To think that friends should always come before partners?

[HonestBrickSquid]

I value my friendships immensely and feel that friends should always take priority over romantic relationships. Is this a reasonable stance, or is it unfair to expect others to put their friends first?

I love my friends. But no, they dont take priority over my husband of 20years. I also don’t come first for them either and I wouldn’t expect to.

I think your question is really interesting. And important. I think most people prioritise their partners over their friends and your post makes me wonder why. Why are friends less important? Why do we create hierarchies of love?

Holiday with you or his mates every year, he goes with his mates. Can’t see you on your birthday because it’s his mate at work’s birthday too. Want a nice romantic night in, sorry my mates have asked if I want to go to the pub and a curry again, yes I know I went last week but still, it’s my mates. See how ‘always’ would work.

Friends and a partner need different things from you surely?

It all depends on the circumstances.

And if someone was being unreasonable or controlling.

But if it was an out and out need on both sides, I think partner would come first (like the example a pp gave where both need a kidney - assuming it was an actual life partner and not just a boyfriend/ girlfriend)

As lots of people have said, it’s because of the word you yourself used: they are your PARTNER.

The person who you are going to spend every day of the rest of your life with.

Sure, but when that life partnership dissolves because one party wants to have sex with someone else (and, lest you accuse me of cynicism, look at the divorce stats), surely it makes more sense to regard as friendships as more stable than your relationship with the person with whom you shared finances, credit score, children, bodily fluids, NoK status, children, until you suddenly didn't.

Continuing to want to have sex with one another is not necessarily the most stable or long-lived basis for an ongoing relationship.

In the honeymoon stage there is little room for friends because the relationship is so intense, or probably should be, if it's not that's probably another problem. Once the relationship is ticking along plenty of room for friends too.

I disagree with you partly because partners that you marry become family which always come first imo! Family are really important to me so I would always put them first tbh

From my limited experience of divorces, one of the couple is definitely not prioritising their partner over their friends or their own desires. So, you’ve sort of answered your own question there.

I think children tend to push out friends more, particularly if the friend doesn't have children, common ground reduces and children are a pretty full on commitment.

I think there should be a balance

It is very true, no matter the age, that when a new man comes along, friends generally get dumped.

I can't speak for the situation with men and new relationships

See I even disagree with this. We are past the honeymoon stage, we’re married and have a home and child together, so we have very limited “free” time between work, keeping on top of the house/life admin, looking after a baby etc. If my husband and I have 1 child free night a month and we choose to spend that going out separately with our friends, how long do you think our marriage would stay healthy and loving?

How long do you think a couple stays happy and in love without having any true quality time together? Not long.

Do you ever consider friends part of your family? If not why not? I'm finding this subject quite fascinating.

I think your phrasing in the OP is quite confrontational and too general. It doesn’t make sense to me that friends always come before a partner, or indeed family or a career or any number of other things that people reasonably value in their lives. I’ve moved for jobs and for a relationship, in both cases knowing that it will obviously impact friendships by adding distance.

But I do agree that it’s crap for friends to just disappear when they get a partner. A very close single friend of mine complained bitterly about friends and family not having enough time for her because of their partners, then dropped me immediately when she met someone. I was, still am, really angry about that. I felt used and discarded (btw I’d been in a relationship for a while and managed to consistently make lots of time for her). It’s not okay to just forget people because you’ve gotten wrapped up in a new romance. Friends aren’t placeholders for a boyfriend. I also think a good network of close long term friends is really important for mental health and stability in case of major life changes.

Sounds like you need better friends, if yours are tending to go awol whenever a man is available.

It’s a balance really.

For me family comes first - including long term partner/husband/wife etc

But having your own friends is very important too. You should make time for them outside of your partner and away from your partner. There are things that are important to your partner where you will put them first and theres things that are important to your friend where you will put them first. There will be however higher number of these things with your partner.

I would generally expect a woman to prioritise her husband over 20 years over her friends. But the people who have been seeing each other for a few weeks and already neglecting their existing friends are very annoying.

