Partners.

When I originally started this draft months ago, I intended to write about how I’ve rarely had the experience of being genuinely comfortable in a friendship with another couple—specifically, a couple whose relationship felt healthy and easy to be around.

I’ve always romanticized the idea of my friends’ significant others becoming my friends, too. Not necessarily best friends, but people I could comfortably spend time with. I imagined my friends’ partners knowing me, liking me, inviting me along sometimes, and feeling like part of the larger social ecosystem rather than someone standing on the outside of the relationship.

Instead, I’ve often felt an unspoken friction.

And if I’m being honest, some of that friction probably has less to do with them than it does with me.

I’ve spent a lot of my life struggling with platonic intimacy. Not because I confuse friendship with infidelity, but because vulnerability is vulnerability. Intimacy comes in so many forms: openness, quality time, compliments, shared interests, frequent communication, emotional honesty, feeling seen.

Those things are also the building blocks of romantic relationships.

So it makes sense that friendships can occasionally feel complicated when romantic partners enter the picture.

There can be jealousy. Competition. Fear of rejection. Insecurity. Sometimes even sexual tension, regardless of anyone’s actual intentions. There can be the quiet fear that someone’s partner doesn’t like you, that your friend will choose them over you, or that your friendship is slowly being replaced by a relationship you can’t compete with.

And I think I’ve sometimes responded to those fears by deciding I don’t like the partner first.

That is a much less vulnerable thing to admit than I’m afraid you don’t like me.

I’ve always been protective of my friends

I’ve also noticed that I can become extremely critical of the people my friends date.

Part of that probably comes from how much I love my friends. When someone I care about is unhappy, I pay attention. When they tell me about something their partner did that hurt them, I remember it.

And that creates a problem.

Best friends complain to each other about their relationships. It’s normal. We vent about the argument, the annoying habit, the thing our partner said, the chore they didn’t do, the insecurity they triggered.

But when you hear enough negative stories about someone, you start building a picture of them without ever realizing that you’re doing it.

Then, when your friend says, “But they’re actually wonderful,” you have to reconcile the person you’ve imagined with the person they love.

The truth is that I’ve sometimes wondered why my friends stay in relationships that seem to make them unhappy.

I’ve worried that they were sacrificing too much of themselves. I’ve worried about their independence. I’ve wondered whether they were settling or whether they were being held back from becoming the people I knew they could be.

But I’ve had to learn something uncomfortable:

I am not inside their relationship.

I don’t know everything.

I hear what my friends choose to tell me. I see what they choose to show me. I see their relationship through the tiny windows they open.

That isn't the whole house.

Every relationship has its own language

I think this is where I’ve had to become much more humble.

Every relationship is different.

Some couples tease each other constantly and genuinely enjoy it. I would probably cry.

Some people need a lot of independence. Others want to do nearly everything together.

Some couples have sex every day but struggle to make ordinary decisions together. Other couples rarely have sex but share an extraordinary intellectual or spiritual connection.

Some people need structure from their partners. Some need freedom.

Some people want their partner to remind them about appointments, chores, and commitments. Other people would interpret that same behavior as controlling.

There are couples who would be miserable with the amount of independence another couple considers perfectly normal.

There are couples who genuinely like being attached at the hip.

There are couples who spend most of their time apart and are completely happy that way.

There isn't a universal formula.

I can know what I need in a relationship without assuming that everyone else needs the same thing.

And that's an important distinction.

I don't always understand why partners don't try

There is one thing I still struggle with, though: feeling like a friend’s partner doesn’t make much effort to know the people who matter to them.

I’ve had friends whose partners I’ve known for years, and others whose partners I’ve barely met.

Sometimes that separation is completely reasonable. People are introverted. Socializing is exhausting. Work is demanding. Some people simply don't have much interest in becoming friends with their partner's friends.

That's okay.

But sometimes I interpret that distance personally.

When plans are made and a partner repeatedly avoids them, I can start wondering whether they dislike me. When I see couples spending time together without extending an invitation, an old insecurity whispers that I wasn't wanted there anyway.

And then I start constructing explanations.

