“My goal is to marry my best friend,” explained the young woman in my office. I have heard a version of this many times. There is tremendous pressure today to find a partner who is your “one and only.“ Indeed, it’s practically impossible to scroll through Instagram without seeing someone refer to their significant other as their #bestie.

Relationship expert Esther Perel addresses this contemporary cliche and cautions against searching for a romantic partner who checks every box in a 2018 SXSW talk:

We still want all the same things that traditional marriage was about—[family life, companionship, economic support, and social status]—but now [we] also want [our partners] to be a best friend, a trusted confidant, and a passionate lover to boot… What we have created in a romantic ambition is one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide.

While it’s cozy to think of your romantic partner as your best friend (who doesn’t like a package deal?), here are 3 reasons it’s important to nourish your platonic relationships too.

1. Friends Help Us Weather The Storm

An argument with your significant other is one of the most upsetting of daily stressors. As one patient told me, fighting with his partner in the morning sets a negative tone for the rest of the day. He described it as a dark cloud that hangs over him and follows him around until the issue is resolved.

In addition to taking an emotional toll, there is a physical cost to relationship disharmony. Negative interactions can impact the immune system and cardiovascular function.

A couple’s therapist might encourage a bickering couple to work on conflict resolution and to spend more quality time together. A study offers another important way to protect oneself from the harmful effects of conflict: having good friends.

Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, asked 105 newlywed couples to keep a daily diary of marital conflict and to complete questionnaires about their social interactions outside of the marriage. The couples provided morning and evening saliva samples so the researchers could measure levels of cortisol, a hormone the body produces in direct association with physiological stress.

The findings indicate that having a few good friends to lean on can buffer against the stress of everyday conflict with one’s partner. Participants with high quality social support experienced lower levels of stress when marital conflicts arose. It is worth nothing that the number of friends didn’t impact the couple’s ability to handle conflict—it was the quality of the social interactions that counted. Knowing that someone has your back makes every challenge a little bit easier.

There is a lesson here. If you are in a relationship, don’t forget to make an effort with your friends. Having a shoulder to lean on that is outside of your relationship will enhance your connection with your one and only. When there is trouble in paradise, you can turn to your friends to help you weather the storm.

Friends don’t just make life better, they make romantic relationships better too.

2. Boundaries Strengthen Bonds

Contrary to how romantic relationships are depicted on Instagram, spending all of your time together does not deepen the connection. Poet Ranier Maria Rilke understood the tension between the longing for togetherness and the fundamental need for autonomy in ‘Letters to a Young Poet.’

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

While it is important to share the same values—having different interests, hobbies, and friends allows for the “possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”

Supporting your partner’s interests and encouraging their pursuit is known as “autonomy support.” In other words, if your significant other loves to go camping but it’s not for you, suggest they go on a camping trip. If your partner is passionate about Broadway but you cannot stand it, buy tickets for them and their best friend. People are happiest when they do things that matter to them and become frustrated when they cannot. Encouraging the one you love to pursue their interests is relationship-enhancing. I am not suggesting that you and your partner need to be totally independent. On the contrary, when you support another’s autonomy, it will bring you closer together. As Rilke observed:

A good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude.

3. Greater Health, Happiness, and Wellbeing

Friendships often take a backseat to other demands but the more we prioritize friendships, the happier and healthier we are and the better our romantic relationships will be. A study from Michigan State University found that close friendships predict day-to-day happiness, how long we’ll live, and even more so than spousal and family relationships. On days when individuals interact with friends, they report greater happiness and are in a better mood. In fact, people generally report more positive experiences with their friends than they do with their families, particularly in later life.

Bottom line: Invest in friendship.

Sustained stress drains our cognitive resources, and the uncertainty of the pandemic has left many feeling emotionally exhausted and overwhelmed. Our brains are buckling under an endless stream of information, making it even harder to make good choices and focus our energy productively.

These days, the risks and benefits of participating in basic activities require ongoing assessment and evaluation. From attending social gatherings to going to a restaurant to taking public transportation, we have to ask ourselves, “Should I or shouldn’t I?”

Cognitive overload makes it challenging to process, sort, and prioritize data. As a friend put it recently, “Every decision makes me feel like Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream.’ I just want to hold my head and shout ‘I don’t know.'”

If you are experiencing decision paralysis, here are 5 strategies that might help.