In your OP you've put that friends should ALWAYS come before partners. That's obviously not true. It's entirely context dependent. Also, I would consider my partner a friend (one of my very best friends) as well as a romantic partner. Life isn't this black and white.

Er no 🙄 I love my female friends but DH is my best mate, otherwise why would I have married him? I can’t understand your thinking OP.

I am divorced (not because of cheating or anything terrible) and still think i made 100% the right decision to prioritise my exH because we had a life together. When we divorced, my friends didn't take the place of a husband - they were great companions, and supportive and incredibly close but they weren't holding my hand at night, or making life decisions and choices with me, or building a life with me. And that's how it should be - I would never want a friend to replace a partner. Too many women go wrong by substituting friends for life partners and then being upset when these friends find their own life partners, have children, prioritise parents, careers, hobbies, other friends etc.

Now that I'm with DH, I have the same policy I did with my ex. I want my friends to live their own lives, have adventures and priorities outside of me - and I feel grateful that they choose to include me in their lives. I value our time together. But my DH and I have a joint life together. When my mum gets too old to live on her own, my friends aren't going to open up their homes to her, my DH will because it's our joint home and it's a commitment we've made. Similarly I'd do it for my MIL, not my friend's mum.

Marriages last because there's a love between 2 people you can never replicate in friendship. The love might go and you might end up alone, but that's just life. Prioritising friends still won't get you the benefits of that partnership.

I've been with my husband since we were teenagers, he's my best and oldest friend. We've moved around a lot so tend to have acquaintances rather than friends, there is no one outside of our nuclear unit I'd put ahead of DH.

I'm completely open to having more in-depth friendships, but it just hasn't happened thus far.

Sure some have. But when people are single, especially when young, their friends are their day to day life. When I was in my early 20s, I'd spend the day with my two best friends, go home to change and go back out with them all night. Now, I'm still friends with those two women but getting together is rare, especially all three of us together, even though we all live relatively near each other. It's great when we do get together but I wouldn't expect to see them weekly, nevermind multiple times a day.

And it's an absolute wrench to have the people you see constantly become someone you see every now and then. But it's also natural. Just like our children go from needing us every moment, to sometimes living on the other side of the world. Relationships naturally change massively. The only one that has no natural end other than death, is marriage/life partnership. If it ends before that, it's because something has gone wrong, whereas all other relationships only stay the same if something has gone wrong.

I have never had to choose.

Interesting. Not sure of your age still but I have a group of friends who were each others main support system all through teens and 20s, men came and went. By early 30s though they were all (at slightly different times) starting relationships with men who would go on to become husbands and fathers of their children. They did prioritise those relationships because that is what mattered most to them… marriage and family. When everyone was at different stages the group was very fractured with the single ones unhappy at the time and priority the coupled up ones were giving their relationships. Eventually everyone bar one did end up in the same position and friendships stabilised again. The one person who didn’t meet anyone (despite the others still carving out time but not the same time as before for her) cut off the group which is and was very sad.

I think both are very important. Friendships should not take a complete back seat to romantic relationships especially in the early days, but equally if you're getting married and starting a family with your partner (even if that family is the two of you) then I think that relationship does become more important especially if it's the family unit you're maybe raising children in. To me, good friendships are the ones that withstand all the changes that happen in a lifetime and that allow for your partner/husband/wife to be a really important person in your life - someone you've committed to in a major way. I would prioritise my husband over my friends if it was in a crunch. But a decent husband wouldn't put me in a position where that would be a problem either and would understand that at times I'd need to be more available to my friends than to him.

If you think friends should always come before a partner....then I actually don't think you understand what a romantic / life partner actually is.

If that's your attitude, I don't think you are suited to having a stable & committed partner. It sounds like you prioritise non-romantic, non-sexual relationships, and you need to find more people like you to not feel disappointed, and not run into issues with others.

Be prepared though, that it's not a one way system. You will be subject to the same attitude & treatment....which you might not be prepared for or like once you experience that.

For most people, a serious partner is not background noise or fluff when someone is bored with their friends. A serious partner is their number one person, their rock in life.

It doesn't mean that people should start being flakey, not following through with plans, with cancelling them at last minute. If they forget about their friends, some people will come to regret that later on.