Wives that have lots of guy friends (or vice versa)

In My Humble Opinion
1

For this instance, I will use the example of a male/husband’s point of view thinking about his girlfriend/fiance/wife having lots of guy friends. Feel free to use the other angle as well.

How many of you that are married out there have this issue or is it not an issue for you at all?
Would you be alright knowing that your gf/fiance/wife has and wants to keep having lots of guy friends while she’s with you? She will regularly hang out with them and be out late with them and say it’s just a friendship and that you can’t tell her she is not allowed to have friends.

For me, if you want to call it old fashioned or whatnot, I personally believe once you are committed to another (bf/gf, engaged, or married, especially married), you shouldn’t really be keeping guy friends around. I don’t mean you can’t have any guy friends period, but hanging out with them once a week or texting them, talking with them a couple times a month is still inappropriate and seems to be only asking for trouble down the line. Some people may use the excuse that he’s your co-worker or team member or something like that so she needs to keep friendship with them and hang out with them every now and then.

What do you think about wives who believe it’s not just ok but necessary for her to keep guy friends and hang out with them from time to time? I think it’s inappropriate unless it’s an actual company/business meeting OR if we are all hanging out together as a group of friends.

2

I think it’s absolutely normal. My wife has male friends, and she talks with them, and spends time with them, not in my presence.

If you feel it’s inappropriate, then, IMO, you’re somewhere between old-fashioned and controlling or paranoid (or perhaps a member of a conservative religion).

Turning this around: @thescrr - if you are a male, do you feel that it’s inappropriate to have female friends with whom you talk and do things without your wife?

FWIW, I’m married; my wife has male friends with whom she does things, and I have female friends with whom I do things – for that matter, the two people whom I consider to be my best friends (other than my wife) are both women.

3

I have several female friends. Will call or text or email or FB chat with them. But I don’t go out with them or stay out late with them — I’m home with my wife.

Most of my female friends are coworkers or former coworkers. Some are even her friends and I communicate more regularly with them than my wife does.

I’m aware of this, sensitive to it, and respectful of it. We don’t talk about my wife behind her back, we talk about other things. And I certainly do not open up to them about any intimate topics with my wife.

4

Thanks for sharing.

Yes, the answers will vary and there’s definitely no one way about it. I think it is possible to have good relationships with members of the opposite sex even if your married, but I think it’s generally more troublesome than beneficial overall…say 65/35 and you are part of the 35 that have a completely healthy and trusting marriage that you can both keep guys and girls as your close friends and hang out with them without your spouse.

I believe it’s definitely healthy to have some acquaintances but to develop new and close friendships with other women while I am married would not be a good idea IMHO. Now, if the woman is a long time friend of mine, say I knew her since childhood or college days and she’s one of my best friends and is also good friends with my wife, that would be different. We would all be hanging out together from time to time and once a while I could have her as a close friend to confide in about personal things that maybe I don’t want my wife to be involved in. .But having also said, it sounds weird because your spouse should sort of be your best friend too and not just your love/spouse. I would think if you are married happily and trust each other, you would not need to have another private female friend whom you share intimate secrets with behind your wife’s back. That would seem odd and opening the door for trouble down the road (unless she’s your psychiatrist).

But I support you if you have a loving, and strong relationship with your wife with complete trust in each other, that you continue to have good close relationships with other women. I just don’t think the majority of the world can do what you guys do. That’s meant as a compliment.

5

I’m with Kenobi_65. My wife has male friends she spends time alone with, and I think that’s healthy. If she only spent time with me, that would be weird, IMHO.

6

Any man who tried to cut me off from any of my friends, male or female, would be finding the door right quickly. I’ve already had two abusive relationships and isolating your partner from friends and family is #1 in the abuser handbook. If you don’t trust your partner, why are you with them? I think it’s also really telling that you think your partner’s male friends are your only competition when your wife might very well have lesbian friends with benefits lol.

7

I have a group I go out to lunch with, all ex-co-workers, all women. Me (male) and the five of them. One time a waitress said, wow, you have five girlfriends. I told her, yeah, I’m trying to cut down.

