In modern life, it is normal and necessary for everyone to have their own friendships. Friends help us share, relieve pressure, and maintain personal identity after marriage. However, many families fall into stress, even break up, just because friendships exceed the necessary limits of a married person.
The problem is not whether there are friends or not, but how to treat friendship so as not to hurt the marital relationship.
The boundary is clearly the foundation of marital safety
The most common mistake is to equate "freedom" with "no boundaries". When entering marriage, all intimate relationships outside need to be placed within the framework of respecting the partner. Texting too much, confiding in the private affairs of husband and wife with friends, especially friends of the opposite sex, easily creates emotional mismatch.
Many people argue that "it's just friends", but forget that human emotions do not operate by pure reason. When empathy, understanding and sharing are concentrated in another relationship, marriage will be disconnected.
Dr. Shirley Glass - a famous American family psychologist, author of "Not Just Friends" - once warned: "Emotionalism often starts from friendships without clear boundaries. It's not noisy but powerful enough to destroy marital trust.
The boundary here is not prohibition or control, but self-awareness: not hiding, not being too intimate, not letting friends become emotional shelters instead of their partner.
Prioritizing marriage and transparency in relationships
Another important principle is to prioritize marriage. When time, energy and care are given to friends more than to the wife or husband, imbalance will appear. The partner may not say it out loud, but the feeling of abandonment will gradually accumulate, becoming distance.
Transparency is the key to helping friendship not become a threat. The fact that your partner knows who you are playing with, in what circumstances, how to talk is not a loss of freedom, but a way to build trust. Relationships that need to be hidden are often relationships that have problems.
Dr. John Gottman - marriage psychologist, co-founder of the Gottman Institute in the United States - said: "Sustainable marriages are built on trust and emotional priority. When a person constantly turns out to seek understanding, it is an alarming sign for marital relationships.
Connecting friends with family life is also a healthy way. When friends meet and socialize in the common space of the family, the relationship will naturally be placed in the right place, reducing the risk of misunderstanding and distance.
Marriage does not require people to give up friends but requires maturity in maintaining relationships. A beautiful friendship is a friendship that does not make others feel insecure. A solid marriage is a place where everyone knows how to return, instead of looking for compensation outside.
Knowing how to keep boundaries with friends, in fact, is protecting your own home.
