Should boyfriend be your best friend?

On my very first date with my boyfriend, I didn't know if he was going to kiss me. I didn't know yet that he loves Concord grapes, plays the saxophone and has never seen a Woody Allen movie.

But I did know for certain that I wanted this person with whom I'd just eaten dinner to be in my life, somehow.

I remember sitting across from him at a table in a Portuguese restaurant, smiling, and thinking, "Whatever happens after this date, I really hope we become friends. You're cool."

Flash forward six intense, crazy-in-love months and this man is not only boyfriend -- he is my closest friend now, too, the one who knows everything about what goes on with my family, what goes on at work, what weird dreams woke me up in the middle of the night.

And I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing.

He is my boyfriend, he's my best friend, but he's also filling a vacancy that slowly opened up in my life recently. You see, I don't have a lot of friends. No, I'm not a complete nutter who can't keep any friends, I swear. It's just that, in the past two years, all my closest friends have scattered, literally, around the world:

Christiane was born in Germany and moved back there to be closer to her family; Stephanie joined the Army and right now is stationed in Iraq (at a prison, of all places); and Phil and Andrew are both in grad school in Boston, and it turns out people don't have much of a social life while they're attending Harvard Law School. Last, but not least, there's my best guy friend whom I had a pretty major falling-out with last year, and I've scarcely seen that guy since

Your boyfriend shouldn't hear everything that you would tell a girlfriend, columnist says.