If you want to improve your marriage, then you might want to start spending some more time with their friends, a study finds.
Being friends with your spouse’s friends has an impact on your marriage
A long-term study conducted on 355 couples found that in couples where the husband liked their wife’s friends, 70% of them remained together by the time the study ended. However, for couples wherein the husband didn’t have a good relationship with their wife’s friends, only 50% of them remained together after the study.
Of course, there are numerous factors that contribute to whether or not a couple will stay together, but being friends with your spouse’s friends does have a significant impact on a marriage.
Sex and relationships therapist Courtney Geter, LMFT, CST shares, “It is typical for spouses to bring up friends in conversations. If your husband makes a negative comment about your friends, you may feel unsupported or torn between two aspects of your life, if you don’t address your feelings and resolve the conflict, it could impact other areas of the relationship, such as enjoyment spent with your husband or even areas such as sex.”
Photo from: maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com
Get to know your spouse’s friends
According to psychologist Nikki Martinez, PsyD, LCPC, your spouse’s approval of your friend group is important since their opinion matters a lot to you. “This is the person that we love and trust the most, so their assessment of others around us matters to us,” she shares. She adds, “We want to know that they agree that someone is a good person, that they are likable, and that they enjoy being around them.”
That’s why it’s important for couples to at least extend the effort to get to know their respective spouse’s friend groups. They don’t necessarily have to be very close to their spouse’s friends, but being on good terms, or at least being able to spend some time to get to know them is a good way to start.
However, what can you do if you just don’t get along with your spouse’s friends? Is you marriage doomed to fail? Not necessarily. Just as you have your personal group of friends, you can have ‘couple friends’ or people that you’ve met as a couple, and both get along with.
Having friends and mingling with people outside your relationship is important as it allows distance for couples to miss each other, and it also gives the both of you new experiences that you can talk about once you’re together.
Source: rd.com
READ: Real couples share: The biggest issues they fight about