8

Speaking from the wife point of view …

I used to fly airplanes as a hobby. This is a VERY male dominated activity, particuarly when it comes to homebuilt/ultraight aircraft where I got my start. It was unavoidable that I when I started flying I would be spending time in a small box with men who weren’t my husband. I had been flying eight years before I took a flight where the other person was a female pilot. It’s not that my husband was unwelcome - he was the first person I took for a ride after being issued my license and he often came along - but some of the aircraft only sat two people so there wasn’t room for a third person.

On the other hand, when two people are strapped down with four-point harnesses eight feet apart on what looks to be a telephone pole with wings it’s not like they can do anything untoward.

(No, not actually a picture of me - just a random pic of a type of airplane I’ve flown grabbed off the internet)

So… the husband was always welcome to be around, was introduced to the folks I flew with (and he occasionally flew with them, too), but didn’t feel a need to always be around. I never had a problem with the guys misbehaving. Probably because we were all aviation nut-cases FAR more interested in flying than almost anything else.

(One of the guys at our local airport had just made his first flight in an airplane he has built himself. He was fumbling around trying to find adequate words for the experience and finally burst out with IT WAS BETTER THAN SEX! All the guys in the airport lounge who weren’t pilots were calling bullshit. All the pilots, though were pondering the matter and nodding in agreement, going “yeah, yeah… I can see how that would be…”)

Just for the record - husband and I were married 30 years, certainly with no straying on my part. I have no reason to believe he did any straying either.

As always, YMMV and not everyone gets the same results.

And, by the way:

and

…are a bit mutually exclusive. Because what you’re saying is that she’s not allowed to have any guy friends unless you approve of them and you’re there to chaperone.

It is possible to have multiple friends.

Being friends does not entail sharing any sort of intimate or private details about anyone else. I certainly did not discuss private details between me and my husband with any of my girl friends. Nor did/do they share such things about their partners with me.

9

I don’t think they’re going to vary nearly as much as you think.

It’s unusual for someone to be so controlling that they don’t want a significant other to have friends of the opposite sex. That’s an unhealthy level of insecurity.

10

I have several female friends, all of which are former or current colleages. A couple of them and I have lunch occasionally to catch-up and network. One of them I helped buy a car - she wanted a dude there during the purchase. Another is one of my skiing and hiking buddies (my wife doesn’t do either any more) among my male friends that I do those activities with. My wife knows them but we don’t all hang out together.

I don’t think she has any guy friends, but it wouldn’t bother me. We’ve been married 28 years, so we are fairly secure in the relationship at this point.

11

I entirely don’t care about my spouse’s friends’ genders. We have been together for decades.

12

I lost a good and close friendship because her husband had the same perspective as the OP, so no, I’m not at all sympathetic to that viewpoint. It was a few years ago, and we are still colleagues, but I miss the friendship a lot and it still hurts sometimes.

13

I was with my exwife for fifteen years. She had plenty of guy friends and made new ones during our relationship. I had no problem with it at all. Likewise I had friends who were women and that was never a problem. I might have had an issue if she was spending a lot of one on one time with just one of them until late at night a few times a week or something extreme but that never happened.

With one girlfriend I had a problem with one guy because I didn’t trust his motives and I was right about him.

If I were to look at my currently active platonic friendships, it’s probably two thirds women. There is no way I am giving up two thirds of my buddies for anyone.

14

Well duh, human society in general is still living under some modification of traditional patriarchy, in which men were entitled and expected to be fully in control of their wives’ social and sexual behavior, which was supposed to be monogamous.

Naturally this led to a lot of gender segregation and behavior policing, where women’s socializing with unrelated men without their husbands’ supervision was automatically viewed as somewhat suspect or dangerous.

Given that background, it’s not at all surprising that extramarital cross-gender friendships are widely perceived as unwise or risky or “not a good idea” or “more troublesome than beneficial overall”, etc. That may not be the most healthy or positive attitude on the issue, but it’s a very understandable one.

15

FWIW I’m a husband and most of my closest friends are women. I hike with one, including day trips. My spouse is fine with that. And I’d be fine with her having close friends including men. She occasionally meets a male friend for lunch or whatever. It’s great that we can do things independently (especially considering we each have interests the other doesn’t share) and great that we bring new things to talk about back to our own relationship.

I have no wish to do anything like cheating, and very much doubt she would either.

16

I couldn’t care less. Wife is the same way. 25 years married.

