Image via WikipediaIs your spouse your best friend? The one person that knows you better than anyone else. You can turn to them when you are down, when you need a hug or a shoulder to cry on?
When marriage can promote friendship between husband and wife it can become a safe haven for expressing ones emotions and knowing that the other person really cares about you and loves you.
When a person has to hide their emotions from a spouse or is unable to tell their spouse how they really feel then the spouse is not a best friend. When a person goes outside of the marriage to be understood or to find a friend then the intimacy of friendship in the marriage is compromised.
People have forgotten how to be friends with their spouse or have just given up trying. Without the friendship in the marriage it is difficult to work on the rest of the marriage, the intimacy in the marriage, the love or the passion in the marriage that was once there. Couples get into a pattern of being stuck and sometimes just don’t know how to start to be friends with their spouse again. Others have found that maybe the person that they married is not the same person anymore and the relationship and the friendship have changed.
Nurturing friendship in marriage has to stat with wanting to have your spouse as your friend, seeing the value in the relationship, and taking the steps to add the friendship back into the marriage. The steps that a person takes to put the friendship back into the marriage are similar to the steps that were taken to get into the marriage to begin with. The steps are about dating your spouse, getting to know what they like, what interests them, showing affection, listening, communicating and doing all the steps that you would be doing if you wanted to really get to know that person. Get involved in an activity that you both enjoy, it can be cooking, hiking, yoga, skiing, whatever it is that you both may enjoy. This is called nurturing the friendship, just like you nurture a child, or a pet, it is the same concept as nurturing the friendship in the marriage. It takes time, and persistence and willingness to want to make it work.
The benefits that will come from your spouse being your best friend are enormous, and as couples grow older and age together, many times it is the friendship in the marriage that the couple relies on and depends on. When couples nurture the friendship in the marriage, then they know that they have a friend in their spouse to be there for the good times and the bad times, in sickness and in health and most important to have a friend to grow old with.
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