I don't think of it in terms of preference.
If I want to learn something I can't learn from my partner, that's what my friends are for.
![🤷♂️ 🤷♂️](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png)
If my girl and I are arguing a lot, maybe I just need to go to my boys, have a couple beers at their place and play Halo for a bit while we talk about it so I can decompress and get it out of my system, that's what my friends are for.
You don't want your partner to have no outlet for how they're processing the information from the relationship that they're getting from you. Because with no outlet, and under the consideration that most humans are on auto-pilot mentally, that's usually actually the cause of infidelity.
Instead, you want them to have trusted and positive outlets.
You want them to have friends they can go out to lunch with and talk about it, or over to their place and watch a movie and talk about it, etc. Not friends who offer solutions like: "Well if it's that much of a problem, we're gonna go to the club," not friends who offer destructive outlets, but rather friends who offer constructive outlets.
Me going to my friends house and trying to shoot straight in Halo after the 4th beer while talking is harmless. But me going out to socialize with other women would probably be pretty ******* destructive and counterintuitive to keeping my relationship, and visa-versa with women and men. That make sense?