Sharing is caring

While the traditional flashpoint for couples tends to be the dreaded in-laws - sisters in law, fathers in law, brothers in law, and mothers in law have featured in family discord forever - another point of contention can be your partner’s friends.

This dynamic provides great comedic scope in TV series like Friends or Nora Ephron movies, but what about in real life? You love your other half, obviously. They’re great to be with, which is why you’re with them and why you have no intention of going anywhere soon. But the friends? Oh dear me, the friends.

We’re not talking downright offensive here. We’re not talking people who operate outside the norms of acceptable behaviour, via social taboos like sexism, racism or homophobia. No, we’re talking common or garden personal dislike here. Nothing more dramatic. Your perfectly nice partner has some friends who you personally cannot connect with at all. They are just so bloody over-intellectual and stuffy/under-intellectual and boorish/vaguely sneery and condescending - insert reasons to dislike here. But they mean the world to your partner, who has known them forever - long before you two were a couple.