether you call it God, the sacred, or the Good, that vertical axis orders the horizontal bond. “Best friend” language pulls the gaze back down to compatibility. Covenant language lifts it: we are not just for each other; we are for something beyond us. Prayer, worship, blessing, and shared service become marital practices, not private hobbies.

Burdening the spouse

Another unintended harm: naming your spouse your “best friend” often burdens them with being everything—lover, confidant, therapist, co parent, career advisor, spiritual director, recreation partner. That totalization exhausts a marriage. Spouses need outside friendships and a community so that the marriage can major on what only marriage can uniquely hold.

The psychology of naming

What we name, we notice. If “friend” is the first frame, you will instinctively prioritize ease, humor, and low stakes disclosure; you will also be tempted to judge the health of the marriage by the temperature of affection rather than the integrity of promise. If “spouse” and “beloved” are first, you will notice opportunities for sacrifice, honor, and consecrated intimacy. Over time those choices shape the soul of the union.

Objections and clarifications

- “Shouldn’t spouses be friends?” Yes—friendship is a vital ingredient. Its trust, play, and companionship cushion the harder work. But it’s a seasoning, not the stock.

- “Isn’t calling my spouse ‘best friend’ just a cute shorthand?” Perhaps—but shorthands form scripts. If the script you repeatedly rehearse is friend first, don’t be surprised when the marriage performs like a friendship with benefits.

- “Does reverence kill fun?” No. Reverence deepens fun. It turns play into celebration, sex into sacrament, and ordinary days into liturgy.

How to honor marriage without diminishing friendship

- Use covenantal language. Introduce your spouse as “my wife,” “my husband,” “my beloved,” or “my covenant partner.” Words invite posture.

- Practice rituals that signal sacrament. Weekly date nights are good; also keep weekly blessing, shared prayer, Sabbath rest, or a gratitude litany. Renew vows privately on anniversaries.

- Guard the mystery. Keep some parts of your story sacred—rituals, nicknames, prayers, or traditions that are not for public consumption.

- Tend eros intentionally. Pursue each other. Preserve difference and polarity in healthy, dignifying ways. Curate surprise, beauty, and play.

- Build a mission. Name a shared calling—hospitality, mentoring, service, creative work—and align time and budget to it. Couples who share mission anchor beyond moods.

- Keep other friendships alive. Don’t collapse the social universe into the marriage. Strong outside friendships reduce pressure inside the union.

- Create a rule of life. Agree on rhythms for money, time, sex, conflict repair, screens, spiritual practices. Covenant lives by rule, not by vibe.

- Fight as vows keepers. Use phrases like “Because I’m yours…” “Our promise means…” Replace win lose with “What protects our covenant?”

- Bless, don’t banter. Humor is welcome; contempt is poison. Publicly honor your spouse. Private teasing is fine; public reverence is better.

- Seek pastoral or elder guidance. A spiritual director, elder couple, or counselor helps keep the union ordered to the sacred, not to convenience.

A note on equality and roles

Friend first models often flatten difference in the name of equality. Marriage needs equality of dignity and mutual submission, but it also benefits from differentiated strengths and responsibilities that emerge from the couple’s gifts and circumstances. Covenant invites a dance, not a mirror. The aim is not uniformity but union.

The long view

Every marriage enters winters where affection feels thin. In those seasons, friend first marriages tend to measure the relationship by the dwindling warmth and declare bankruptcy. Covenant first marriages draw on a deeper account: vows, grace, reverence, and a shared yoke. When spring returns—and it often does—the love resurrected is better than the love that never died, because it has been chosen anew.

In summary

- Friendship in marriage is good, but insufficient as the governing frame.

- Calling your spouse “best friend” can unintentionally reduce a sacrament to a social preference, erode reverence, dampen eros, and burden the union with the wrong expectations.

- A deeply spiritual marriage thrives when friendship is nested within covenant: vow first, reverence first, mission first—companionship gladly within.

Let friendship sweeten your marriage. Let covenant define it. When you honor the sacred bond as sacred, you leave space for friendship to flourish without stealing the throne that belongs to something holier, weightier, and more life giving than friendship alone could ever be.

I am a global nomad/permanent traveler, or coddiwombler, if you will, and I move from place to place about every three months. I am currently in Peru and heading to Chile in a few days and from there, who knows? I enjoy writing articles, stories, songs and poems about life, spirituality and my travels. You can find my songs linked below. Feel free to like and subscribe on any of the platforms. And if you are inspired to, tips are always appreciated, but not necessary. I just like sharing.

YouTube Top Song List.

https://www.YouTube.com/results?search_query=julia+o%27hara+top+songs

Amazon PlayList

https://www.amazon.com//music/player/artists/B0D5JP6QYN/julia-o'hara

Spotify PlayList

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2sVdGmG90X3BJVn457VxWA

You can also purchase my books here:

https://www.lulu.com /spotlight/julie-ohara

I am also a member of Buy Me A Coffee – a funding site where you can “buy me a cup of coffee”

https:www.buymeacoffee.com/JulieOHara