I've had the opposite experience. A few year ago a bunch of the guys I hung out with in college got together at a Wurstfest (German festival every November in Bew Braunfels, Texas), and got super drunk. All the married guys were talking about how they just loved their wives so much.

It was super wholesome.

one is even convinced that I’m gonna get divorced just because he did and views all marriages that way

Classic Divorced Guy

there is one friend in the group who agrees with me that our wives are our best friends and soulmates

Wife and I joke about how we can never get divorced because it would be too awkward when we kept hanging out as friends.

But we also have a friend couple that did get divorced, and still hang out regularly on very good terms.

I remember seeing here on Lemmy a while back that a good boyfriend/girlfriend is a best friend where there is also an erotic angle.

Same here

After a few beers I usually just try to hold back the question why they're even together with their wife, if they're so unhappy with her

I do get, that some people just need to vent, but I don't have anything bad to say about my wife.
She loves this piece of shit, that I am. In my eyes she is an absolute saint

I work in IT. Every time more than a handful of IT folks get together the talk always turns towards how shitty their wives are/were before the divorce.

Or the wife is framed as someone who keeps them from buying tech stuff ("I'd like to upgrade my homelab, but the purchasing department keeps turning me down! Har har").

I'm just sitting here with a lovely wife who trusts me to spend money on what we need to keep the tech stuff working.

My best friend was convinced that my ex wanted to get pregnant even though we'd been together for years and she had zero desire to have children. Nothing I said convinced him. I really don't get it because it's just not that uncommon anymore for people to not want kids.

It's people who rush into relationships because they feel like they need one, instead of taking time to find your actual best friend forever.

The bar for "decently responsible and kind man" seems incredibly low.

Nah, some people just like to make stuff up to complain about something.

Open, honest communication is the foundation for ANY healthy long term relationship. Spousal, friendship, family, all of it. It genuinely baffles me how many people don't seem to get what that means. It doesn't mean you need to be perfect. It means you need to approach tension in your relationship in good faith and with intent to fix it as a team, not as an excuse to shirk responsibility and blame others. Even if it isn't your fault. Blame itself does not offer solutions.

As a 100% polyamorous person, most folks first instinct is to ask me how I can manage it without getting jealous and are shocked to hear that, if anything, I feel orders of magnitude less jealousy than I would in an exclusive relationship. The problems they usually cite are problems that would be just as bad if not worse with monogamy, as evidenced by how many peoe cheat in monogamy. Their gut reaction is to imagine it as some sort of cuckold/cuckuean humiliation ritual when it really just comes down to the fact that I'm not perfect, I accept that fact and I want the ones I love to maximize the love they feel by seeking what I can't provide from others. It's such a burden off my chest. I can love my wife in the ways I do best and just be happy with that.

I kinda lost track what I was talking about I'm a bit sleep deprived. But I'm happy you and your wife are flourishing and I hope any changes to come only serve to strengthen that 💚🐿️

Love this perspective and I feel a lot of the same

My wife and I are at the bar patio right now playing board games.

I agree with everything except that women make better leaders, because i'd rather call it "different". Leadership styles do differ, but which one is better depends on the situation. My wife was absolutely great at planning and improvising when something went wrong, while not having the calm needed for fine, detailed work - threading a needle was a pain for her, constructing something from Ikea made her really tilt; I OTOH absolutely suck at improvising (planning is fine, although realizing the plans is hard), while having no issue with very sensitive and rather annoying tasks, i simply kept my pace and cool throughout.

We really were a good match in general, and would still be together if it weren't for my other issues which made us slowly drift apart and smothered what we had. We still care for each other a lot and visit one another every few weeks and message daily, but how it currently stands we are both better off alone.

Strangely I cope a lot better with the situation than her - i have a more active social life than i ever had before because i finally broke free of my permanent mental overload by living alone and being able to set my own rules, while her social circle currently crumbles without a clear reason why (although i think a lot of her acquaintances do resent her for dropping me, and gossip seems to spread like wildfire - she doesn't deserve that at all, but even where i personally told people that I fully agree with the decision to separate, it doesn't help at all)

Most of my friends in relationships are happy there, but my wife and I are still notoriously happy in ours. I recently had a therapist comment about how we handle conflict surprisingly well after I explained it to her

All I had to do was ruin a few articles of her clothing and I was off the job. I was truly trying to be helpful, but the blowback was real. I still do my own, however.

My spouse set up individual tubs for each person's clothes to be put in after the dryer (including tubs for blankets and towels).

Very organized, but the entire laundry room floor is covered in these individual tubs.

I fold things as soon as I take them out of the dryer so I can avoid the tubs.

My wife and i kind of just fell into set tasks that we dont mind doing, but the other person hates. For example, i hate emptying the dishwasher, but i dont mind filling it. She does all the laundry, i do all the bathroom cleaning.

I love my partner but honestly, gun to my head, I could never get a load of her laundry done without disaster. I tried, but determining which of her infinite identical black articles of clothing are hand-wash only, which are dry-clean only, which are cold wash hang-dry, which are tumble dry light, etc. is a skill I completely lack. Add to it that she's autistic as all hell and so has removed the tags from every article of clothing she owns and I never stood a chance on this one....

(meanwhile my own laundry follows the "if it can't go into the wash on heavy-duty, hot, it's weak and needs to be culled from the herd" line of thinking. I'm not particularly presentable, I admit.)

Honestly, there are some people who shit-talk their exes so much that I worry a little bit.

Hot take: venting about the person you live with doesn't mean you'll be venting about people you hang out with occasionally.

But it would be good to discuss your issues with the person face to face, regardless if it's a friend, roommate, or spouse.

Please don't be alarmed, but I am finding out where you live and coming round for my tea.

TIL "spotted dick" is actually food.

I am a big fan of weekday risotto since learning you don't actually have to stir it if you have a good sealing dutch oven or pressure cooker and short grain rice.

I would be soooo fat knowing you. That sounds amazing.

Ooh, I can answer the first one! With two answers!

Answer one is because things that I already saw there basically fade into the background. You know how in, like, Hannah Barbara cartoons it'd be obvious when a cupboard was going to open, because they had the static background painted on a different layer, and the moving objects were on foreground cells with slightly different colours? Right, so, when I first notice something new in a new location I might go "huh, why is that there?", but once I've seen it, it's now not new, and I basically don't see it anymore. So long as it's not actively in my way, it's a static part of the background.

There have been times when I was actively trying to clean up a room because we were going to have guests over, and I noticed I had been cleaning around a large white plastic bag that was on the coffee table, probably from some food delivery in the past several months. Like, my whole job was cleaning and tidying, and it was like the bright white bag was part of the table. I think it's just always been there 😛

It wasn't until I had already cleaned under the edges of it that I went "hang on....... This is garbage. Why am I trying to preserve this and keep it undisturbed?"

Unfortunately my wife is, I think, basically the same way, so our house is a nightmare. Or it would be if either of us could see it 😉

The second reason is much simpler, which it that when something is in a place, and I know I didn't put it there, I assume my wife may have put it there for a reason. So probably best to not touch it, in case she wanted it here, or comes looking for it here again in the future.

I fucked up a meal so bad thinking I was doing good, I literally didn't have to cook for the first decade of my marriage. We've been happily married for over 21 years now, I think the best friend and always wanting her to have the best life she could helped the most.

Took many years but I did eventually realize the best thing might in fact be the thing she suggests over the logical answer, but people really can get better with time.