it's a hypothetical question, of course, since engagement is not quite in my sphere en masse, i don't have a best friend, and if i did she would probably be female. but this question, in the more general form, has been bugging me for several years: the simple fact is that i don't particularly like my friends' friends. i'm not talking about my acquaintances' friends, or my friends' acquaintances, both of whom i wouldn't be expected to like (hell, i don't really like my acquaintances), but with my real friends' real friends, you'd think there would be something there.
and the situation is going to come up. because my friends kick major ass, and it's really hard to envision anyone good enough for them. especially since, well, with the occasional exception of yours truly, the people they've dated have, in my opinion, been flat-out not good enough for them. and i can only marry at most one of my friends. :)
this is a really hard entry to write politely, because my natural inclination right now is to go into character analyses of my friends' friends, or into anecdotes, both of which would be horribly tactless with regards to one of my readers (the erstwhile protagonist of the story.) but the general moral question stands even independent of my life. what do you do? it would be easy, of course, if the person in question had some sort of massive flaw or conniption that your friend was oblivious to.
but in general, that's not really true. i don't disclaim my friends' friends because they're bad people, far from it. it just seems like they're not sufficiently sparkling. if anything, this is worse with their significant others, because it's a lot easier to get sucked into a romantic relationship by random chance or inertia than it is to get sucked into friendship. (deep down in most of us, after all, there are biological urges which confidently note that procreating suboptimally is way better than not procreating at all, and that procreating optimally is comparatively only a bit better than procreating suboptimally.)
what it comes down to, essentially, is "you can do better." but that's not a statement i feel confident making. a few years ago, it would have been, but i've come to realize after being booted from the ivoriest of towers into a somewhat drabber (if still reflective) dungeon that there is a huge random element in meeting the right people. that i can't really assess the likelihood of friend X actually meeting someone who is good enough for them. even in the best-case scenario, where i have such a person at hand, the caprices of contrived meetings will surely doom it.
another confounding factor is that i know from a jealous perspective that i don't want my friends to get married (or become effectively so.) because most of them will become a heck of a lot less interesting, as they fall into the patterns of domestic bliss. this is the catch-22: i contend that people become happier even in a suboptimal marriage, that the psychological act of being married is full of potent endorphins. and so it's better for my friend to be married, even if the person is not good enough for him. so it's hard for me to with a good conscience give advice which, if followed, will rip someone out of their bubble. it's hard for me to try to shade people from blissful and encapsulated to enlightened and miserable.
i mean, look at me. i'm very happy right now, i'm going through one of the happiest periods of my life, but i think it's a crest. i think my baseline happiness, removing the fluctuations, would probably be higher right now if i were able to accept a lifelong suboptimal relationship. (it's not a conscious choice, of course.)
there's a less arrogant possibility to all of this, which is that for whatever reason, i can't see how cool these second-degree people are. it could be jealousy that they are taking my friend away from me; it could be insecurity that my friend likes them better. i'm not in the best position to judge those forces, but i have felt those before and i kind of know what they feel like, and i don't think that's what's going on here. i'm much more inclined to believe that my (hypothetical) friends are in inertia-trap relationships.
because once you're in a relationship, your life starts to crystallize around it. and pretty soon, even if the relationship isn't taking up all of your actual or mental time, it becomes a precisely shaped piece of the puzzle. a precisely shaped piece of the worldview. and of course from that perspective, it's the perfect relationship, because it jigsaw-fits nicely into the structure that has coalesced to fit it. and so it seems like the perfect relationship, even though it may not be. and you start to forget the pleasures that don't fit with it. you unconsciously end up sacrificing a large part of yourself on the altar of sanity, on the altar of preserving the relationship, since you need it to complete the picture.
the problem is that the picture is no longer a classic. the picture has changed, the picture is probably in mauve and yellow. you have the innate desire to fit all of the pieces together, though, because a complete picture of something ugly is more satisfying than a puzzle of something gorgeous which is missing a few pieces, which is what you used to be before being in the potential well.
i'm not as cynical as this makes me out to be, of course. it's precisely because i think something more fantastic is possible that i myself am not now married to any of the girls i have been involved with. but i've seen so many people fall into both revocable and irrevocable such traps that it makes me wonder.
maybe i should erase all of this. maybe it's not a good thing to inkling thoughts of breaking up suboptimal relationships, to engender doubts in my oh-so-captive audience's mind. after all, you know, even if you deserve someone better, there is no guarantee whatsoever that you will actually find that person ever again, and certainly not just-like-that. (part of the inertia trap, of course, is that when you're really devoted, when you're marriage-bound, you're not going to accidentally stumble upon a better person as much because of mindset as because of opportunity.)
anyway, i'm done. i feel i should mention that, matt, i know you're reading this, and i'm emphatically not talking about you. i think your relationship with j. is great; i think it's one of the most appropriate matches i've ever seen, to be honest. (take it with a huge grain of salt; after all, how well can i possibly know her?)