Rick and I hang out on occasion. I’ve told my mom about it and she thinks it’s wrong that his wife is okay with this. According to her, married people aren’t allowed to have friends of the opposite sex, unless the spouse is going along too. She’s amazed that Rick’s wife isn’t jealous of me and actually said that the situation is the same as my sister and her boyfriend and his wife. :dubious: :rolleyes: I’m rather astonished by the whole thing, especially considering Rick is old enough to be my dad. (Sorry ) I quizzed her, and apparently people in a relationship aren’t allowed to have any single friends of a sex they’re interested in (so gay guys can’t have male friends, bisexuals can’t have any friends, etc)
What do you all think of this? It’s utterly ridiculous, right? (And for the record, it’s not that she’s had any sort of trouble with my dad. He’s got less friends than she does. I have no idea where she got this idea.)
In my experience, every couple has their own comfort zone on this issue and it’s no one else’s business as long as the three people involved agree on it. It doesn’t come up too much in my marriage, for either of us.
No, but I recommend treading with caution. My suggestion would be that you make friends with his wife in some way, whether this be just a friendly chat on the phone or asking her for a recipe or whatever seems natural. (Maybe you’ve already done this, as you mention her being OK with you getting together with Rick). A 20-something year old woman may see a 40-something year old man as a completely unrealistic romantic partner, but many 40+ year old men do not rule out 20 year old women.
There are, as Kalhoun said, different comfort zones in different marriages, but it does seem kind of narrow and insulting to suggest that the only interest one could ever have in a member of one’s preferred (to have sex with) gender is a sexual interest. It also can put a lot of pressure on a marriage to expect one’s spouse to be so utterly everything to oneself.
Married folks can have single friends, though, in my experience, usually both members of the couple at least know the single friend. A lot depends on context. If my husband were to say, “Co-worker Sally and I had lunch today” or “Gaming buddy Sally and I are getting together to work on our character sheets,” I wouldn’t think twice about it. If he were to say, “Sally and I are going out to dinner tonight” and didn’t ask me if I wanted to come along, alarm bells might start pinging.
As Kalhoun says, though, it’s something every couple has to work out for themselves. Some married folks see themselves as much more of a social unit and don’t like to socialize without their partners. No skin off my nose.
**Kalhoun ** basically got it in one. Every couple has to work this out for themselves. Whatever they decide is none of my business.
That said, if a couple disagrees, and one of them asks for my opinion, I’m firmly on the side of “I’ll be friends with anyone I please, thankyouverymuch.”
People vary on this one, indeed. We’re pretty careful about this sort of thing–neither of us would just hang out alone with a member of the opposite sex. We’d have other people along too.
We have plenty of social interaction outside of each other–it’s a simple rule and not hard to live by. Going out to lunch? Take another friend. Make it a crowd instead of a twosome.
I don’t think it’s insulting, because it’s just careful and an acknowledgement of human nature. I don’t actually suspect my husband of being irresistibly attracted to every woman he meets (and at any rate it’s his rule for himself, not one I made up for him), and one lunch at Burger Hut isn’t going to inevitably spark an affair, but the line has to be drawn somewhere and we find it best to draw it there. It’s easy, it’s simple, and we each prefer to hold ourselves to that particular line.
YMMV, but it’s not unheard of or totally outrageous–it’s part of the normal spectrum of things people do.
When my ex-husband and I were married, this was a problem for him. I had a number of single guy friends. Most of them I had been friends with before I met him and some I made during our marriage. For us it boiled down to trust and insecurities. I would have never cheated on him and I knew he would never cheat on me… he just didn’t trust that…
And it didn’t help with people on the outside (his friends included) feeding into his insecurities.
So while I was okay with being friends with other people, and they were okay with me being married and even hung out with him… the issue wasn’t the other guys… it was that he wasn’t secure enough in himself.
On the other hand my BFF is married and of the opposite sex. A lot of rumors are started because of this and it annoys the living shit out of me. As for his wife, I have tried talking to her and becoming friends with her on our own level… though I don’t think we have that much in common.
