Do people really feel that single friends of the opposite gender are a significantly bigger risk than *married * friends of the opposite gender? Are married people statistically more likely to have affairs with single people than with other married people? Because most of the people I’ve known to have affairs had them with other married people.
I’m not married, but if I were, and I were looking to have an affair, I’d want someone in the same boat. It’s much more practical. Someone who has exactly as much to lose as you do is much more likely to be reasonable and discreet.
As has been said, the issue isn’t “looking to have an affair”. The issue is falling in love. It is very difficult to control emotions through sheer will-power, and even if you are successful, it’s painful and makes the central fact of your emotional life something you can’t share with your partner. It’s better to avoid the whole process. This doesn’t mean a person can’t have friends of the opposite sex, but they do need to have control mechanisms in place to avoid the whole situation–the details vary from person to person.
I think most people occasionally meet people that they realize they could have been happy with. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love their spouse/SO. For me, those are the people I don’t develop any sort of one-on-one friendship with, despite the fact that I am sure I’d enjoy such a friendship. It’s hubris to think one’s emotions can’t get away from you.
But it would also be twice as many tracks to cover. A single person, who could come and go as they please, could more easily accomodate the married person’s schedule.
As for your question about statistics, I don’t know. Suppose married people tend to stay away from single people for reasons stated in this thread. Then the pool of possibilities would tend to be narrowed to other marrieds.
This is a good point. If I were Rick’s wife, I’d make a point to meet you and invite you to group events, not because I’m jealous, but because chances are very good that if my husband likes someone, I will too. It would seem odd to me if my husband had a good buddy in our town that I’d never met. It’s not really about sex; it’s about knowing the important people in my spouse’s life. I’m not saying that my way is right and Rick’s is wrong, just that different couples have equally valid ways of dealing with the issue.
shrug I can’t speak for anyone else, but our rule, as I said above, is no hanging out with anyone of the opposite sex alone. Married or single doesn’t come into the equation. Friendship is great–we just keep it in a group setting, never one-on-one.
There are females I consider friends. . .these are my neighbors, some coworkers, friends of the marriage, etc. You can’t NOT have friends of the opposite gender.
However, the idea of doing something with one of them that I do with my male friends (go to a movie, go to a ball game, go get a drink in bar, long walk in the park) – no way on Earth would I do those things with female friends, nor would my wife with another male.
I hate to see a good apology go to waste, but I meant it pretty much as you were taking it - not aimed at any particular person, but I think it is extremely appropriate that people looking for relationship-type advice on message boards remember the context of the people giving the advice - 50% divorce rate. In my opinion, you can easily extrapolate that of all the people telling you what they think, a very large proportion of them are giving you bad advice or advice that won’t serve you well. Before you start thinking I’m a complete asshole again, it took me many years to figure this out on this board after feeling some kind of uncomfortable cognitive dissonance over and over, and finally realizing that this is what it is.
I think, if I read you correctly, that my apology still stands. I took your comment to be a snide remark aimed at only the folks who had a different point of view than your own. Meaning that the folks who say it’s OK to have single preferred sex friends are the ones who have a lot of failed marriages and whose advice should be scrutinized.
Again, I was tired and just reacted poorly – I don’t have any reason to believe you’d say something like that. Which is why I kept re-reading it and finally had it dawn on me that you probably didn’t mean it that way, but that ALL advice from the anonymous population should be scrutinized.
I’m not married, but I am in a relationship where it’s more or less a foregone conclusion.
I have two very close female friends. The wifey adores one of them, and they’ve basically been best friends since they day I introduced them. The wifey hates the other one, and has been convinced that she’s trying to steal me away since the day I introduced them.
I think of one of them as a “big sister”, and the other as a “little sister”. I didn’t have any sisters growing up, so I don’t know if that’s an apt comparison. The “little sister” is the one she hates.
So I guess to some degree it just depends on the person.
I also think it’s reasonable to allow one’s partner a certain degree of unreasonableness in a relationship–this is all about moderation and compromise. If your spouse is really uncomfortable with the idea of some level of co-ed friendship (whatever that is), it really isn’t something you can shift much: you have to find the compromise they can be comfortable with, not the compromise they should be comfortable with. This is why you date people before you marry them–if your expectations on this sort of thing are miles apart, it’s not fixable, and no amount of logic or innocence will fix that.
In other words, if you have a long conversation and get them to admit that they really have no reason to be suspicious, where they acknowledge that they do trust you and don’t really think you’d cheat, where they agree that there is nothing wrong with the other person and that you need your own space, if you have that conversation you haven’t resolved a single thing if they still feel uncomfortable about it. It’s not a logical thing. In a case like that, I think you have to decide where your greater loyalty is: if it’s to your relationship (not your spouse, your relationship), you need to change the outside friendship until it’s one that the other person is sincerely comfortable with. If it’s not, you need to consider what that says about your marriage.
Gee, I go home for the day and my thread explodes. Hey! People are actually replying to one of my threads! That means y’all like me! Right?
