I turn 30 this year. I am 29 and not married and most of my friends are not married, but a good deal of us are getting there. Plus-ones have evolved into girlfriends and boyfriends and partners. Which is all to say that I am spending more and more time with Other Peoples’ Boyfriends. Historically, I have been known to be very hard on boyfriends, prone to eyeballing some new unfortunate plus-one and starting in with “so, what’s your deal anyways?” I’m a tough nut to crack and I am bad at playing nice because I often forget that I am supposed to. [For the purposes of this essay, Your Boyfriend is a stand-in for all varieties of romantic partners. The basic principles hold true for many combinations of genders and sexualities, but this phenomenon feels most salient in my friendships with straight cis women who are dating straight cis men.]
Luckily, my friends have picked non-awful significant others for the most part. Their boyfriends, probably, are fine. Some are fine in the way oatmeal is fine (blandly nice), some are fine in the way an October release Oscar bait movie is fine (forgettably pretentious), some are fine in the way your friend’s dopey drooley rescue dog is fine (sweet from a distance but please don’t ask me to dog-sit). These are—yes—specific subtweets. Sorry not sorry to my friends’ exes.
In the past decade my stance towards these boyfriends has softened from animosity to neutrality. There are numerous factors leading to this exceedingly generous position. One: straight men do actually improve with ten years’ worth of personal growth and maturity. Two: believe it or not, I am less of a stone cold bitch than I once was. Three: I have accepted that my opinions on this issue are actually irrelevant. In my early twenties, I was baffled that my friends, my beautiful, dazzling, sharp-witted, insightful friends could pick such mediocre men. These are people with whom I could spend hours upon hours engrossed in conversation about ideas! Art! The ways in which our feelings and perspectives shifted day by day and moment by moment. What on earth were they talking to these men about? These perfectly nice men for whom my ordinary conversational prompts seemed like an unpondered novelty they were considering for the very first time.
Four years into my own relationship I understand that what we need in a partner is often very different than what we are drawn to in friendship. In friendship, in family, I love debate. I love a rowdy, loud conversation about ideas. I can be a little cutting, a little brutal. I want to talk about concepts, want to pass judgment about whether or not a memoir is trite. Sophie hates all of these things. We can and will have thoughtful discussions about things that matter to us, but she shirks back from anything that approaches combativeness. If you had told me at twenty that my partner wouldn’t be interested in spirited debates about articles on the internet I would have been taken aback. It seemed to me that is mainly what I did. But in reality that is not what I needed in a girlfriend. If I spent every evening yelling about hypotheticals until I went to bed I would be exhausted. I access that part of myself– that combative, sharp side of me so much of the time. My relationship is a place for me to tap into the gentlest version of myself– my goofy soft underbelly left unguarded. We were friends first, but the part of me that desperately, doggedly pursued her was the part that realized that she was different from my other friends, that this was a person I needed to rebalance me at the end of the day. Sophie is a deeply kind and generous person, and with her I am my sweetest and most patient self.
Your partner fulfills a different role than your friends, and thus you fulfill a different role in your friend’s life than their partner does. If you were the type of person your best friend needed as a romantic partner, they would have dated you– and they didn’t, so their ideal mate is probably someone who compliments the parts of them you don’t. You and their boyfriend are two necessary but unrelated species in the ecosystem of your friend’s life. They are a red panda to your pollinator, a Bigleaf maple to your elk, maybe even– in the most contentious version of this– the grub to your grub-eating lizard. Surprisingly enough, grubs and grub-eating lizards rarely become best friends!
This brings us to the fallacy of the double date. Societally, we assume that because we have so much in common with our friends, we will also share our tastes in life partners. Our soulmates will be friends because we are friends– two parallel couples with parallel dynamics forming a Venn clover of group compatibility. And sometimes that is the case— a perfect symbiotic quartet effortlessly sharing a table for four.
But just as often the Venn diagrams form not a clover, but a chain. Your girlfriend’s friend aligns with a piece of her you don’t fully relate to, and that friend’s boyfriend completes the opposite piece of his girlfriend than your girlfriend does, and the next thing you know, you are at a hockey game with a perfectly fine boyfriend you have absolutely nothing to talk about with. He asks me if I surf and I apologize that I am actually afraid of the water, and I ask him what it is like to be a corporate lawyer and he says it’s stressful and I say I bet. I’m sure he thinks I’m fine too.
I used to wish for a more engaging, dynamic love for my friends. Now I know that all love is mystifying– what could be more dynamic than bearing witness to the incomprehensible? In my most benevolent moments, I am even grateful to these Fine Boyfriends for making my gorgeous, brilliant friends feel seen in whatever ways I have failed to as a friend. May their happiness burn eternal.
Please don’t text me and ask me if this essay is about your boyfriend. He’s probably fine! And if he’s not I will lie to you and tell you that he is—it’s really not any of my business.
Paid subscriptions are still paused! If you made it this far without subscribing maybe we should fix that mmm?
As someone who is on a lifelong journey of learning to being comfortable with my own needs in a romantic relationship vs. what I think I should need based on other's relationship dynamics, this was a refreshing piece to read!
Any chance you're turning paid subscriptions back on soon? I'd love to read some of the old posts you currently have locked for paid subscribers. Especially the one about your house purchase!
Never thought about how your partner is what you need that's different from what your friends give you. Love this!