Re: this, no, they’re grandfathered in. They were friends prior and they’re not subject to the SO’s approval. If there are serious objections, like “I think my SO’s friend is a drug dealer,” then you don’t marry the person in the first place.
Re: OP. I’m leery. Those relationships can become too close and when your marriage is trouble, they can cross a line. I wouldn’t knock others who are cool with it all, but I don’t choose to have married friends (who bear no other connection to me like work).
E.g. there’s a married woman I work with. She’s really smart, attractive, funny, and likes me as a person for sure. But I think her marriage hasn’t been going too well and she’s been asking about why I haven’t found a wife etc. To a certain degree that could be a friend who’s concerned for a friend. But when it goes on for awhile, it starts looking like a vicarious interest. Whether that’s the actual truth or not isn’t as important as her SO’s belief about it.
By and large I think people self-sort. E.g. if you’re a couple with a kid in tee ball, you meet all the others who are in the same boat and that becomes your circle of friends.
My sister’s carpool guy quit on her because his wife didn’t think it was appropriate that they met at the rideshare lot and rode into work together. She had no problem with the fact that he works in an office right down the hall from her, but didn’t want them in the same care together. My sister is married, too, but her husband didn’t have a problem with it.
On the one hand, I have sympathy for the wife’s viewpoint, because frequent driving in a car is substantially different than working in an office in terms of likelihood to produce emotional intimacy. Not for every carpool, but for some.
On the other hand, I want to roll my eyes at her, because at some level if the carpool folk really want to pursue intimacy (emotional or physical) riding in a carpool isn’t likely to make that much difference.
I actively encourage my partner to have friends (of either sex) and he encourages me to do the same. We’d go crazy without our own circles to run in. We have some interests that don’t intersect so it’s necessary for us to have other friends to engage in those interests with.
I’ve never met Rick’s wife. I certainly wouldn’t care if she came along, nor their children. I figure it’s his problem if she’s jealous (which according to him, she isn’t) and I just wouldn’t let it get beyond being friends. The same is true if I ever manage to go bowling with Asimovian or hang out with any other Doper. My only other married friends, I’m friends with both of them and was friends with the wife first (we’re practically sisters. And according to their kid, I’m his best friend. He’s a cutie.)
It is one of those things to be discussed with the spouse, like any other things that you need to find what’s the comfort zone of your beloved is; is there any expected boundaries and such.
It’s up there along with (some couples) deciding whether they want to be friends with their spouse’s friends, none or some.
I’m a “one of the guys” kind of girl, and Mr. K has never had a “boys only clubhouse” kind of attitude. In fact, when one of the guys suggests they ditch me, he never goes along with that. However, he doesn’t like hanging out with the girls. And the girls are his sisters, in most cases! I really don’t have any single friends anymore.
For my parents, at least, the reasoning is that all men are looking to be horny and it is a woman’s responsibility to not to “tempt” him by avoiding close contact with him. They literally cannot conceive of why a woman and a man would want to be “just friends” as the only purpose of man is to be horny and to have sex.
This is the same father who, in an attempt to scare us away from living together in sin, told my now-husband that he wouldn’t have married my mother if she had lived with him, while my mother was in the room, BTW. Because, y’know, the only reason he married my mother was to for free milk.
It’s one big self-fulfilling prophecy. Thankfully we’re moving away from it.
Well, I think the point is that hardly anyone starts carpooling (or whatever) with the intent to commit adultery. But when you spend, say, an hour with this person every day, chatting about your lives, and then maybe complaining about your spouse or discussing your difficulties with your mom, it’s easy to become emotionally intimate. Then one day you discover that you don’t want to stop talking to this person, and you’re attracted to him. By the time you realize that you’re falling for each other, it’s much harder to stop.
Plenty of people don’t mean to let it get beyond friends. But they get into hot water before they really realize what they’re doing, and by that time they’re headed straight for an affair and breaking it off takes more self-control than they’ve got. It happens all the time. People are fallible human beings with feet of clay, that’s just how it is.
) I quizzed her, and apparently people in a relationship aren’t allowed to have any single friends of a sex they’re interested in (so gay guys can’t have male friends, bisexuals can’t have any friends, etc)