The post 9 Signs Your Partner Is Also Your Best Friend first appeared on Crafting Your Home.
“Best friend” gets used loosely when people talk about their spouse or partner sometimes as a genuine description, sometimes as a slightly awkward stand-in for “we’re close.” Researchers have actually studied the difference, and it turns out the distinction matters more than it sounds. Here’s what the research says it looks like when a partner is a true best friend, not just a label.
You Genuinely Enjoy Their Company, Not Just the Relationship
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Psychologist John Gottman’s Sound Relationship House model places deep friendship as the foundational layer that everything else trust, commitment, intimacy is built on. That friendship isn’t assumed; it’s built through ordinary curiosity about each other’s inner world.
You Ask Each Other Real Questions, Not Just Logistics
Gottman’s research identifies “Love Maps”, a detailed, continually updated mental map of a partner’s inner world as a core part of relationship friendship. Couples build this by regularly asking open-ended, genuinely curious questions about each other, not just coordinating schedules.
You Notice and Say the Good Stuff Out Loud
Gottman’s studies found that unhappy couples tend to register only about half of the positive things happening in their relationship, while content couples actively notice and acknowledge them. Pointing out something you appreciate, however small, is one of the clearest markers of an intact friendship.
You Respond When They Reach Out, Even for Small Things
Gottman’s concept of “turning toward” bids for connection responding to a partner’s comment, question or glance rather than ignoring it is, in his research, one of the strongest predictors of relationship stability. Friendship, in this framework, shows up less in grand gestures and more in a high rate of small daily connections.
Related: The Mind-Body Connection: Why Mental Health Fuels Better Intimacy
You’d Pick Them as Your Best Friend, Not Just Call Them That
This distinction turns out to carry real weight. A National Bureau of Economic Research study by economists Shawn Grover and John Helliwell, using long-term UK survey data, specifically asked people to separately name their best friend. People who spontaneously listed their spouse not people who were just asked if their spouse was their best friend were about twice as likely to report higher life satisfaction from their marriage.
The Friendship Adds Something Marriage Alone Doesn’t
Grover and Helliwell’s research found that the well-being benefits of marriage were roughly twice as large for people whose spouse was also their best friend, compared to married people generally. The effect held up even after accounting for prior life satisfaction, suggesting the friendship itself not just being married is doing real work.
Your Connection Doesn’t Fade After the Early “Honeymoon” Stage
The same research found that married people showed a less pronounced dip in life satisfaction during midlife than unmarried people, and the researchers suggest friendship is part of why those benefits don’t taper off the way early-relationship excitement typically does.
Related: 7 financial-problems-that-tear-older-couples-apart
You Can Be Dissatisfied with the Marriage Itself and Still Value Each Other
A 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychology analyzing more than 1,000 married individuals found that unhappily married people weren’t all the same: one group was dissatisfied across every area of life, but another group reported low marital satisfactionwhile still scoring close to average on friendship and family satisfaction. It’s a reminder that friendship and romantic satisfaction, while connected, aren’t identical and that a strong friendship can be a separate asset even during a hard stretch.
You Can Laugh About the Hard Stuff Together
Gottman’s writing on friendship describes healthy couples as tending to “glorify the struggle” looking back on difficult, shared experiences with a kind of fondness while couples with weaker friendships stay stuck focusing on the struggle itself. How a couple narrates their hard times together, more than whether they had hard times, is itself a signal of friendship underneath.
What This Doesn’t Mean
None of this means a spouse has to replace other friendships, and relationship researchers interviewed on the topic have been direct about that: it’s not necessary for a good marriage, and some experts note a real best friend typically offers unconditional acceptance in a way no single relationship, romantic or otherwise, can fully provide on its own. The research isn’t arguing your partner should be your only confidant Just that when friendship is genuinely there, it tends to show up in these specific, measurable ways.
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