Let’s be honest here – for many women, the emotional intimacy they have with their friends can run deeper than what they share with their partner.

This is why your girlfriends are the ones who hear every gripe about your relationship, see ‘that’ text, and get to decide whether he’s ‘good enough’ long before you do.

It’s a dynamic that can feel empowering – you have a collective vetting system to protect you! But it can also sabotage your relationships if your friends have TOO much say over your love life.

Thanks to group chats and social media, we now run our relationships like reality shows – with a jury of girlfriends waiting to weigh in.

We send screenshots of texts for analysis. Forward voice notes for dissection. You ask, ‘Am I overreacting?’ and the group decides.

It feels supportive. But it also means your friends, not you, are emotionally steering your relationship.

We’re outsourcing our decision making – and when we rely on friends to interpret our partner’s every move, we lose touch with our own natural instincts.

‘My friends dumped him before I did’

Farah, 33, says her friends destroyed a promising relationship before it even began.

‘I met Dan on holiday. He was gorgeous, funny and kind. But when I sent photos to my friends, they said he looked ‘too slick’ and gave off ‘player energy’.

‘They dissected everything: how fast he texted back, what emojis he used, they poured over his social media and found he’d dated a model years ago. The verdict was ‘a player’.

‘I questioned everything and decided maybe he wasn’t up for anything serious.’

She ended it, even though her gut instinct was to see where it led. ‘A year later, I saw he was engaged to, and later married, someone else.

‘The friend who led the ‘dump him!’ battle cry, said, ‘Oh, maybe he was genuine.’ I was furious. I’d let them talk me out of something that could have been wonderful.’

Farah’s story is common. In a 2023 Relate survey, one in four women admitted they’d ended a relationship because their friends disapproved – even when they weren’t sure their friends were right.

Why we overvalue our friends’ opinions

There’s a reason why we lean hard on our friends.

Female friendship is incredibly intimate and emotionally rewarding – often more so than romance.

If we can’t trust that our love relationships will last, it makes sense to prioritise the friendships that will. After all, if we don’t take our friend’s advice, we risk offending them and then where will we be, when yet another relationship fails?

So, we share our secrets, our fears and all the juicy details. It feels safe and validating having those close to us approve his every move – except it’s anything but.

Friends mean well, but their advice is never neutral. They bring their own baggage, biases and projections.

The friend who’s been cheated on might see red flags where there aren’t any. The single friend unconsciously – or consciously – has a vested interested in keeping you as her wing mate.

Some can see their friends clearly, take into account their personal histories, and edit before extracting any nuggets of wisdom. But if you’re feeling insecure, the tendency is to defer to them instead of trusting your own judgement.

‘I nearly left my husband because my friend kept pointing out his flaws’

Katrina, 42, told me her best friend nearly wrecked her marriage. ‘I’d tell her we’d argued, and she’d say, ‘You deserve better. You’ve outgrown him’. She meant well but it chipped away at how I saw my

husband. I started nitpicking, comparing him to my ex (who my friend adored), looking for evidence she was right.’

Eventually, Katrina realised she was more invested in proving her friend right or wrong than fixing the issues in her marriage.

‘Once I stopped sharing every fight and niggle with her, things improved dramatically. I changed my thinking from, ‘My husband isn’t worthy of me’ to ‘My husband is a good man and I’m lucky to have him’.

‘It made me treat him differently and see his positives not his flaws. We’re now doing well.’

Even supportive friends can become destructive sounding boards when they’re given too much power.

How to stop friends meddling

I went through a period during my late 40s when I was single and not having great success with men. I started to doubt my own judgement – then realised the problem was that I was relying too much on everyone else’s.

I’d developed a nasty habit of introducing men to my friends far too early. If date three went OK, the next one would be with a laser-focused friend, given the task of deciding whether the guy was worth pursuing.

If the verdict was no, there were no more dates. At first, I’d think, ‘Phew! Dodged a bullet there!’. But increasingly it was, ‘Will anyone be good enough?’.

I made myself a new rule: don’t introduce anyone to friends until I make my own mind up. Give it three months.

I met my now husband soon after and by the time the three months was up, he got introduced in an entirely different way.

It wasn’t ‘What do you think of him?’. It was ‘Here’s someone I really like and think I could have a future with’.

Surprise, surprise. They thought he was just perfect – and he is. Hence, rule number one…

Decide what you think before you get other people’s opinions.

Three months is about right: it’s enough time for you to get a good measure of someone.

Choose just one or two friends to share with. Who is your calmest, most perceptive friend? The one who runs her own life well and makes balanced decisions?

Handpick your confidantes carefully: your closest friend might be too protective to make objective insights.

Keep some things private. Not all conversations, moments and emotions need to be shared and dissected.

Oversharing destroys that special ‘you and I against the world’ feeling that is the magic of falling for someone.

You need secrets only you and your partner share to create deep intimacy.

Set boundaries. If a friend always criticises or undermines your relationship, tell her it’s unhelpful. A good friend will respect that; a controlling one will sulk.

Surround yourself with happy couples. Research proves couples who socialise with other happy couples tend to have more lasting and satisfying relationships.

You learn from and emulate successful behaviours. Hang out with friends in unhappy pairings and you learn to look critically at your partner.

Trust your gut. Good advice empowers you to act. Bad advice replaces your judgement with theirs.

Details of Tracey’s podcast, products, advice and book information can be found on traceycox.com.