I've seen this a few places and conversation actually came up at dinner last week with my girlfriends about it. A friend of mine was talking about seeing a post on FB, basically her husband's former boss and friend wrote on his girlfriend's wall, "I'll miss my best friend!" She was going out of town or something inconsequential. She thought that was so strange. She says her husband is her best friend, but if he ever referred to her as such, or introduced her as his best friend, she would be mad. I should say that she thinks the boss was/is in love with her. She has high self-esteem, and thinks a lot of herself. Anyway, the rest of the table's consensus was that it wasn't weird in the slightest. Of course her husband would introduce her as his wife because they are married, but the boss and his GF aren't.
But it got me thinking. I don't think having it one way or the other is right or preferable, but I can't say my SO is my best friend now. I can chalk this up to a few things.
1) Our relationship is still relatively young (going on a year and a half), but I'm old enough to know we don't know everything about one another and we have a lot to learn in the next several years. Even after years together, engagements and marriages, people grow and change so you never really know everything about someone. You just hope to grow and change and discover things together.
2) We are "older"-we aren't really old at all, but we aren't 22-we have had a some life and experiences, both good and heart-wrenchingly bad, that we didn't go through together. You can always tell a person something, but they won't ever know what it was like to be there. He can know about the things I went through in HS and college, but he wasn't there like my friend J, or my friend T. That sense of history and experience together will come to us, but I have a much longer history of experiences with others, so to speak. As does he.
3) I think the idea that your SO is or has to be your best friend is kind of a new concept. Like engagement rings and wedding registries. In the History of relationships and marriage, I don't think your husband/wife as best friend became a thing until just recently. It could be because marriages through history were to keep a clan together, or for social status, or for reasons other than love.
While he is certainly the most important person in my life, and there is an intimacy there (not just physically) that I don't have with anyone else, I kind of like the divide right now between love/partner/confidante and Best friend/confidante. I guess for me, each person has their role and I would never expect one person to fulfill every role for me. I have no qualms saying that my BF is the absolute love of my life. I've never met anyone like him and no one has made me feel the way he does. I've said it before and I'll say it again, he loves me more than I love myself. But I still hesitate to say he's my best friend. Maybe those roles will meld together. Maybe not.
But I was wondering, is your SO your best friend? And why?