Big burly guys and their new girlfriends....WTF

[Sarahfeena]

[QUOTE=catsix]
Meh. I don’t have any interest in being the friend of most of my male friends’ girlfriends. They tend to be girls, which in every case has meant that they don’t like doing the things I like to do, and I don’t like doing the things they like to do.
[/QUOTE]
Well, you know, you don’t have to become best friends with them. As I said, I would not be likely to be friends with my guy friend’s wife if it wasn’t for my prior friendship with him. The idea is to be nice and friendly, and make a little bit of an effort to get to know her. I think this is just common courtesy when a friend is involved seriously with someone. I do the same with my girlfriends’ husbands/SOs, as well.

Accept them? Well, that depends on how they treat my friend. Be their buddy? Doubtful. Hang out with them without my friend present? Why?

No reason to have to hang out with them without your friend present…I am not close enough with any of my guy friends’ wives to do that. But there are occasions when I see them, and I treat them as I would my own friends…chat, ask them questions about their jobs or their kids or whatever. It’s not a big deal, but it goes a long way to showing them that I am not a threat.

Maybe my friend doesn’t want to be buddies with my boyfriend. I can’t fault someone for that. They pick their own friends and decide who they like hanging out with. I’ll tell ya tho, with that group of guys that I’m really close with, if one of them said to me ‘cat, this dude you’re seeing… he’s bad news. Watch your back.’ I’d trust my friend. They’ve never said anything bad about a guy I was seeing without a very good reason. Sometimes they see what I don’t, and they’ve never done me wrong.

I wouldn’t disagree with this. My husband doesn’t typically hang out with the guys he has met through me, but I do expect him to make an effort to be nice when we do have occasion to get together. Say we are having a barbeque or whatever, I would expect him to be just as genial a host to my guy friends as he is to his guy friends. The idea is that they are all “family friends” now.

Never. I would never in a million years tolerate being told ‘You can only see this friend if I am there.’ That just says the new boyfriend is too insecure for me to handle. It also says ‘There’s the door.’

I wouldn’t necessarily like this either, but I think that I could definitely push the bounds of what is appropriate. If I told my husband that a guy friend and I went out to lunch, he wouldn’t care, and I wouldn’t expect him to. If I told my husband I was going out clubbing alone with the guy friend on a Saturday night, I would expect him to not be too thrilled with that.

Basically, what I am trying to say is that when one is in a serious relationship, there are appropriate ways to handle other opposite-sex friendships and inappropriate ways. Showing no interest whatsoever in your friend’s SO is not the way to go about having healthy relationships all the way around, IMO.

[Lilairen]

[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]
:rolleyes: It’s not ‘ridiculous’ at all. It’s plain old good sense. Again, it’s too easy to fall into an affair with a close friend.
[/QUOTE]

I have never experienced an attraction that managed to render me into a mind-controlled zombie incapable of taking responsibility for my own choices. My choice to keep my promises and commitments is always available to me.

If someone wants to believe that my vows are worthless enough that I can’t be trusted to keep them without fundamental changes to established relationships, they should under no circumstances accept such promises from me. If my word is so worthless that I can’t be trusted to actually choose to keep it, why the hell would anyone be so moronic as to want to be involved with me?

And if my word is not worthless, why on earth would I want to be involved with someone who starts from the assumption that I’m going to be a cheating whore? If I feel a need to be randomly insulted, I’ll just go post in the Pit and not have to wash its underwear.

[catsix]

Sarahfeena said:
As I said, I would not be likely to be friends with my guy friend’s wife if it wasn’t for my prior friendship with him. The idea is to be nice and friendly,

I don’t consider that friendship. I don’t think of my friends SOs as friends of mine just because they’re dating my friend. Sometimes, I meet one I want as a friend. Most of the time it will never get beyond a minor acquaintance.

and make a little bit of an effort to get to know her.

Like everyone else I meet, I don’t decide whether or not I’d like to get to know them based on them knowing someone I know. If they’re not that interesting to me on their own, then I’m not going to go to any effort.

