I chose the second option. I would probably be OK with it if the girl was in a relationship, and we spent time, as a couple, with them as a couple. I am not married but I’m in a LTR. My b/f suddenly wanting to do leisure activities with a new girl, specifically without me, would be a red flag. The reason we’re in a relationship is because we want to spend our free time together, so this scenario doesn’t necessarily make sense to me.
Don’t forget the unemployment.
I know, right?
Always a bad idea because of the When Harry Met Sally reason.
In my view, work shouldn’t be the only thing spouses don’t do together. It’s perfectly fine to have separate hobbies and go to separate places and meet different people. And half the population is the same gender as I am (which I assume would be a gender any SO of mine would find attractive), fancy that.
My husband works out of town. He also loves to roller skate, and has been doing so since he was 12. I don’t roller skate, and obviously, I’m usually not out of town with him.
On Wednesday nights, he skates. He likes to have a skating partner. Usually, he can find one on Craigslist, and occasionally, he’s become friends with these women. I don’t see a problem with this.
Either I trust him, or I don’t. Fortunately, I do. He doesn’t give me reason not to.
Either he’s an adult, capable of making his own decisions, or he’s not. But he’s an adult. He can be friends with anyone he chooses to be friends with.
It would be very odd for either of us to strike a close friendship with anyone, male or female, who wouldn’t eventually meet our spouse. Even my co-workers and tennis teammates have met my husband. So it would be weird for him to strike up a close friendship and not introduce him/her to me at some point. That’s not to say that we’d all have to be best buddies, but I’d probably insist upon a meeting at some point if he was spending a lot of time with her.
After that, if I was satisfied that she didn’t have other ideas about him, I’d step aside. It’s not that I’m not the jealous type as much as simple trust. I trust my husband.
This is, in my opinion, nonsense. Look, When Harry Met Sally was a funny movie, and the writing is generally really sharp, but it was a movie, not a documentary.
I’m 33 years old, been married just over nine years (and together with my wife for 12). Among my circle of friends is a woman who is 25; she is, as you put it in your quote above, “a smoking hot babe” and I think there’s a reasonably good chance that she’d be attracted to me in a context-free situation.
Now, according to your theory, I’m supposed to avoid spending time alone with this person. Because what? Am I going to trip and fall and suddenly find myself having sex with her? Is she going to trick me into going to Bermuda with her? I’m a grown ass man; I’m responsible for my own decisions and able to control them. I have to make a conscious decision to cheat, and I will not make that decision. Attractive as this girl might be, my wife is more so.
I am not faithful because I lack the opportunity to be unfaithful. I am faithful because I choose to be, because I want to be.
It’s not “if I’m going to cheat, I’m going to cheat.” It’s: "I’m not going to cheat, so I might as well continue a mutually beneficial non-romantic relationship with a person who is of my preferred gender.
Not hanging out with a hypothetically attractive woman who is in other respects a good friend because it might lead to cheating would be like declining to cut my food with a knife because I might suddenly decide to stab myself in the face.
I chose option two because that’s what works in our relationship, a sort of ‘my friends are your friends’ agreement.
That’s not to say I don’t go off and do things with my friends on my own, and same for my husband. But each of us knows each other’s friends and I would find it weird if he didn’t want to introduce me to a new friend, regardless of gender.
You have a bit of self-awareness, but really, unless you start doing something with your life, you’ll continue to be easy to dismiss. It’s not like you worked for 20 years and got laid off, it’s that you’re essentially still in first gear, living at home with your parents. Especially when you go off spouting things like “I’m super cynical and untrusting lolz”. If you’re divorced, 50, and was cheated on by your spouse who was the only person you’d ever fucked, well, then you’d have reasons.
I’m kind of surprised that not many people in the thread have come out full force against the friends thing. In real life, I see people (mostly women) with lots of anxieties about their partner spending any amount of time with someone of the desired sex. I’ve certainly been the target of anger and animosity from girls (they’re certainly not women) who don’t like me talking to their guys.
Even worse is if my SO and I hang out with a guy friend of ours and talk sports or play cards, the girl will want force herself into the situation, uninvited and unwanted, to play cards and talk sports. Nothing kills the mood faster than her offering to make pina coladas :smack:.
Why would you marry someone of a particular gender if you get along with everyone else of that gender so poorly as not to be friends with any of them?
I cited the Harry Met Sally reason in my post and said they were always a bad idea. But my wife and I have such relationships. My point, obscure as ever, was about the potential problems. Its not just you or your spouse, but the other person as well. When you are aware of the possible problems, they can usually be avoided. But if your spouse is in such a relationship with someone you don’t know, you will have no idea what that other person’s motivations might be. I don’t worry about my wife’s friendships with men, at all, once those men have seen that I look like I could cause them great bodily harm. I trust my wife, I don’t trust other men. She shares that feeling concerning other women. You wouldn’t believe the extent she has gone to, to make sure that my female friends understand that.
Hmm. I think since the poll is only asking about what you would do with regard to your spouse’s friendships, I only answered inasmuch as regards the “non-friend-making spouse” as you described it. The logic doesn’t work both ways.
Where I was trying to go with this is, a relationship needs trust to work. Trying to make rules like “no friends of the sex you are attracted to” doesn’t create trust if none exists. In fact, it fosters an atmosphere of suspicion.
