Not so. My kids are grown up now. As I said above, I loved socializing. Once I belatedly discovered how easy it was to make new friends, it was a gas. It was exhilarating. I wasn’t looking to hook up with anyone special, either. During that period in my life, I was effectively asexual. I just liked making new friends. It was like suddenly discovering I could play the piano well after a lifetime of thinking I couldn’t.
Why I cut down on socializing after we began our relationship, and she awakened in me a glorious new sunrise of sexuality, is my recognition and acceptance that our relationship has moved us into a new phase of our lives, where we are just so totally into each other that everything else can fall away and it doesn’t matter. I so enjoyed socializing and am prepared to enjoy it again someday. But for now, it was just time to let go.
Are you kidding? Caring for children is enormously time consuming , demanding, and exhausting (mentally, emotionally, and physically), especially if a family doesn’t have an extended family to help out. If both parents work, they’re lucky to even get two minutes of time to relax and clear their heads, especially for the first five or six years. It’s also extremely expensive. Some people simply can’t afford to go out on social occasions once they have kids, not to mention paying for babysitters.
I definitely consider myself an introvert and find that I have a limited pool of energy that I can expend being around other people. When I’m in a relationship, practically by default, most of that energy is spent on my SO. The rest of the time I want to be alone.
Mr. Sali’s dear bachelor friends were always welcome to come over to our house after we married and reproduced. Good times! Fire up the barbeque, pound down beers, watch the game, go out back and throw a frisbie, play hide n’ seek with the kid, order a pizza. Go down the road for target practice at the firing range (before drinking, of course!). Then his friends met women, and got married, and though we did see them once in a while…well, I can only conclude it must be meeting women that destroys friendships!
I’m sorry if I gave that impression, but that’s not the case for me at all. I used to be *incredibly *social, even as a single mother with a small child. I was the social butterfly, within the time constraints parenting and working allowed. My mom spent a lot of nights babysitting! I did theater for the socialization that 20-30 hours of rehearsal a week allowed, not to mention parties and hours and hours of just hanging out with friends. As I got older, I ran a spiritual group and was out at least six nights a month running classes/Circles or socializing with them, in addition to going to school part time and working full time, and all of it was fun. Some of it was obligation, and there were times of great stress, but it was a whole lot of actual hours of socialization and I really did love it.
Then I met/moved in with my SO. It really is as simple as I said: I like him MORE than I like socializing. I don’t like socializing any less, I just like him MORE. I really can’t overemphasize just how much I like being with him. It’s rather sickening, actually.
I enjoy socialising, and still do now I’m married. I like it if my husband comes along, but I’m happy to socialise without him if he’s busy. I think for me the biggest difference came with moving in together. I’m don’t dislike being home alone (quite enjoy it as a once-in-a-while thing), but coming home to him is definitely more attractive than when I was living on my own or with housemates. It doesn’t stop me going out altogether, but if I’m feeling a bit ambivalent anyway (tired, don’t like the sound of the activity) then I suspect I’m more likely to say no or leave early than if I didn’t have him to come home to.
Lots of people don’t isolate themselves when they have a partner- although you might still not see them. A large part of this “isolation”, especially the kid part, has to do with different life stages.
I bet a lot of my single friends though I was isolating myself when I had a partner. I wasn’t. I still socialized - but not so much with my single, unattached friends. Mainly because we weren’t interested in the same things anymore. I socialized more with the friends who were also coupled-up. None of us were interested in going to bars to meet men- which was mostly what my unattached friends were interested in.
Same thing with kids- once I had kids, it was harder to socialize on little notice. Although I had family who could babysit, they had kids of their own, so for every night of babysitting I got, I could count on being asked to return the favor. That drastically cut down on how much babysitting I asked for, so socializing without my husband was limited to when neither one of us was at work or in situations where i wouldn’t need a babysitter. Therefore, I tended to see my friends with children more often. Friends with children tended to be more open to socializing not requiring a babysitter (taking our kids to the park, for example) than the childless ones. There’s also a lot of socialization going on in the bleachers during baseball practice, going to the diner while the Scout meeting is in progress and that sort of thing.
And now that my kids are grown, I mostly socialize with people who don’t have little kids - because now I can decide on Thursday night that I’m leaving for Atlantic City Friday after work and coming back Sunday.
It's sort of like an avid golfer who stops golfing and starts playing poker- he's going to lose contact with his golf buddies at some point while acquiring poker buddies.
