To Strengthen Your Marriage, Invest More in Your Friends

When Bert Ellison experienced intense mood swings, the first person he turned to was usually not his wife, but Dan Driscoll, his close friend of more than two decades. During the first year of his Ph.D. program, Mr. Ellison was an emotional yo-yo, one day telling his wife that he wanted to quit, the next that all was well. Mr. Driscoll suggested that Mr. Ellison take the concerns to him first, easing the stress on their marriage.

“I didn’t make a vow to Dan on my wedding day,” Mr. Ellison told me, “but I’m able to uphold my vows, I think, more fully because I can process some stuff with my best friend before I bring a more polished version to my wife.”

Research has affirmed Mr. Ellison and Mr. Driscoll’s approach. A study measuring the stress hormone cortisol in married people found that spouses who felt satisfied with the social support they had outside of marriage showed less physiological stress from day-to-day marital conflicts than those who weren’t as satisfied. Just as in finance, in our social life, it’s wise to diversify our portfolio.

I’ve reaped these rewards from my own living situation: I share a home with my husband, two close friends and their two children. Our friends’ perspectives, passions and social communities have made my and my husband’s lives fuller and more dynamic. Sharing a space with friends has also created opportunities for me to discover new dimensions of my husband. One afternoon, I noticed him happily engrossed on the living room floor with our housemates’ toddler, who was endlessly uncapping and recapping markers. My husband was fascinated, he said, by how the toddler had developed, and in that moment, I admired his exquisite patience and attentiveness.

Through our setup, I’ve arrived at a clearer sense of what an ideal marriage looks like to me: not one where my husband and I are cocooned, gazing into each other’s eyes — as lovers are so often depicted — but looking outward, anchored within a circle of people we love.

This is something the ancient Romans would’ve understood. Some classicists argue that friendship played the central role in ancient Roman society that marriages do today. A Roman might refer to a friend in terms that people now use only for a spouse, such as “half of my soul” or “the greater part of my soul.” In the Byzantine Empire, pairs of male friends (who, in some cases, may have also been lovers) would enter Christian churches to be ritually turned into brothers, united for life. Some were buried together.