But there are occasions when I see them, and I treat them as I would my own friends…chat, ask them questions about their jobs or their kids or whatever.

Yeah see I don’t really ‘chat’ with my friends that way. I’m not a talk-over-coffee person, more like a couple-of-sentences-over-beer-and-pool kind of person. My conversational style doesn’t really go with the general female style.

Say we are having a barbeque or whatever, I would expect him to be just as genial a host to my guy friends as he is to his guy friends.

And I can pretty much guarantee that when I’m at a barbecue there’s two conversations going on. The guys are congregated around the beer and grill, discussing sports. The girls are off wherever they are discussing decorating the house and how they got those accent pillows on sale at Macy’s last week.

I don’t fit in to conversation B.

If I told my husband that a guy friend and I went out to lunch, he wouldn’t care, and I wouldn’t expect him to. If I told my husband I was going out clubbing alone with the guy friend on a Saturday night, I would expect him to not be too thrilled with that.

I don’t think my SO determines what is and isn’t appropriate. If he said ‘You can’t go to the bar with that guy.’, I’d show him the door. I have shown someone the door for that.

Basically, what I am trying to say is that when one is in a serious relationship, there are appropriate ways to handle other opposite-sex friendships and inappropriate ways.

I, not someone else, decide what’s appropriate for my opposite sex friendships. Someone can’t live with that, he’s too damned insecure for me.

[Stonebow]

catsix, I for one, appreciate your POV on this- but I think your approach is in the minority for relationships as a whole. For most of us, there has to be a compromise between doing what we want to do and making our SOs happy. Even if you love each other very much and are very compatible, those two won’t always line up. I’d be very much bothered being attached to someone who was content to always do x (whatever that might be) without any thought as to whether it might bother me. And I’d not ever knowingly do something that hurt my wife- her happiness is more important to me than my own. And, as we have a healthy relationship, that feeling is reciprocated.

At times, I wonder why exactly anyone would get serious/ married with this worldview. For you, catsix, and others for whom marriage isn’t on your radar, that’s cool. I just don’t get the idea of ‘I love you, and we can be together, but unless we’re fucking, fighting, or paying the bills, my time is my own.’ What the hell’s the point?

I just chalk it up to a different worldview/ set of life goals. And, as long as people who generally agree on what they need emotionally in a relationship end up together, it’s all good.

As for the OP- I’ll reiterate- it sucks that you feel abandoned by your pal. But you need to re-examine your role in his life, and whether you actually were friends (and not just keeping in touch between trysts), and whether your own anger/resentment is you being jealous of his new SO. While we’ve seen some exceptions in this thread, dealing with an ex and a new SO can be awkward at best. In either case, I’ll tell you that masculinity or dominance has very little to do with a guy trying to avoid a fight with the woman he’s sleeping with.

[saoirse]

[QUOTE=Stonebow]

At times, I wonder why exactly anyone would get serious/ married with this worldview. For you, catsix, and others for whom marriage isn’t on your radar, that’s cool. I just don’t get the idea of ‘I love you, and we can be together, but unless we’re fucking, fighting, or paying the bills, my time is my own.’ What the hell’s the point?
[/QUOTE]

See, I would characterize it as, “unless it’s the 156 hours per week that are not my own, my time is my own.”

[Waverly]

[QUOTE=betenoir]
He doesn’t have to hang out with me. He doesn’t on the other hand have to lock me out of his life. And a partner who would request that that, or a big burly man who would put up with that is…not a good thing.
[/QUOTE]
Someone who speaks English please explain the relevance of the “big burly” angle to me. Are big-burly-men a different bread than the rest of us?

[Lilairen]

[QUOTE=Stonebow]
At times, I wonder why exactly anyone would get serious/ married with this worldview. For you, catsix, and others for whom marriage isn’t on your radar, that’s cool. I just don’t get the idea of ‘I love you, and we can be together, but unless we’re fucking, fighting, or paying the bills, my time is my own.’ What the hell’s the point?
[/QUOTE]

I find gifts vastly more valuable than “I’m doing this because I have to.”

