Many people hear that the ideal partner is also your best friend, and then wonder whether their own relationship falls short. A recent American survey suggests the answer is more mixed than the saying implies. Having your partner as your best friend was linked to more companionship, while having a best friend outside the relationship was linked to more social support.
The study came from Natalie Pennington, a communication researcher at Colorado State University, and was part of the American Friendship Project, an annual survey of social connection in the United States. It was published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships in 2025, and the university announced it in April of that year.
The sample was 940 American adults who were in romantic relationships, including people who were married and people who were dating but not married. Participants listed the people they thought of as friends and then said what role each person played in their life, for example best friend, colleague, sibling or romantic partner. In other words, people decided for themselves who counted as a best friend. The researchers did not hand them a definition.
The comparison was between two groups: people who said their romantic partner was their best friend, and people whose best friend was someone other than their partner. The groups were then compared on companionship, social support, loneliness, life satisfaction and a general sense of connection.
Among the people who counted their partner as a friend, about 39 per cent said that partner was their best friend. Compared with earlier research, fewer people in this sample described their partner as their best friend.
The two groups differed in the kind of connection they reported. People whose best friend was their partner reported more companionship, closeness and more frequent interaction. People whose best friend was someone else reported more social support. Neither arrangement came out ahead on both.
On the other measures, the groups looked alike. Loneliness, life satisfaction and connection did not differ between people who had their partner as a best friend and people who did not. That is a plain null result, and it matters: the survey did not find that one arrangement left people less lonely or more satisfied with life.
The survey also described who was more likely to name a partner as a best friend. Lower income, older age and dating rather than being married were each linked to naming a partner as a best friend.
This was a survey completed at one point in time, so it can describe patterns but cannot say what causes them. It does not show that naming your partner as your best friend produces more companionship, or that having a best friend elsewhere produces more support. It is just as possible that people with certain relationship styles, life stages or incomes end up in one arrangement or the other.
Because people chose their own meaning of best friend, the label may mean different things to different respondents. One person may mean someone they tell everything to; another may mean the person they spend the most time with. The news release does not report a breakdown of each subgroup, and it does not discuss the study's limits, so readers wanting detail should look at the full paper.
The findings are from American adults and may not apply to people with different cultural expectations of partnership, to people in non-romantic households, or to couples whose circumstances limit contact with friends outside the relationship. The survey also cannot tell you what is right for your own relationship. Plenty of people are content with a partner who is a close companion but not their closest confidant, and plenty are content with the reverse.
What the results do offer is a gentle prompt to look at what you expect from one person. If every social need is placed on a partner, any gap can feel like a failing in the relationship. If some needs are shared across friends, family and community, the same gap may simply be ordinary.
Source: Is it better when your romantic partner is also your best friend? Insights from CSU research (Colorado State University news release on a study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships) DOI: 10.1177/02654075251336872
Illustration of companionship within a couple and support from a wider friendship network. AI-generated editorial illustration. This article summarises published research in our own words and is general information, not personal health advice.
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