Your wife is not your best friend. She has another job.

She covers your back, holds you when you are vulnerable, and supports your successes. She runs the house, has your children, and deals with your need for intimacy.

And she should not bitch about your music or Photographing or Jogging if you don’t bitch about her dressmaking or flower arranging or cycling. Because friendship is different from marriage. Alte cuts to the bottom of this.

I got over myself and stopped treating my husband like my best friend. Husbands aren’t friends, they’re spouses. You have to be more tolerant with spouses because you’re not keeping them around for their entertainment value.

I have real, actual female friends now (both online and in real life), which has taken a lot of the burden off our relationship and freed us up to concentrate on discussing spousal things, like our kids, sex, relatives, faith, finances, and future. Ditch the romance and you might find your passive-agressiveness disappears along with it. My expectations were the problem, so I fixed them and now I prefer my husband’s company to everyone else’s.

The pro photographer and I share some interests. But we don’t share everything, and that is OK. More than OK. Because it means we have things to talk about that include kids, relatives, faith, future and our wish for licit satisfaction, and (much more safely when you are courting) what happened at orchestra, or on the hike.

Men need buddies — in Kiwiland and OZ they are called mates and it is not ghey: it is about hunting, footy and xbox (or viola, cameras, and nature in my case). Women need friends — in real life much more than guys do, for facebook and pinterest do not satisfy.

And men and women are different. Obvious is obvious. Most men know this: women used to, but they have been lied to so often they have forgotten the truth.