My friends are already like that.
I agree with everyone who says you have to issue an invitation and see if it sticks. Presumably, your friends like hanging out with their wives and kids, so if they’re involved in planning an event, it’s going to involve the wives and kids by default. It may not even have occurred to them that there are other options.
Of course, if you plan something and it turns out that they’d rather hang out with their wives and kids than with you alone, ever, you’re going to have to either accept that they’re a package deal or find new friends.
Sometimes, when you get married and have kids, telling them on a Saturday “I’m going over to Acsenray’s house to hang out for the afternoon” just doesn’t cut it.
It wouldn’t work in my family. My wife would want to know why, and she wouldn’t be thrilled with my decision to just go hang out. Now, if I said “Oh, this Saturday I’m going to a ball game with Acsenray”, it would probably work. I don’t know why either.
There aren’t a whole lot of people out there that you’ve known since the 7th grade. I have newer friends, but sometimes you want to spend some quality time with old friends. You share things with people like that that it’s not possible to share with just anybody. It’s like if I complained that my grandmother doesn’t make enough time for me and the answer was to go out and find another grandmother.
I don’t even know what this means. Hang out for 10 years? What about hang out for a few hours once in a while?
I have a friend who always wants to get together, “just us guys.” We all have kids but we get together once a month or so. The problem is, this friend then wants to make a whole day of it. All day Saturday, hanging out and drinking beer, yaking about college 30 years ago? No thank you, a couple of hours is fine.
Keep it short and maybe your buddies wil be able to make.
Or take up golf. My understanding is that the point of golf is to get away from you family and hang out with you buddies for 4-5 hours on the weekend.
Keep what short? It’s never gotten to the point where length is determined.
None of my friends play golf. I can’t see any of us going to the trouble to take up an expensive hobby like golf that we don’t really have any interest in.
Also try to keep their situations in mind when planning an event. Perhaps if you tell the guys you want to go to the comedy club and make it a boys night catch the 9 p.m. show instead of the 11 p.m. show so they aren’t getting home at 2 in the morning they might be more amenable to leaving the families at home for a night. Or if that doesn’t work plan a movie day where you split into 3 groups, the kids seeing the newest Disney film in one theater, the guys watching Bruce Willis blow shit up in the theater next door, and the wives seeing Diane Keaton learn to love again in the next theater (by which I mean auditoriums within a single multiplex, not going to three different locations.)
Oh, I’ve had guy friends who were the same way. One guy in particular used to get really, really super pissed when other guys would blow us off for non-family activities. Then he got married and bang, vapor.
Plus, I don’t really mind hanging out with family – sometimes. What I don’t get is why some people are just permanently attached at the hip. He claims, over and over, via email that he’d really love to get together, but he just can’t get away, not for a single night, for years. Note he’s contacting us, not giving us excuses! I just don’t get it. Your wife is incapable of watching the kids for one night, for something you claim you deeply wish you could do?
I guess I just don’t get being a parent but if I had to spend 100% of my non-work time with anyone with no breaks ever, I’d freaking scream.
My friends all still get together for big holidays and events like weddings and the like, and will see each other on a more individual basis, but for more casual, just-Friday-night-type get togethers we have definitely self-segregated into the breeders and the non-. ::shrug:: That’s just how it goes.
What? No way! I’m a single woman who gets to hang out all the time with my girl friends…aaaand their kids. And if I’m lucky, their husbands too!
Every time my girl friend “casually” asks me out for lunch or dinner - the whole family shows up. Never “hey want to grab lunch WITH JUST ME SO WE CAN TALK?” more like “Hey my family needs to eat, want to do it with us?”
And of course every conversation is broken up by making sure the toddler keeps dinner out of his nose, and they have to run right afterwards because the kid has to sleep or is sad or something.
I think balance is the key. My husband has a group of buddies he plays soccer with every Saturday morning. And most Sunday night he and a friend go to a ‘guy’s night’ movie.
The kids and I have no problem with this, because on other occasions we get together with those same guys and their families to hang out, have a swim party, have dinner, or see a family friendly movie.
I think there are some couples / families who, when they become a couple and/or a family, lose their sense of independence, and just flat-out don’t think of not leaving the wife & kids.
I mean, how many of these guys drug their wives to all this great shit you did before they had kids? I suspect that was the case as well, except that since the wives are adults, they didn’t get in the way to the same degree.
I also (and I’m not necessarily bashing women here) think there’s a certain insecure set of wives who are the ones that Dogzilla’s talking about, who decide that they’re now Mothers and part of a Family, and expect the husbands and everyone else to buy into that particular BS.
I’m lucky… my wife is pretty intent that I have “my boy time” and go off and hang out with my male friends and drink beer, eat wings, watch football, etc… and talk about stuff she’s not interested in- sports, beer, guns, computers, video games, cars, etc…
By the same token, she’s entirely welcome to go hang out with her girlfriends and do arts & crafts, talk about babies, etc… I want no part of that.
+1 My wife and I have lots of different friends. Some we socialize with as a family including kids. Some just as couples. Some she alone with the ladies, and some me with just the guys. And several of our friends cross many of those borders.
The key is to be explicit about the gathering, what’s taking place and who’s included. People normally don’t get butt hurt if you say let’s just do this as the guys or let’s not include kids this time. You have to be assertive and not assume that everyone know what you want to do.
Make some new friends, whose interests are closer to your own. This will mean you can still see your old friends occasionally, when it fits in with their lives, but you won’t be relying on them for everything.
This came up on the Dope before and I was so relieved. It’s funny how the bitchy ball and chain can secretly be the lifesaving best friend who gets you out of watching boring sports.
The OP should just get on with already and have a baby. If you can’t beat them, join them. Maybe you won’t get to see your friends more, but if you trade babysitting with friends you’ll get the chance to hang out with your girlfriend or wife.
Acsenray has already said he’s not interested in making a bunch of new friends - he just wants to see his old ones alone once in a while.
I agree with everyone else who says invite them out for a specific “Guy’s Night Out!” and see what happens. Your friends might not have any idea that there is such a thing as a Guy’s Night Out!
Here’s my problem… I’d rather go to the boy’s event! Beer and football? Count me in! The only thing there I wouldn’t be interested in is guns, but I think I might make it up with airplanes and hockey! The closest I’ve ever come to arts and crafts is painting the bedroom wall.
It’s actually rather tough for me to find other female friends who are interested in that stuff, but there are a lot of couples and guys who are, so we all get together as a group. Sure, us girls might toss in that a particular defenseman is hot, but we understand the rules of the game, too!
I am flashing on a fun saturday afternoon we had at the house once … we had people over for a weekend and got bored, so we took the guns out back into the field to our range area and blew through several boxes of ammo. During the cleaning party afterwards, we got into discussing macho shit, and got into a blindfolded fieldstripping contest. Guns, not people =)
[we have a legal for us AK, which is admittedly easy to strip and reassemble with practice. But it did somewhat resemble some sort of barracks movie.]
Did I mention the dramatis personae was self, mrAru, 2 female friends and a buddy who was a ranger when he was still in the army. FWIW, the females did better at sighted fieldstripping than the 2 guys did, but the ranger was the best blindfolded. He apparently did a stint in his units aggressor squad and had been issued an AK as part of the aggressor kit =)