Maybe they don't like me.

Maybe my friend doesn't want me around.

Maybe their partner doesn't want me around.

Maybe I've done something wrong.

Maybe I'm being replaced.

The reality is probably much less dramatic most of the time.

People have their own lives.

People have different social needs.

People don't have to want the same friendships.

And someone's lack of interest in becoming my friend isn't necessarily a rejection of me.

That's a lesson I am still learning.

There is something strange about seeing your friends at home

The few times I’ve spent significant amounts of time around friends and their partners, I’ve sometimes left feeling strangely disoriented.

People behave differently around the person they love.

There might be more PDA than I'm accustomed to. Maybe they argue. Maybe they have inside jokes that make absolutely no sense to anyone else. Maybe one person becomes quieter. Maybe the other becomes more playful.

Sometimes you see a version of someone you didn't know existed.

And honestly, I think that's beautiful.

Home is often where people stop performing.

We spend so much of our lives being socially acceptable versions of ourselves. We regulate our voices, our expressions, our reactions. We make ourselves easier to understand.

Then we go home and become weird.

We complain.

We get quiet.

We laugh at stupid things.

We become affectionate.

We become annoying.

We become vulnerable.

We become ourselves.

Getting to witness that side of someone can be uncomfortable, but it can also be a privilege.

It reminds me that no matter how well I think I know someone, I will never know every version of them.

I don't actually need to like my friends' partners

This might be the most important thing I've learned while writing this.

I don't need to like every person my friend’s date.

And they don't need to like me.

I don't need to become best friends with their partner.

Their partner doesn't need to become part of my inner circle.

We don't even need to have particularly similar personalities.

What matters is that we can respect each other's place in someone's life.

Because my friend is allowed to love someone I wouldn't choose.

They're allowed to see qualities I don't immediately see.

They're allowed to make mistakes.

They're allowed to stay.

They're allowed to leave.

They're allowed to change their mind.

They're allowed to choose a relationship that I don't fully understand.

And I am allowed to have concerns without making those concerns the center of their relationship.

That's a boundary I've had to learn.

There is a difference between “I don't think this relationship is good for you” and “I don't trust you to make decisions about your own life.”

The first can come from love.

The second can come from control.

I never want my love for a friend to become another form of control.

There is history underneath all of this

Some of my defensiveness around my friends' relationships probably comes from experience.

I've had friendships end because a significant other didn't like me, and my friend chose the relationship over the friendship.

Sometimes those romantic relationships eventually ended, too.

I was left with a particularly painful lesson:

I can love someone fiercely and still not be chosen.

After enough experiences like that, I think I started trying to protect myself before anyone could hurt me.

If I assumed my friend's partner didn't like me, then their rejection wouldn't surprise me.

If I decided I didn't like them first, I didn't have to care whether they liked me.

If I judged them, I could create distance.

If I made myself difficult to know, I couldn't be abandoned by someone who never really knew me.

That's not confidence.

That's armor.

And some of the things I've written about my friends' partners over the years probably came from that armor more than anything else.

To my friends, and the people you love

I don't want to be the friend who thinks she knows better than you.

I don't want to be the person keeping score between your partner and your friends.

I don't want you to feel like you have to defend the person you love every time you tell me something difficult about your relationship.

I want to be someone you can talk to without worrying that one bad story will permanently change the way I see your partner.

I will probably still worry about you.

I'm probably still going to have opinions.

That's part of loving people.

But I am learning that loving someone also means respecting their autonomy.

And to the people who love my friends:

You don't have to be my friend.

You don't have to come to every gathering.

You don't have to understand me.

You don't have to earn my approval.

But if you love someone I love, I hope you take care of them. I hope you celebrate them. I hope you encourage them to remain themselves. I hope you give them room to grow. I hope you show up when things aren't easy.

And if you do those things, then I'm happy you're there.

Because ultimately, I don't need to be part of your relationship.

I just want the people I love to be loved well.

And maybe that's the healthiest place for me to stand—not between my friends and their partners, not judging from the outside, but beside my friends, trusting them enough to let their lives belong to them.