What Are We Really Looking For in a Partner?

There is a phrase that appears constantly in modern dating conversations: “I want my partner to be my best friend.” It sounds romantic, reassuring and perhaps even obvious. After all, who would not want to deeply enjoy the person they choose to build a life with?

But I think there is an important distinction that is often overlooked. I absolutely believe there should be friendship within a romantic relationship. You should enjoy your partner’s company. You should be able to laugh together, have meaningful conversations, travel, share experiences, enjoy dinners, spend quiet evenings together and genuinely look forward to certain parts of your free time as a couple. What I question is the idea that your partner must also become one of your best friends for the relationship to be strong enough.

Those are not quite the same thing.

Today, many people enter dating not only looking for a husband, wife or long-term partner, but also searching for someone who can occupy a place alongside their closest friends. They want that feeling of effortless friendship, the person they can talk to about everything, someone who shares many of their interests, understands their humour and perhaps feels as comfortable as the people they have known for fifteen or twenty years.

There is nothing inherently wrong with finding that. For some couples it happens naturally, and it can be wonderful. My concern is when we transform it from a beautiful possibility into another compulsory criterion for choosing a partner.

Because modern dating already has enough criteria.

We Have Turned Dating Into a Search for Everything

The average person looking for a serious relationship today is often searching for a very specific combination of qualities. There must be attraction, compatible values, emotional maturity, similar family goals, lifestyle compatibility, good communication, stability, kindness, ambition, sexual compatibility, intellectual stimulation, humour and chemistry. Depending on the person, we can add religion, education, culture, social background, geography, career, financial habits, health, hobbies and dozens of smaller preferences.

Then we add: “And ideally, this person should also feel like one of my best friends.”

Each individual requirement can sound perfectly reasonable. The problem appears when we keep adding them together until the person we are looking for becomes almost mathematically impossible to find.

This is one of the contradictions of the current dating world. We have more access to potential partners than perhaps any generation before us, yet many people feel that finding the right person has become harder. Part of that is because more choice changes the way we evaluate people. When another profile, another date or another possibility always seems available, it becomes easier to focus on what someone lacks rather than asking whether what they offer is enough to build something meaningful.

Someone can be attractive to you, kind, dependable, emotionally balanced and aligned with your vision for family and life, but you may still leave a date thinking, “I am not sure we would ever be best friends.”

I think we should ask ourselves why that should automatically matter.

Best friendships usually develop over years. They are built through shared history, loyalty, difficult experiences, ridiculous moments, disagreements, reconciliation and thousands of conversations. Yet people sometimes expect to recognise the potential for that kind of bond after three or four dates. We are asking a new romantic connection to reproduce a type of relationship that may have taken a decade to develop elsewhere.

Perhaps we are simply asking too much, too early.

A Great Team Does Not Require Best Friendship

Coming from football, the comparison I naturally make is with a team.

Think about any great football team that has won major trophies. Eleven players step onto the field pursuing exactly the same objective. They need to understand one another, respect one another and trust that the person beside them will fulfil his responsibility. They have to communicate, sacrifice for the team, cover for each other’s mistakes and sometimes put their individual preferences aside because the collective objective matters more.

But those eleven players do not need to be best friends.

Some of them may be. Others may simply have enormous professional respect for one another. They may have completely different personalities, backgrounds, hobbies and social circles. They might train together every day, fight for one another during the match and then spend their evenings with completely different people.

None of that prevents them from becoming an extraordinary team.

In fact, some of the greatest teams in sport have contained strong personalities who would probably never have naturally become close friends away from football. What united them was something different: a common objective, mutual respect, understanding, discipline, selflessness and the willingness to fight for one another.

That is what allows teams to win trophies.

And I believe there is something useful in that comparison when thinking about marriage.

Your husband or wife is your teammate in life. You are trying to build something together. Perhaps that means children. Perhaps it means building financial security, creating a peaceful home, supporting each other’s ambitions, travelling, caring for ageing parents or simply navigating the unpredictable decades ahead as one unit.

To succeed, you need many of the same qualities a great team needs. You need shared goals. You need mutual respect. You need to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. You need communication. You need selflessness. You need to know that when life becomes difficult, the other person does not simply stop playing for the team.

Those qualities are not identical to best friendship.

You may have a friend you absolutely adore, someone you can speak to for six hours and laugh with constantly, but that does not automatically mean you could successfully build a household, raise children or make major financial decisions together. Equally, you may meet someone whose personality does not resemble your closest friends at all, but who could become an exceptional partner because the two of you function beautifully as a team.

Friendship and partnership overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

Your Partner Should Have Their Own Place

One of the things I find strange about the “partner as best friend” expectation is that it sometimes implies there is a hierarchy where the ultimate proof of closeness is promoting your partner into the same category as your closest friends.

I see it differently.

Your partner should have a place of their own.

Imagine a woman who has been best friends with another woman since she was twelve. They have shared school, university, heartbreaks, careers, family changes and perhaps twenty years of memories. Then she meets a man at thirty-five and builds a wonderful marriage with him.

Does her husband really need to compete with that friendship?

Why?