Actually my Wife really doesn’t have guy friends though. She works in an office that is primarily women.

I have a very close friend that is a woman. Known her for about 35 years. She lives about one and a half hours away. When I visit her I just spend the night.

Since she lives closer to my mom than I do, I will often just continue on the see my mom the next morning. It just makes sense.

17

We (a couple in our 60s) have a very good friend who is in her 30s. When she got married a few years ago we became friends with him also. Then he got an opportunity to complete his Master’s Degree with a full scholarship at a University about a 10 hour drive from here.

With her husband gone for 2 months we felt bad for her, so we’d let her know whenever we went out. Turns out she accepted almost all of our offers. When her husband would call in the evening she was often not home and that bothered him (unbeknownst to us).

Then one Saturday night we were out until 2 am. I was designated driver. I dropped my gf off at our house so she could let the dogs out, then took our friend home. My gf was worried about how drunk she was, and made me promise to see she was safe and sound before leaving her.

So, I’m in her living room and she has run to the bathroom. Her phone rings, and she hollers for me to answer and let whoever know she’s in the bathroom. I assumed it was my gf calling to check on her. Nope, it’s her husband. I explain that his wife is in the bathroom, that we’d had a great time, where we’d gone, etc.

Turns out he wasn’t cool with this. They got a divorce. She’s with a really great guy now who is much more like her.

18

Most of the responses so far have been saying, correctly, that it’s perfectly okay for a married person to have friends of the opposite sex.

But the OP seems to be afraid that his (real or hypothetical) wife or girlfriend is being, or is at serious risk of being, unfaithful to him. Or, he’s not getting what he wants or needs from the relationship because his wife or girlfriend is spending so much of her time and energy with other people instead of with him. (ETA: Or maybe he’s just overly controlling, which is a whole nother problem.)

Without knowing the people involved, we can’t tell him that those fears are unfounded. Those are things that do happen sometimes. They are problems. But they can’t be fixed by trying to forbid one’s partner form having or spending time with friends of the opposite sex. If your partner is trustworthy, you have to trust them; and if they’re not trustworthy, maybe you shouldn’t be with them.

19

A couple of additional thoughts, from my own perspective:

All of my life, I’ve had close friendships with girls and women. As a boy, I wasn’t interested in a lot of the things that my male peers were (sports, playing “war,” etc.); although I had several boys who were good friends, at least half of my friends/playmates were girls, and I was often more comfortable playing with them, and hanging out with them, than with my male classmates, who often teased me about being unathletic and just generally kind of “girlish.” (In retrospect, now that I know more about gender identity than I did when I was younger, I’ve come to realize that I am probably not strictly cisgender, but that’s another topic for another time.)

As an adult, I’ve still found that I’m comfortable having women as friends, and part of that is being able to talk with them about emotional topics – while I have a few male friends with whom I can have that kind of conversation, there aren’t many; most guys still seem to not be interested in (or comfortable) talking about their emotions with other guys.

In addition, I have a number of friends (yes, mostly female, but some male, too) who rely on me to be a counsel, a shoulder that they can cry on if needed, and a person that they can talk to about difficult stuff. (I guess I’m a good listener, and I’m not judgmental.)

It’s not that I don’t talk about those emotional topics with my wife – I do. But, it’s sometimes good to be able to interact with other people on that level, too.

I also attend gaming conventions, which often involves sharing a hotel room at the convention with one or more friends. Sometimes I wind up sharing a room with one or more female friends, and there have been occasions in which I have shared a hotel bed with one of them. My wife knows about this, as do the husbands of the female friends – it’s not a big deal for any of us.

My wife knows all of my female friends, and I know all of her male friends. There are times when we do things as a group (i.e., my wife and myself, along with one of my female friends and her husband), and there are times where I’m spending time with a friend, who happens to be a woman, on my own.

20

This is the nub of the whole thread. With a side helping of “If you’re not trustworthy, you don’t belong with anyone.”

One can live one’s life assuming the worst about other people or assuming the best. The choice is yours, but which choice you make leads to two very different levels of happiness & comfort in your life. My general view is that people who assume the worst of others are actually projecting their own craptacular inclinations onto far more of the public than deserve it.

As a separate matter, with one’s spouse/SO, there should be very little “assuming” involved. You will know their character pretty well pretty quickly.