IMO, assuming that you can provide everything they need is arrogant. I know full well that my SO needs other friends, it’s not a reflection on me it’s just his nature to be social.
If I were to insist on or expect that he have no single gay male friends we’d have problems. For one, we have different interests. He’s very into playing pool so he’s on a pool league that plays on tuesday nights. I’m into online RPG’s and our GM meeting is tuesday nights. So I get my time to do what I enjoy and he has time to be out with friends doing what he enjoys. For another, he likes running around to a lot of activities, while I more prefer being at home. So sometimes when he wants to go out and I don’t, he’ll go with one of his friends.
Now if I knew one of them was trying to get in his pants, that would be different of course. But in general, I see no reason that someone in a relationship should need to restrict who their friends are based solely on gender.
Hahaha. I can believe that. I’m sure we’ve all had the occasional fantasy or “What if?” thought about friends. However, I guess I would consider that different than if the guy actually had a crush on me or something.
I guess I have to take your guys’ word for it since I’m sure you guys know more about how guys think than I do. However, as much as I’d like to believe that I am God’s gift to men ;), I don’t think that most of the guys I know are secretly harboring an attraction to me that is so strong that it would threaten things if I were married.
Well, that might be the case for lavenderviolet, but I can categorically state that none of my male friends want to get into my pants - or vice versa.
“Okay, BWP”, I hear you say “I’ll believe you when you say you have no designs on them, but how do you know *they *don’t want to screw you?”
To which the short answer is: I’m about 120kg/240(ish)lbs, for a start. I have practical-short (not stylish-short) hair and swear like a wounded pirate with Tourette’s. And, while I’m in my own house I’m quite likely to wear whatever’s comfortable, which means I’m just as likely to answer the door (and socialise with my mates) while wearing something I wouldn’t be seen dead in outside - like shorts that reveal I haven’t shaved my legs since at least the last season (if not the last year). So I think I’d know if they were picturing me naked - they’d be turning green and making gagging noises!
My friends (of both genders) are simply very much the kind of people who take others as they find them; I don’t think gender has ever been a factor in who they like or don’t like.
The guys have friends who are female, and then they have Girls They Want To Have Sex With. They don’t naturally gravitate down the ‘let’s be friends and see how it develops’ route, which might account for the fact that they aren’t inclined to muddle up girlfriends and girls-who-are-friends in their mental filing cabinet.
It’s hard to define, and the even the word “disrespectful” doesn’t capture it. I mean, we’re talking about marriage and love and trust and respect – deep shit, right.
I know I can’t provide every emotional need for the wife, nor her for me.
But, if my wife felt the need to take a male friend. . .I don’t mean a guy in her book club, or on the pool team. I mean a FRIEND. . .a guy who she went to lunch with, talked on the phone with regularly, exchanged gifts with, etc. etc. etc. If she has something like that, then there’s definitely something I’m not providing as her husband. That’s not from arrogance. It’s from the role I think a person should play as spouse.
Most of “our” friends are females as a matter of fact. I’m good friends with them. When they come over, we have our own topics of conversation that don’t involve my wife. For instance, one time my wife got sick at the last minute, and I had dinner out with 3 of them. But, if my wife was out of town, they wouldn’t have called me up and asked me to go to dinner. I wouldn’t go to a movie with one of them. And, if I did, I would be embarassed if we ran into someone that my wife and I knew.
:: boggles :: Wow, this thread makes me glad I’m terminally single, because I don’t think I could face knowing that I was allowed only one friend of the opposite sex for the rest of my life.
(As a side note, I’m equally boggled by the idea that all guys want to sleep with all of their female friends, because honestly, if this were true even one time in ten, it would be a hell of a lot easier to find a partner than it is. I grant that this is based purely on personal and anecdotal experience, but I think I’m pretty much average-looking, at least not hideous or anything.)
