Eternally Hopeful 1776

I have some thoughts on the "marrying your best friend" conversation: I consider my husband my best friend, and we have an extremely interwoven life. Our moods affect one another, and the rhythm of our day-to-day lives is often influenced by how the other person is feeling. My husband is a deeply feeling man. He is steady, but he is also emotionally engaged, and his emotional world occupies just as much space within our marriage as mine does. He is not always the “container” for my emotions, nor would I want him to be. I did not marry a man whose purpose is to remain unaffected by me while accommodating everything I feel. I married a man whose internal world I want to know, experience, and be influenced by, just as he is influenced by mine. That said, a man's internal world can be incredibly difficult for a woman to understand because it can be an incredibly isolating place. Within the mental health community, this level of emotional interdependence is sometimes frowned upon or hastily labeled “codependence.” While I can appreciate the concerns surrounding excessive emotional enmeshment, I also believe we have become far too comfortable pathologizing relational closeness simply because it challenges our cultural obsession with independence. Marrying your best friend can be extraordinarily rewarding, but it is also demanding. It requires a willingness to discuss, adapt, listen, and remain receptive to feedback that is not always favorable. Both people must be capable and willing to do this, every single day. There is considerable discourse, emotional exploration, and intellectual engagement involved in maintaining a relationship where two people are so intimately acquainted with one another's internal worlds. Not every relationship can support this level of integration. Some people lack the capacity, willingness, or emotional accessibility required to navigate it, whether those limitations exist within themselves, their partner, or the relationship between them. And perhaps more importantly, not everyone wants it. Marrying your best friend is a dream I have the privilege of living every day, but it is also extraordinarily intrusive. It means allowing another person access to parts of yourself that many people would prefer to keep private, and accepting that their emotional experiences will inevitably influence your own. I don't believe we should be encouraging everyone toward this kind of marriage any more than we should be discouraging those who thrive within it. There is no singular arrangement of intimacy that every marriage must aspire to. Some people want two relatively independent lives that meet in the middle. Others want two lives so deeply intertwined that the distinction between them becomes difficult to locate. Neither arrangement is inherently superior. But pretending they demand the same things of us is a mistake. It's up to each of us to decide how you want your relationship to look, but two people that want different dynamics will struggle. Be honest with yourselves.

This is how you say delicious! Y’all should smell my kitchen right now. 😃 Coming soon…