And if you are very devoted to your partner, and you realize that your friendship with that smokin’ hot babe from the local boating club or whatever is going down a dangerous track, it should be your responsibility, not your partner’s, to exercise some self-control. Stereotypes tell us that men just can’t restrain themselves when they see a beautiful woman; that rationality goes out the window and they just start having sex with her against their better judgment or even against their will. In addition to generally suggesting that men can’t be held responsible for their actions, on the darker side this idea is used to excuse sexual assault and place the blame on the victim. It’s a ridiculous notion. So yes - don’t expect your partner to babysit you, just back off from Smokin’ Hot Babe a little.
And let these same principles apply regardless of the genders in this situation.
I’d like to think that most people want to preserve their relationships and be honest with their partners. They don’t see marriage/domestic partnership as a game where you try to get away with as much as possible without you partner knowing. And if that makes me naïve, well, I’ll try to only date/marry/shack up with my fellow naïve humans.
I agree with Storyteller on this. If you really trust your wife you wouldn’t feel it is necessary to scare off potential suitors, since you’d trust her to reject them herself.
It’s ok to have nonmutual friends when you’re married. It’s not ok to fuck them, no matter what their gender.
While it hasn’t been a problem for me or my wife, we know people where that would be an overly simplistic view of the situation. I’m not disagreeing with the principle. But we are both satisfied with the ‘trust but verify’ approach. And it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, mutual agreement between spouses is an important factor in this whole area.
Thirding Storyteller. If you don’t trust your spouse to follow the rules you have mutually set for the relationship, there’s no good reason for you to stay married. If you do trust your spouse, why are you then policing their friends?
The part about ‘rules you have mutually set for the relationship’. Don’t you see that for us, we see the benefit of attempting to eliminate the potential issues, in our minds, or those of others, at the outset. I’m not making a recommendation for others, except for the mutual part. Why are you assuming this is about my wife and I trusting each other? We don’t trust other people. Especially people we haven’t known for very long. It’s not the kind of thing that needs repeating after you’ve known somebody for a while.
I guess I’m not sure how “trusting other people” enters into it. The only scenario for me where “I trust my spouse (and they are worthy of said trust)” and “I don’t trust other people” doesn’t add up to “no sex happens” is “my spouse’s ‘friend’ raped her”, unless I’m missing something. I feel like there’s a logical disconnect in here on one of our ends.
:rolleyes:
I’ve had jobs and I was living in my own place for two years. Just because I’m unemployed at the moment doesn’t mean you know anything about me. I don’t see why you even brought it up. I said I was untrusting of women and you respond by telling me just what a loser you think I am. Get over yourself.
I also don’t get the distinction between work friends and personal-time friends. I mean, interactions with co-workers don’t necessarily mean friendship. It’s entirely possible to be friendly to people at work without seeing them outside of work hours or even engage in a more personal level of conversation. And if my SO has an issue with me having friends of the opposite sex, then how is having opposite-gendered friendship based on work-related interactions different?
At any rate, when I was a tad younger, I had an ex who would claim to be friends with people he’d meet (ie. new co-workers, customers, etc) because they were soooo nice to him and he really enjoyed their company. At first it was fine and dandy, but as our relationship progressed on, he’d say things like “I always want to do nice things for her, but with you, I’d have to put in SO much effort. Why is it so much easier to be nice to this other girl than it is to be nice to you?” Back then, I thought the other girls were the problem… competition to be eliminated because I’m the only person he should look at. PERIOD. But then, looking back on it, that’s just stupid and naive and downright immature. He was acting the way he was (and worst off, telling me all about it, expecting me to have a magic cure - which, by the way, I did) because we weren’t right for each other and no amount of whining about how his friendships with other girls were ruining our relationship and asking him to limit his contact with them could help the god-awful mess that I’d gotten myself into. I mean, I wasn’t a saint because I was quite manipulative too. It’d start off with innocuous things like “I don’t have a lot of male friends, all I need is you” then onto things like “Well, can you not talk about our relationship to her? I don’t know her and it makes me uncomfortable that you’re sharing all this private stuff about me”… and then when he inevitably discusses me with her (of course he is going to, that’s what friends talk about), I’d say “I can’t believe you broke your promise. Obviously, I can’t trust you to behave yourself if you can’t even do something as simple as keep your mouth shut about me, so you have to stop hanging out with her.” It also didn’t help that his “friends” were not the kind of people I’d hang out with, uneducated, low-brow, self-centered idiots, the lot were (hey, just like the ex! No wonder.) It was a disaster all around.
Now that I’ve put a few years between that ex and my current SO, I am so happy to report that I’ve grown up quite a bit. Not that I have all the wisdom in the world, but at the very least, I realize that with a solid foundation, there is absolutely no reason to restrict other people’s interactions just because of my insecurities. Part of the reason I was so possessive before was because I was depressed and had no social outlets, so I was waiting around for the ex to call a lot and hanging onto everything we did together. Now that my brain’s no so fussy with self depreciating thoughts, I actually have friends of my own to hang out with and really appreciate the sanity that speaking to different people brings. I wouldn’t want my SO to say “Hey, that guy friend you have, I don’t like him because he’s male, and as a rule, males are horndogs, so don’t see him anymore, okay?” so I don’t say that about his female friends. Besides, I like his friends, and if he met someone he hit it off with, male or female, I’d trust that he was making a good judgment of the characters he spends time with. If I see someone take advantage of his good nature (and it’s happened before… sometimes, he’s a little too willing to believe other people’s sob story), I’ll say something, but I’d say something whether it’s male or female.
And at any rate, what about male friends I had before we met? Am I supposed to stop being friends with them just because my relationship status changed?