I believe that married people can have preferred gender friends, but they have to make damn sure that those people are friends of the marriage, and they have to keep the boundary lines firm and obvious at all times. No, people don’t accidentally screw the plumber when he comes in, but people accidentally move from being just friends to having an affair all the time, without even realizing when they moved from casually chatting at work to putting their marriage in danger. It happens in happy marriages, to people who love their spouse more than anything in the world.
Do you think that most people in affairs woke up one morning and said, “I’m going to screw someone who isn’t my husband today!”? I think most people in affairs slid into them gradually and without realizing where they were headed, and it is not healthy for people to bury their heads in the sand about this issue and say that anybody can be friends with anybody and if it affects the marriage, then the marriage wasn’t that good to begin with. Yes, there are a lot of people in affairs who are unhappy with their marriages, but don’t kid yourselves that it is 100%.
Another point for all y’all to think about - the North American divorce rate is around 50%, and the majority of those marriages end because of infidelity. Maybe we need to re-think how we are interracting with each other. Maybe we do need to put our spouses and our marriages ahead of our friendships, in no uncertain terms.
Then if you want to get married, don’t marry a guy who isn’t going to allow it.
The thing is, and you single people don’t sem to realize this. . .if you find the right person to marry, there really is no need for friends of the opposite gender.
Go find a couple who has been together for a long, happy time. Maybe your parents. How many friends of the opposite gender do your mom and dad have? How many did your grandparents have? How many opposite-sex friends do your aunts and uncles have?
When you find the right person, you probably aren’t going to desire friends of the opposite sex, and if you still do, then you probably didn’t find the right person.
It’s not a comfortable thing in a marriage for someone to seek opposite-sex companionship outside of the marriage. And it goes beyond the very valid point that featherlou makes.
At the risk of being redundant, featherlou and Trunk pretty much outlined exactly how my husband and I feel about it - we have friends of the marriage. If we were seeking companionship outside of the marriage, it would be dishonest to the marriage and to each other. Hell, it’s hard to explain. Read what featherlou and Trunk wrote. That’s what I mean.
When my wife and I were married, neither of us had any expectation or desire that the other should stop having friends of either sex outside the marriage. We both had multiple friends of both sexes before being married, and had no reason to cut off any of those friends simply because we went down to the courthouse and signed some paperwork. Honestly I don’t think I could remain married to someone who either expected me to cut off old friends because of her, or who expected me to be her one and only male friend. It actually strikes me as being wrong and unrealistic to expect a single other person to be my sole social contact and support, and I wouldn’t want to be with someone who expected to be solely dependant on me for companionship.
Of course she and I put each other first; that’s an agreement we’re both very clear and firm on. But we’re both clear enough on where we stand and where our priorities are to trust each other to go out and spend time with other people.
I agree, but I don’t think most people are advocating no boundary friendships with preferred gender friends. If I found myself getting too close to a friend, I would distance myself immediately, especially if I found myself starting to crush on him. But to say a married woman shouldn’t have single male friends in general is basically implying that neither can be trusted to respect the marriage.
Before they both left the company, my husband was good friends with his single, female coworker. Said coworker is very much interested in finding a man to settle down with and help raise her daughter, and based on what he’s said to me, she would’ve considered him an option had he not been married (I had to explain this to him; he’s so clueless sometimes). They had coffee together and talked all the time and they still chat online now that she’s out of state. There’s nothing wrong with their friendship, and I can trust him that there never will be/would’ve been.
My male phone/chat friend is someone I can talk computer games and the games industry with (which is 90% of our conversation), because my husband isn’t as much into computer games as we are. So in that respect, yes, he provides something my husband can’t. I have very few female friends and I see them rarely anyway, but when I do, it’s usually because they, too, provide something he can’t, in this case, female companionship.
My husband is my best friend, hands down. There is no one I’d rather spend time with, and we’ve been married almost 13 years. But I’m not going to exclude friends just because they aren’t wearing a wedding ring and have a penis.
Oh, and that cute plumber I mentioned upthread? He was married with kids. By that logic, it’s better for me to be friends with him than with my gaming friend who’s never hit on me or in any way expressed anything more than friendship with me.
