To think it's totally normal to love and like your best female friend more than your husband?

[mimblefish]

What the title says, really. I am in constant contact with my best female friend. I adore her, she is the other half of me. My husband has never been remotely bothered about this, I love him and he's a nice man and I find him very funny and he is my best friend after her. We have never had any problems.

A bisexual friend of mine said recently that if she was married to me, she'd feel really threatened by my relationship with my best friend. Now, I am not sexually attracted to best friend at all. If it was between her and husband I'd probably pick her to pull out of a burning building, but that doesn't mean it's a romantic attraction. I get that things might be more complicated if you're not straight, but, eh. What do you think, mumsnet? AIBU to think lots of women love their best friends more than anyone but their children?

Great friendships are really important. But whenever I've had an intense female friendship like that it's always gone horribly wrong in some way.

Does your friend know how you feel about her? I would be a bit weirded out if it was me. In fact, a close (married) friend did at one point start describing me as 'the love of her life' and her 'life partner' and it was pretty uncomfortable. And the friendship didn't last, for lots of good reasons.

If you genuinely want to make a life with this woman, go for it. Otherwise maybe reel it in a bit.

I think it shows that you’re not that happy with your husband above anything else.

If you’re not attracted to her romantically then it’s different to a partner dynamic.

"If it was between her and husband I'd probably pick her to pull out of a burning building"

... Did I just read that sentence correctly? Youd let your husband die and save your best friend if the situation happened? Welp. You're not gonna be married much longer if he sees this.

As everyone has said. You and your best friend seem too close

You don't have to invest all your friendship in your dh though do you. No one said that !

mmm, my DW comes before my BFF - although I love my close friends I wouldn't be saving them before my wife...

@GreyShadow

Omg some of these comments. Call me a bitter old women but sadly, according to the most recent statistics, almost half of your amazing best friend marriages won't last. :(

Yes it's wonderful and great to have your husband as your best mate, but what happens if it ends?

Having a female best friend is deep and intense and they love you through thick and thin. I've had a 20 year marriage to my "soul mate" and two other long term relationships end, but my besties are still here.

One of my besties are also planning, half jokingly, our retirement together.

I genuinely feel sorry for those that invest all their friendship in their husbands. But as I said I'm old and have seen it all :)

So in answer to OP, yes I completely understand the deep love for your BFF. However the burning burning building situation I can't fathom, it's like asking which child would I pick.

I love my besties (I'm blessed to have 2) but it's a different love to a partner.

Completely agree with all of this!

My long lasting friends are not going anywhere and I have never put a man before them, never will. I have had friends though who have put their men before their friendships and they have ended up pretty lonely once their marriage has ended. I would never treat my friends that way.

I have been with my husband 20+ years and we have had good years and bad. There has been times where I have thought of leaving him and there has been times where I thought I would die if he left me.

Ultimately, I know it's quite likely we will get a divorce at some point down the line and the people who will help me through that are my best friends.

@newsyoucanuse

mmm, my DW comes before my BFF - although I love my close friends I wouldn't be saving them before my wife...

It must be different if you're attracted to women, though? Then your wife might legitimately have the same concerns about you being close to your best friend as my husband might if my best friend was a man.

As it is, we are all happy, there is no issue, friend feels the same way about me as I do about her and we are both happily married. We have been best friends since we were fourteen and now we are forty. We lived together for eight years. DH knew when I married him that she was an enormous part of my life and always would be; her husband knows the same about me. Believe me, I have been friends with people before where I've had to break it off because they got weird and couldn't "reel it in" but I don't need to reel it in with BFF! Adoration is mutual!

The burning building analogy has been taken a bit too seriously by some, I think. Obviously there isn't going to be a burning building. If there was I imagine it would probably be DH saving everybody!

He knows I feel like this btw, we have talked about it at length and he's said to me many times that he wishes society wasn't so nervous about male friendship, that lots of men suffer as widowers because they've been taught they need to get all their emotional sustenance from their wives, etc etc. Whereas because women have strong female friendships and nobody is standing in the background shouting GAAAAAAAAAAAAAY, we often don't suffer quite so much when we're widowed because we have better networks.

Those of you saying that partners come and go but a friend will always be there. Unfortunately, best friends can let us down, too. I did have a bestie once, but in the end I had to accept that I'd been wrong about her and she was just a user. (I lent her money which she never intended to repay as it turned out.)

