I've been pretending to like my best friend's husband for four years and I'm running out of steam

My best friend, I'll call her Maya, has been with her husband Dan for six years, married for three. Maya is one of my favorite people. Dan is not.

He's not a bad person in any dramatic way. He doesn't mistreat her, he's not cruel, there's nothing I could point to and say this is the problem. He's just genuinely one of the most boring, self-absorbed people I've ever spent time around. Every conversation circles back to his job, his opinions, his stories. He talks over Maya constantly and I don't think he notices he's doing it. He has a habit of explaining things to people who already know them.

In the early years I thought I just needed to get to know him better. I tried. We've spent a lot of time together at this point and I know him pretty well. I just don't like him.

The exhausting part isn't disliking him, it's the performance. Four years of "haha yeah Dan" and asking follow-up questions about topics I couldn't care less about and laughing at the right moments. Every time I leave their place I feel weirdly drained in a way I don't feel after seeing Maya alone.

I would never tell her. She's happy, the relationship is genuinely good for her, and "I find your husband tedious" is not information that would help anyone. So I'll keep going. I'm just tired and I needed to say it somewhere.

The confession isn't that I dislike him. The confession is that I've gotten so good at pretending that sometimes I'm not sure if it's still pretending.