Couples fold inward. In the first year it is lovely and largely harmless — you cancel things, you stop replying to the group chat, you would rather be at home. The trouble is that it does not always unfold. Sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian described marriage as 'greedy' for exactly this reason: analyzing national survey data, they found married people were less likely than single people to stay in close contact with friends, siblings and parents, and less likely to help them out. The pull toward each other is real, and it has a bill attached.
Eli Finkel's work names the other half of the problem. His argument is that expectations of a primary relationship have climbed steeply — we now want a partner to be a best friend, a passionate lover, a career coach and a route to becoming a better person — while the time and attention many couples can actually give each other has gone down. Ask one person to be your entire social world and you have set them a job nobody can do, and turned every ordinary disappointment into a referendum on the relationship.
So separate friendships are not time taken away from the two of you. They are what keeps you interesting to each other and gives you somewhere else to put a complaint that does not need to become a whole conversation at home. The practical version is a standing commitment that is not couple-shaped — a Tuesday basketball game, a monthly dinner, a friend you call on the walk home — and active generosity about your partner's. The person who makes it easy for their partner to leave the house gets a better person back through the door. The other side of it is shared people: couples with an overlapping social network tend to feel more anchored, and friends see things about the two of you that neither of you can. A low-effort repeating thing — Sunday coffee, the same bar on the first Thursday — beats the dinner party you keep meaning to throw.
Each name one person you have been meaning to see, and text them now, in the same room, out loud. Then put two things in the calendar for this month: one night apart with your own people, and one night with people you both like.