I know my partners choose to spend time with me – not because it was a requirement to do so, but because this is what they want to do.

If those resources are already mine by some sort of fiat, what the hell can I be given? The sense of “All my time is already signed over to you because of our relationship” completely slaughters any sense of value for me. I perceive there being an obligation of doing what is required to maintain that relationship, but if it’s all obligation, where’s the time to enjoy being with each other? If I’m intending to spend the rest of my life with someone, I want at least some of it to be fun!

I choose to give above and beyond what I have to do. I choose to do more than I have to by obligation, more than I have to do to maintain the relationship as healthy, because that is what I want to do. I perceive the ‘time belongs to partner unless specifically negotiated otherwise’ as setting up for pain – because there is no option to actually give, it’s already theirs; because any choice to do something other than be-with-partner is set up as a betrayal by axiom, a taking away of what’s theirs. I just don’t want to introduce either the stress meltdown in potentia of obligation overload or the inability to give to a partner as they deserve into my life, which means my resources have to be essentially my own.

As a completely separate thread from this, I also have experience of abusive relationships (both romantic and familial), and one of the things that has been a part of abusive relationships I have experienced has been the sense of ownership and the subversion of my individual self to the desires of the abuser. The ‘you exist to satisfy these desires, your time and your self are mine’ pattern in abusive relationships is a nasty, vicious thing; it too easily slides into ‘your worth is determined by my satisfaction’. Whenever I run into a situation where someone is trying to control their partner’s friendships, my gut response is to want to say, “You’re aware that that’s one of the prime warning signs for an abuser, right?” Intellectual knowledge that in most cases that’s a matter of coming from Joinedathehippistan, where the customs are strange to me, only helps so much; mostly it keeps me from bringing it up at random and thereby gratuitously insulting innocent Hippistanis.

[lowbrass]

[QUOTE=Waverly]
Someone who speaks English please explain the relevance of the “big burly” angle to me. Are big-burly-men a different bread than the rest of us?
[/QUOTE]

Yes, didn’t you know? Small people have to do what big people tell them to do. It’s in the Constitution. That’s why they put your height on your driver’s license. If two cars reach an intersection at the same time, the small person must yield to the large person.

[begbert2]

[QUOTE=catsix]
If a guy that I was dating had a problem with my pre-existing friends purely because they are men, he’s out. History. I will not give up what has been around in the worst of times through all the miles for what might work in the future. It’s not fair to the people who have chosen to be my family.
[/QUOTE]
And that’s entirely your call. I, however, am not going to restrict my associations to people with balls of steel and unlimited, absolute self-confidence. (Heck, I don’t have unlimited, absolute self confidence.) But you are free to associate with whom you choose, and smack the rest in the ass with the doorknob at your discretion.

(Just want to reiterate that I was speaking of cases where I choose to back off from the friends out of consideration for my girlfriend and the new, fragile relationship we’re developing, not cases where she demands that I become a recluse. If that occurred…umyeah. She’d better be damn appealing cause that sort of thing would be a real turn-off.)

[catsix]

Stonebow said:
Even if you love each other very much and are very compatible, those two won’t always line up. I’d be very much bothered being attached to someone who was content to always do x (whatever that might be) without any thought as to whether it might bother me.

What you’re saying here could also be used as an argument for ‘I am going to continue my friendship with X even though you do not want me to.’ Anyone who’d require me to give up a friendship with someone is asking me to do a thing that would bother me severely, and there are going to be times they don’t get that.

There are times when I’d have to put my foot down and say ‘No, I will not give this up for you.’ Really, for some of the friends that I have, it’s no more a consideration than if the SO said ‘You can’t ever see your brother unless I am there’

I just don’t get the idea of ‘I love you, and we can be together, but unless we’re fucking, fighting, or paying the bills, my time is my own.’ What the hell’s the point?