It’s nice to see the varied (and polite) opinions. I think what bothered me about my mom’s assertion was the assumption that EVERY wife would be jealous of her husband spending time with with another woman (and again, it felt even more silly considering my dad has never cheated on her, her dad has never cheated, basically none of the people in her life have ever cheated on their spouses, as far as I know.)
I’ll admit I haven’t been in many situations where I could turn out to be ‘the other woman’ - I have few friends, most of them have been unmarried (a basic fact of my age. You don’t get a lot of married friends in high school). On the other hand, I tend to have an easier time making friends with guys.
Flatterer. Sorry man, but if I’m going to sleep with someone much older than me, it’s either going to be Weird Al, David Bowie, or Ringo Starr.
And yeah, DOPEFEST! Hell, I was planning on having a party (or two or three - small apartment, lots of potential invitees) in November, y’all can meet my cats.
As a pansexual, I think it’s completely absurd. How am I supposed to have no single friends? As soon as one of my friends breaks up with someone, I’m supposed to cut him or her out of my life entirely, only to initiate contact with them once more when they’re dating again?
And what if my single friend is not attracted to men? Am I still not allowed to hang out with him or her? Totally fucking ridiculous.
And that’s the other thing. What, I can’t be just-friends with anyone? Even if they turn me off?
OTOH:
IME, this is one of the most important factors, depending on how close one is with the other party. For example, I began developing a close friendship with my best friend’s girlfriend until it became clear that he was uncomfortable with it. It was unfortunate that we had to cut it off, but, c’est la vie. He was my friend first and my job isn’t to make his life more stressful.
So if I get married, I can’t have any of my own single friends? Not one? If my spouse doesn’t enjoy spending time with my single friends, I have to cut them off, because I’m such a sexual beast that I can’t control myself around anyone?
Does this mean that gay couples can only have opposite sex friends? I’ve said it elsewhere and will say again here, I don’t understand why any friend is a threat to a healthy relationship.
My ex- used to be close to a male co-worker. When our marriage was okay, I didn’t think much about it. When our relationship hit some bad patches, I thought about it a lot more and she confided in him more. You can imagine how that didn’t thrill me.
It’s not that you can’t have opposite sex friends, or friends of a gender you are sexually attracted to. It’s that people’s feelings don’t follow orders.
You hang out with somebody, it’s all platonic, everything’s cool. And suddenly someone has a sexual crush on someone. You can’t pretend this never happens, people! It happens all day every day. And people have affairs every day, and it’s not just jerks and assholes and sluts and bastards who have affairs, it’s ordinary people who find themselves in a situation where they’re doing things they never expected to do.
I don’t ever plan on having an affair, but I know I’m a flawed, imperfect human being. I can control my actions, but I’ve been known to eat that extra slice of pie even when I know even at the time I’m putting it on my plate that it’s a mistake. Or I’ll post on the Dope when I should be working. And so on. I can control myself when I want to, but sometimes I find that I don’t want to control myself. And even though I went through a lot of pain and angst as a kid as a result of an affair by a parent and subsequent divorce, am I really all that more ethically tough than my parents? Than the people I see all around me having affairs and ruining their marriages? Maybe I am a bit tougher than those other people, but if I am it’s only by a small amount. I’m not a paragon, and they aren’t sociopaths. We’re the same kind of person, only I’ve chosen to arrange my life such that there are some decisions I haven’t put myself into the position of having to make.
I don’t want to find myself in a position of having to decide not to have an affair with someone I’m horny for. I like to think I’d make such a decision, but why put myself through that? And I don’t think that same-sex friendships are even likely to end up with one person or another or both having that attraction, because some friendships just aren’t. But how do you know in advance? That woman you think of as your sister just might be harboring some incestous thoughts about you, and you might wake up one day and find yourself in the same boat. Or not.
My only point is that it is irrational to make a blanket declaration that same-sex friendships are harmless. Because it clearly isn’t true in some cases. Where do you think those 50% divorce statistics come from?
Weird. This completely befuddles me. Is this a non-gay thing? I’m not married, but I’ve been partnered for over sixteen years (and engaged for the last three; what can I say, we like to savor the moment). And I encourage my guy to go out once in a while with his friends, single or not. Heck, I even encourage him to occasionally go out dancing in dive bars with other single gay guys. I know my partner likes to dance and hang out in that kind of a social venue, and I also know that I hate doing so. Seems to me that encouraging him to have friends, single or otherwise, is good for our relationship.
I always assumed that all relationships worked this way. Weird. (But now I repeat myself.)
It’s not a non-gay thing. You use the same rationale my wife uses. We love each other, but we can’t have everything in common. So we encourage each other to go out and do those things with others that we don’t necessarily wish to do together. And we don’t see this as a threat to our relationship in any way.
As I said, it’s been working pretty well for us so far.
Sorry man, but if I’m going to sleep with someone much older than me, it’s either going to be Weird Al, David Bowie, or Ringo Starr.