SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I had a few female friends when I got married. One my W met and one my W didn’t meet. The one she never met kept texting me to come over to my house and check out my garden. I knew since my W never met her this would be totally strange so I stopped reaching out and ended the friendship.

The other women we are now couples friends with her and her husband and I actually would consider myself a friend of the husband now.

I wouldn’t feel comfortable having female friends and I wouldn’t feel comfortable if my W had male friends.

In the end you get to set the boundaries for your relationship.

Strangely enough, this topic made me laugh. I trusted my wife and was perfectly fine with her having male friends. It didn’t go both ways though.

She never showed me trust, and was vehemently against me having female friends. She would get super jealous and suspicious if I had any interactions with women. She even gave me a hard time when I had female coworkers that I dealt with. She especially lost her mind if I was alone at work with a female coworker. “It’s just wrong for male and female coworkers to be alone together.” I always made a point to avoid friendships or one on one work with females. Made sure to keep my distance from any female coworkers.

Guess which one of us had an affair with their opposite sex coworker?

Don’t know why I’m laughing at this right now, but I did crack up.

The topic of this thread is: Should your spouse have friends of the opposite sex?

The question ultimately deals with the spouse of the responder.

I think in my case, my spouse should not have friends of the opposite sex. She's proven that in the her character tends to crumble in certain situations.

As for me, I think I can be trusted to have friends of the opposite sex; but, in general, I don't think it is a good idea.

Again, speaking in generalities, I don't think married men should have female friends unless they have been approved by his wife. The reason? There seems to be a fairly common belief that most men are dogs. I don't know if this is true or not, but many of the men I've known over the years have acted like dogs at one time or another.

We never talked about it actually. But, I never did have friends who were male. For one thing, I entered a marriage where we were an instant family. And, I was pregnant for our child within the first year. I didn't do a lot of socializing, I was busy with work and them and our home. There was always cheerleading, and making dinner, and getting baths, etc. We had no family here to help, we rarely got a babysitter...I really didn't have time.

I actually think the lack of that was part of why empty nest hit me so hard. I had no close friends at the time, no outside hobbies or interests. Instead of seeing that as "Yeah! Me time! What can I get into!" I saw that as a bleak space of despair.

I wouldn't have male friends now, we have male acquaintances that we socialize with together, but I do not speak to them on my own. I have male employees as well, but no issues there. I actually do not think I have practiced bad boundaries in that way in our marriage.

My husband has his own business, he has calls with females who do similar things to find out how they are doing this or that. He attends meetings and will have one on one conversations with them there. Some of them he considers good looking, and thinks that they are really great at what they do. But, he wouldn't consider them friends. He wouldn't go to coffee with them or dinner with them without it being a group outing or without me and in those groups they all know me as well. I tend to agree with you - there is no reason he couldn't be trusted to have female friends, he just wouldn't.

But, I tend to agree with Leavingorbit - it's more about how good your spouse is at fulfilling themselves and how good they are with their boundaries.

[This message edited by hikingout at 2:55 PM, August 26th (Wednesday)]