There are also so many threads on MN about posters being betrayed by their best friend in the worst possible way.

For myself now, I have several very close friends. I don't see some of them much, but I know that we'll be there for each other if needed. Why just have one best friend?

Whereas because women have strong female friendships and nobody is standing in the background shouting GAAAAAAAAAAAAAY, we often don't suffer quite so much when we're widowed because we have better networks.

^100% this, however.

My husband IS my best friend

I think it’s lovely that you love your best friend so much and lovely that your DH accepts it. Who cares what your other friend thinks or anyone else for that matter? 🤷🏻‍♀️

I'm with you OP. I've been besties with my BFF for nearly 35 years. She's never let me down or hurt me. I trust her implicity because of this. I love my DH, but he has hurt me in the past. So yeah, in the burning building situ, it would be BFF I'd pull out (after ds, obvs)

What's all this "best friend will always be there" crap? These boards are literally filled with stories of friendships dying out.
Is it normal for best friends to support your family financially? Do you set up home with them and bring up children? Plan your retirement together? If the answer is yes then by all means prioritize them.

When my dc were young my dh went away for work for three months and the main thing I noticed was that I had nobody in my life who put me first. I was nobody's main priority.

For me, it's dh and I who are one unit. If someone crashes into me at a junction or my child gets to play Mary in the nativity it's him I want to call.

Describing your best friend as "the other half of me" sounds very strange to me!
But it doesn't matter what I think as long as all of you are happy.

I don't see why best friendships would be any more (or less) likely to be all enduring than marriages. Yes, marriages break up, but people fall out and friendships peter out too. So I don't really understand the notion that best friends would always be there with you but a partner might not be.

No, it's not normal at all. Do you love your husband? Are you friends as well as husband and wife?

DH is my best friend. I would rather spend time with him than anyone else. We can talk for hours and we laugh at silly things all the time. We have been married 40 years and never run out of things to talk about.

I’d push my best friend into the damn fire if it saves my husband. 😂
YABU. My husband trumps friends everytime.

Also you sound TOO close to your best friend. It sounds a little much.

I'd choose my DH but I can understand and accept you feel that way about your best friend without thinking there is any more to it.
I had some very intense and close friendships when I was younger, the nature of them has changed over the years but they were amazing at the time.

Adoration is mutual!

It’s not that which seems weird, I don’t think.

Do you feel you settled for your husband, out of interest? Was it everything you wanted it to be?

I have one very close and a few pretty close female friends. We’ve been friends for years and years. We’d all do anything for each other. But it’s a totally different relationship to the one with my husband... completely different. They’re not comparable.

AIBU to think lots of women love their best friends more than anyone but their children?

A list of people I love more than my best friend:

• my mother
• my sisters
• my husband

I think your relationship with her is very weird tbh.

I mean actually I would say that DH is my best friend. I love my female best friend, but she doesn't know nearly as much about me as DH does.

I think that women who've had more than one marriage or longterm relationship that has ended badly especially if it's involved the children's father drifting off and no longer being part of their lives must be very aware (understandably) of the potentially finite nature of romantic/sexual relationships. Perhaps that colours an attitude to longterm friendship as a more stable source of love and support?

(On the other hand, I'm also struck by how often on here the large numbers of women who post about being unhappily friendless and incapable of making friends have spouses or partners.)

I also think that at least some of the women who prize their female best friends over their spouses are the kind of 'Men Are From Mars/Men Can't See Dirt, Bless'Em'' women who think men are fundamentally different to women, unemotional, unobservant, inarticulate etc -- and simply never expect to have long, soul-baring conversations with them, because that's not what they think men are like and/or they have not married them.

I'm in agreement with PP saying it sounds like you've married the wrong man!

I felt like this with my best friend throughout all my past relationships but they were all deeply lacking (although I didn't admit that to myself at the time). I could never understand people who said that their DP/DH was their best friend and believed they were either lying or didn't have a proper best friend. Since meeting my current partner I feel totally different and I understand what those people were saying. I'm deeply in love with him and he is a brilliant friend to me, he feels like home and we also have a fab romantic relationship. All of those things combined make the relationship feel so much deeper than anything I could experience with my female best friend.

That's not to say I value her any less, I absolutely love the bones of her and am totally committed to our friendship and hope she will be in my life for as long as we're both alive but there are certain things I can't get from a platonic friendship.