He occupies another role entirely.

He may be the person she trusts to build a family with. The person she wakes up beside. The person with whom she makes major life decisions. The person who supports her when she is sick, who carries responsibility with her and who is committed to the same future.

Her childhood friend may still understand certain parts of her differently.

That does not make the marriage incomplete.

The same can be true for men. A man may have two friends he has known since he was a teenager. They may have played sport together, travelled together and supported each other through multiple chapters of life. His wife does not need to recreate those relationships to become more important than they are.

She has her own position.

The mistake is thinking that every important relationship must offer exactly the same kind of closeness.

Quality Time Is Different From Best Friendship

What I do think is essential is quality time.

If you do not enjoy spending any time with your partner, there is clearly a problem. A relationship cannot survive purely on compatible values and practical cooperation. There needs to be pleasure in one another’s company.

But how much?

This is where couples differ enormously.

One couple may genuinely love spending almost all their leisure time together. Another couple may enjoy dinners several times a week, travelling together and Sunday afternoons as a family, while also maintaining strong individual friendships and separate interests.

Both relationships can be healthy.

There is no universal percentage of free time a couple must spend together to prove that they are deeply connected.

The quality matters more than the quantity.

Can you enjoy a conversation over dinner without constantly looking at your phones? Can you travel together without creating constant conflict? Can you laugh together? Can you share silence comfortably? Can you enjoy ordinary life together rather than only functioning when there is excitement?

If those foundations exist, why should you additionally require your partner to fulfil the emotional role of a best friend?

Perhaps your best friend is the person you want to spend an entire afternoon discussing football with. Perhaps your partner has no interest in football whatsoever. Does that make them a worse partner?

Of course not.

Your partner may bring something completely different to your life.

We Have Confused “Wonderful” With “Necessary”

This distinction is important far beyond the best-friend question.

One of the most valuable things someone can understand before dating seriously is the difference between what is necessary and what would simply be wonderful to have.

It may be wonderful if your partner loves exactly the same music.

It may be wonderful if you share every hobby.

It may be wonderful if you have identical humour.

It may be wonderful if your partner naturally becomes one of your closest friends.

But none of those things necessarily determine whether you can build a strong marriage.

Character matters.

Shared fundamental values matter.

Attraction matters.

Respect matters.

Trust matters.

The ability to communicate and repair conflict matters.

A shared vision for the future matters.

And perhaps most importantly, your willingness to operate as a team when circumstances become difficult matters.

Relationships inevitably experience seasons where romance becomes temporarily less glamorous. Children arrive. Careers become demanding. Parents become ill. Money creates pressure. One partner struggles. People change.

At those moments, the relationship is not sustained because you both enjoy exactly the same hobbies.

It survives because you remember that you are on the same team.

Could This Expectation Be Keeping People Single?

There is another uncomfortable part of this conversation.

Every time we add a new compulsory criterion to dating, we reduce the number of potential partners who qualify.

That is not automatically bad. Some criteria should absolutely reduce the pool. If you want children and someone definitely does not, that matters. If your values fundamentally conflict, that matters. If there is no attraction whatsoever, that matters.

But we should be more careful about eliminating people based on preferences that have gradually been elevated into requirements.

If you meet someone who has the character you want, shares your values, wants the same future, treats you well, is attractive to you and genuinely enjoys spending quality time with you, would you really reject that person because the relationship does not resemble the friendship you have with your closest friends?

If the answer is yes, it may be worth asking yourself where that expectation came from.

Was it learned from experience?

Or from movies?

Social media?

Relationship content?

The romantic idea that one person should fulfil almost every important role in your life?

There are standards that protect us from bad relationships, and there are standards that protect us from relationships altogether. The difficult part is knowing which is which.

What Actually Makes a Strong Partnership?

Perhaps the real question is not whether your partner feels like one of your best friends. It is whether the two of you have what is necessary to build a strong life together.

Do you respect one another? Are your fundamental values aligned? Can you rely on each other? Is there attraction and affection? Do you enjoy meaningful time together? Can you communicate when something is difficult? Are you both willing to compromise, contribute and sometimes place the needs of the relationship ahead of your individual preferences?

Those qualities may sound less romantic than saying, “I married my best friend,” but they are much closer to what sustains a relationship over decades.

There will naturally be friendship within a good marriage. You will laugh together, develop private jokes, create memories and understand one another more deeply with time. Perhaps your partner will eventually become one of your best friends. Perhaps they will not. Neither outcome tells me very much about the quality of the marriage on its own.

What matters is that you genuinely enjoy sharing part of your life with this person while recognising that neither of you has to fulfil every emotional and social role for the other. You can love your partner profoundly and still have friendships that offer something different. Your partner can do the same.

In a dating culture where people already struggle with endless choice and increasingly detailed expectations, we should be careful about turning every desirable quality into a requirement. The more parameters we add, the easier it becomes to overlook someone who could actually make us very happy.

So perhaps, when you meet someone promising, instead of asking yourself, “Could this person become one of my best friends?”, ask a different question:

“Could we build a good life together?”

To me, that is a much more important question.

Florent Raimy
Founder, Edwige International