My time is my own. I choose to spend it with people that I like to be around. If you think that means I would not choose to spend time with my SO outside of fucking, fighting and bill paying, you’re drawing a dichotomy that doesn’t exist. It’s more like ‘I’m going to go to guys night one Saturday a month.’ or ‘When my friend of ten years happens to be in town, if you think I’m not going out to have a few beers and catch up on everything that’s happened since I last saw him, you’re crazy. We can go see that movie tomorrow night.’

There’s not, perhaps, as much time with the old friends as there used to be, but there is time for them. There is time when my SO does not need to be up my ass.

I never did understand the joined-at-the-hip, every-minute-together thing… or the inabilty to have ‘your friends’ and ‘my friends’ instead of ‘our friends.’

It’s foreign to me.

[nocturnal_tick]

[QUOTE=AngelicGemma]

When a friend got a new girlfriend I saw less or him, well practically nothing. But for the first few months I just shrugged it off as “new relationship syndrome.” However he started cancelling plans and eventually admitted the new girlfriend had told him to stop hanging out with me.

After more psycho behaviour from the GF I finally took the friend to one side and we had a chance to talk about it.

The new girlfriend soon became the new ex.
[/QUOTE]

That friend would be me. While I don’t get the big burly reference, I was lucky enough to realise I fucked up. Hopefully they’ll do the same.

[betenoir]

[QUOTE=Waverly]
Someone who speaks English please explain the relevance of the “big burly” angle to me. Are big-burly-men a different bread than the rest of us?
[/QUOTE]

Well…not a phrase I use often. But they did happen to qualify. I’ve been out with big burly guys and some femmes…including a few guys in dresses.

They were…if it were the '70’s I’d say macho. All the more reason not to be pussywhipped.

[Quiddity_Glomfuster]

[QUOTE=catsix]

Never. I would never in a million years tolerate being told ‘You can only see this friend if I am there.’ That just says the new boyfriend is too insecure for me to handle. It also says ‘There’s the door.’

And once again, it’s not about ‘being told’. One shouldn’t need to be told. It’s just a sensible thing to do.

I’m not turning back a time-tested friendship for what could be the flavor of the month.

At least some of us are speaking about SOs and their feelings, not about ‘flavours of the month’. I don’t happen to subscribe to the ‘flavour of the month club’ myself anyway.

Glad to see that requiring your husband to have no female friends worked out for you.

So you laid the law down, your marriage failed, and you think you’re some kind of expert on what appropriate friends are?

Mmmm. Impressive assumption-jumping there. Just to put you to rights, I didn’t ‘lay down the law’ nor did he. We had discussed other people’s relationships and the roles of friends to them and agreed that partners come first. We split up because we had too much in common - turned out we both liked men.

Now are you real pleased with the ad hominem there? Want to stick to debating points rather than personal snarks henceforth?

Anyone who feels that they must be the center of my attention and always come first is too fucking self-centered for me.

Well given that you said

I also have experience of abusive relationships (both romantic and familial), and one of the things that has been a part of abusive relationships I have experienced has been the sense of ownership and the subversion of my individual self to the desires of the abuser.

it’s understandable that your radar for ‘controlling’ detection would be set to high.

[RickJay]

[QUOTE=betenoir]
For god sake. If I wanted him, I’d have him you bitch. He’s my friend. Yeah he’s seen my tits, he’s not going to see them again, not when he’s with you. I don’t do that. He should know that. Get over it. And what is with these guys who claim to be Doms and have their ball shrivile to rasins at the word of some chick? I woudn’t let a guy tell me who I can be friends with.
[/QUOTE]

Maybe he doesn’t want to see you again and he’s using an excuse so as not to hurt your feelings.

He’s just not that into you.

[Lilairen]

Quiddity Glomfuster, do please learn to distinguish between me and catsix. You can do this easily by actually reading the little name tag on what you’re quoting.