1. Stick to a routine

Establishing a predictable routine will help keep minor decisions at a minimum. Wash the dog on Sundays. Call your grandmother on Fridays. Schedule a walk with a friend on Saturdays. Structure leaves less wiggle room for indecision. Plus, research from the University of Southern California found that establishing healthy habits makes us more likely to default to them during periods of stress. For instance, participants who regularly ate oatmeal for breakfast during the semester were more likely to eat a healthy breakfast during exams. Students who ate unhealthy breakfasts during the semester — such as pastries or doughnuts — ate even more junk food during exams.

2. Be your own Choice Architect

Instead of depleting valuable cognitive resources to guide you through each and every decision, eliminate unnecessary choices. Steve Jobs famously wore a black turtleneck every day so he didn’t have to waste time thinking about what to wear. I have a friend who always orders the special in a restaurant so he doesn’t have to bother with the endless options on the menu. As your own choice architect, design your surroundings to promote choices that reflect your values. Fill your refrigerator with healthy options to spare, turn your bedroom into a sleep sanctuary, and place your sneakers by the front door to remind you to go for a walk. Making it harder to choose behaviors that don’t align with your values makes it easy to choose behaviors that do. Eliminate vitality draining options. If you throw out the candy bar in your desk drawer, you won’t waste time thinking about whether or not you should eat it.

3. Aim for good enough

Instead of investing substantial time and effort mulling over the details of every option, aim for good enough. Research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that Maximizers, people who agonize endlessly over decisions, experience more regret and lower levels of happiness than Satisficers. If you are exhibiting Maximizing tendencies, consider the following exercise. Over the next week, make one choice every day that is “good enough.” For example, if deciding what to cook for dinner, throw together what you already have in the fridge. If in need of a new toothpaste, close your eyes and pull one off the shelf. Later in the day, reflect on why this choice was a fine choice as well as the benefits of deciding without relentless deliberation.

4. Remember to HALT

If decision fatigue is depleting your energy stores and willpower, don’t forget to HALT.

HALT stands for:

Doctors perform a post-mortem when a patient dies to figure out the cause of death. A pre-mortem is the hypothetical opposite. Instead of waiting for “the end” to figure out what went wrong, a pre-mortem is a hypothetical exercise that you perform before a decision has been made. The idea is to imagine yourself in the future and that the decision you made did not turn out well. For instance, perhaps you are considering leaving your job. The upsides are obvious to you. To make sure you aren’t missing anything, fast forward in your mind three months and imagine that you are bored, lonely, and concerned about finances. By forcing yourself to imagine scenarios that turn out to be sub-optimal, you can pick up. blind spots in your thinking according to psychologist Gary Klein.

Bottom line: Don’t be a squirrel when it comes to making decisions.

“I love you all dearly but want you all out by 10pm,” announced my friend with a huge smile. While not the typical dinner party greeting, I greatly appreciate her crystal clear message: enjoy but don’t overstay your welcome. My friend loves having people over but she also knows her limits. “Why not be up front about it?” she asked when I inquired about her bluntness. “I love my friends but I also love my bed. Knowing there is an end in sight alleviates my anxiety that it will go on forever.”

Socializing can be exhausting, especially during the holidays. It is no wonder that many complain about having a “social hangover” after a night out.

Social media posts go viral trying to capture the longing to communicate social satiety without offending anyone. Some of my favorites include:

• In Japan, you serve people appetizers at a party all night long, and then when you’re ready for them to leave you serve them a hearty soup.
• A group of friends who agreed that when someone is ready to leave, they’ll use the code word “Dick Wolf,” the Executive Producer of Law and Order.
• Many variations on excuses for sick pets, children, and significant others who are, in fact, not sick at all.

The popularity of these posts and the comments they generated speak to our anxiety about having a way out of social situations when we have hit our limit.

If “ich fuhle mich jetzt genug beucht” doesn’t roll off your tongue and the other suggestions aren’t your style, here are some social extraction protocols that might help when you are feeling “visited enough.”

1. Set a time limit

In the same way that my friend builds an exit strategy into her dinner parties, explicitly communicate your time frame. “I have an early appointment tomorrow morning” and “I’m on my way to… (fill in the blank),” clearly convey that you don’t have all the time in the world to linger. This is especially helpful for over-talkers and serial clingers.

2. “Because” works wonders

As described in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, people like explanations and the word “because” provides one or at least the illusion of one. There is a difference between saying “I have to go to bed” and “I have to go to bed because it’s so late.” People tend to be much more understanding when we give them a reason.

3. Enlist a partner

Work with a friend or your partner to move people along. Apparently a bartender go-to trick is to tell guests “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”

Bottom Line: Making a big entrance may be important, but don’t underestimate the benefits of having an exit strategy. For those feeling socially spent, knowing you have an out will make your night out more enjoyable.