Couple friends (not!) revisited
by Mira and Charles on February 22nd, 2010Following up on “We don’t really have many friends”
Wow. That’s all we can say. Our blog on how most couples don’t feel they have many couple friends really struck a nerve. We were swamped with responses. They ranged from “Yikes! I never realized it but it’s true!” to “Thank you for making this public. We thought we were the only ones!” to “We felt so badly about ourselves but you did the math and it all made sense.”
A couple of people were confused: they thought we were saying people didn’t have many friends. But we weren’t saying that at all. In fact, that’s the frustrating part. He’s got friends and she definitely has friends, so you’d think they’d have a lot of good couple friends, but they don’t.
Another clarification. We weren’t saying no couple has any couple friends. Not at all. We are just saying that the evidence is overwhelming that people don’t have as many couple friends as they’d want and they don’t like their couple friends as much as they want. And the reason is…it’s hard!
And we want to emphasize what we said in our previous blog. A lot of important lessons follow from this.
1. If you’re looking to get married, make sure you choose someone who can be your friend as well as lover.
2. Enjoy your spouse. (That’s all we’ll say for now. We have a BIG blog on this coming up.)
3. Nurture your one-on-one friendships.
4. Be open to limited-scope couple friends. You can enjoy another couple in one context (sharing play dates with your kids, golfing) without straining things by trying to inflate that relationship to what it can never be.
5. Expand your horizons. If you want couple friends you like better, you may need to do different kinds of activities to meet different people.
6. And please: stop comparing yourselves to couple on TV and in the movies. Let’s all try to remember that we live in the real world, not the media world which is pretty much mostly designed to make us feel badly about ourselves.
And BTW: Charles is going to be talking about this this morning (Feb. 22) in his weekly Fostering Change segment on New England Cable News in the 9 AM hour. You should be able to find his segment on the NECN website.