Fret I think you’re taking an overly simplistic view of marriage. There are folks out there that consider wife swapping acceptable marital behavior, and others that think Missionary position, in the dark, once a year is the norm. You set your own expectations and if your mate is compatible, marriage works.
Featherlou nailed it. Marriages get into trouble because it’s SO easy to get in a rut, or give up minor things for the sake of the marriage. Do that long enough and you find you’re living with a stranger. You can be the most compatible people in the world on your wedding day, and completely different 7 years later. You WILL change. The question becomes: are you changing in a way that’s compatibile with the marriage?
Occasionally. I’m more likely to IM them than talk on the phone - more convienent and less noisy.
Rarely, usually I’m more likely to be going out with a group of friends than just one. But when I do I’ll always let my wife know where I’m going, what I’ll be doing, and when I’ll be back. And I’ll call home and let her know if I’m going to be late.
Not for lunch, but that’s largely becuase I either eat at the office or drive home for lunch - I have a 5 mile commute. I have had lunch or dinner with female and male friends, while my wife was not present, but it’s always been in the context of friends hanging out rather than a date or something.
It has happened - with both male and female friends. Again, it’s more often happened with a group of people rather than just myself and one other person. And, as I mentioned above, I’ll always let her know where I’ll be and when I’ll be back.
Yes. Not often, since we only have one car and she works at home, but she has spent time, eaten with, or gone shopping with male friends. I have no problem with it, so long as I know where she is and when she’ll be back.
I realize that we probably have an atypical marriage. She and I are together out of love, but married for the financial and legal benefits. We put each other as our highest priority above all others, but neither of us expects the other to have no life outside of the marriage.
Shit, we all go do things with groups of people. . .groups that occasionally contain single members of the opposite sex. You probably just have a looser definition of “friend” than I do.
I’m talking about a relationship like the OP is describing. . .
He talking about somewhat intimate stuff with this woman, taking walks in the park.
No one is saying “if you talk to a member of the opposite sex, I’ll cut your head off.”
But, do you really go to your female friends for companionship like they were doing? It doesn’t really sound like it.
With all due respect to both you and to featherlou (with whom I know I’ve had a similar discussion in a prior thread), I have to completely disagree with just about this entire post.
I have been happily married for seven and a half years. I don’t go out seeking opposite-sex friends. But I do make friends fairly easily. I like people – it’s my nature. It was my nature before I got married, and that hasn’t changed. Since I became a social butterfly in my late teen years, I have always gotten along better with women.
This in no way takes away from my love of my wife, my enjoyment of spending time with her, or the bond I share with her that I share with no other person in my life. I don’t WANT that with anyone else in my life. That doesn’t mean, however, that my female friends (or my male friends, for that matter) don’t add to my enjoyment of life in their own ways. My wife is not a baseball fan or a fan of bowling. She’s perfectly content for me to enjoy those things with other people. I don’t hide my friends from my wife, and they adore her.
I know you don’t live that way, so I wouldn’t expect you to understand it. But I *do * hope you can see how someone like me might take offense to your suggestion that I’m not with the right woman because I happy to enjoy some activites with friends other than my wife. Clearly, there is no way that I can concretely prove to you that that’s true; my only evidence is our happiness over the nearly 10 years we’ve been together. But I find it incredibly disturbing that you consider people who view a successful recipe for marriage differently than you do to be doing it incorrectly.
Depends on what you mean by companionship. None of my female friends is going to replace the emotional bond I have with my wife. But I do enjoy spending time with them, and would miss them a great deal if they weren’t around. And I do like to spend time with them, and would miss them a great deal if they were gone. I’d consider that friendship and companionship, comparable to the relationship described in the OP, though far short of the level of intimacy between spouses. I’d also say that the problems in the OP stem from a marriage that’s having problems on its own.
It’s been my experience that infidelity is rarely ever the root cause of a breakup, but is more likely an indicator of deeper dissatisfaction in the relationship. I know of several women I could begin dating were my wife and I to seperate, but that fact alone will not break us up; we know we’re happy with what we have despite other options being available.
