Family Friends

While you and your wife may have brought your own sets of friends to your marriage to begin with, if you’ve been married long enough, you’ve probably been around when your wife (or you) actually met someone and became their friend. And that new friend probably had a significant other. And somewhere early in the relationship, you probably went out as a foursome. And if it was her making the friend, if you hated the guy, couldn’t stand him, then her relationship with the female maybe never got off the ground, or was probably restricted to shopping or girls nights out or something like that. And vice versa. The basic standard that most people seem to have is this: you get to maintain the friendships you came to the relationship with (you don’t have to get rid of the high school friend no matter how annoying to your spouse), but all new friendships have to be cleared with the spouse before commencement. That’s just the way it goes.

Having kids takes this in a whole other direction, since now you have to find a family that is not just acceptable to mom and dad: you have to find a couple with kids to be friends with since you’ll bore regular non-childed people to death discussing diaper brands (or your top ten worst diaper “blow-outs”). And the kids generally have to be the same age as yours (your actual age no longer matters; in parenting terms, if your kids are older than someone else’s, then you’re the “older” parents). You may resist this restricting yourself to childed couples at first, but soon you’ll recognize the advantages of having another set of parents with kids to hang out with.

But first, you have to realize that in choosing these friends, how much you like them and they like you counts, but other stuff counts at least as much if not more. Perhaps most importantly, you need to make sure that they have a reasonable level of attachment to their kids and a reasonable discipline level. Some people believe that once the adults are talking with a cocktail in their hands, all adults are to pretend like the children don’t exist. These are the people whose kids are probably down in the basement, pulling your kids’ fingernails out with pliers when you aren’t there. That’s too far. Other parents, however, will actually follow their kids around your house from room to room and show them how to use toys and will pay more attention to the kids than to you. You might mention to these folks that if you wanted to follow kids around, you have your own. You didn’t need to invite their’s over. So you need to find balance here. Someone who when the kids play in the backyard proposes that the parents sit on the deck, or at least in the family room with the window. But not in the yard.

Another big test once the kids are older is how do the other parents react when you say to their kid “Frankie… stop standing on Julie’s head” in a stern voice. When you discipline their kid. If they’re OK with it, you’ve got family friends for life, even if their favorite band is ABBA and they watch CBS constantly.

This is one of the key reasons why, as you get older, adult brothers and sisters start to hang out with one another. Not because they’ve grown closer or actually like each other. It’s because they’re WAY more comfortable yelling at their own flesh and blood in the form of nieces and nephews when they do something ridiculous like tear up the garden. If it’s not family, you force yourself to think “I didn’t like those flowers anyway.” When it’s your nephew, you grab them by the scruff of the neck and deal with it.

So you’ve got these new couple friends. What are they for? It’s important to do the right stuff. For example, do not ever ever take your family of 3 or 4 out to dinner with another family of 3 or 4. That’s just a disaster. You’re now a table of 8, and you’ll sit in the lobby for 45 minutes waiting for the 2 tables in the restaurant that seat 8 to open up while your kids scream “I’m hungry.” No, what another family is ideal for is for breaking the monotony of weekends stuck at home or weekday summer nights. You go over to the other person’s house, you turn the kids loose and you drink a beer or a glass of wine and spend 2-3 hours together. That’s what these new friends are for.

I wondered why my dad never did anything solo with our “family friends’” dads. It’s because he didn’t actually like many of them as actual friends. And, look, you’re gonna have to lower the bar here. Sometimes you get lucky and you find some guys that you’d normally actually be friends with. When this happens, they normally have a kid who keeps trying to kiss your daughter’s belly or a kid that kills small animals or a wife who your wife hates because she’s really really hot, I mean smoking hot (despite the superficial attraction to that situation, don’t become friends with that guy: it ain’t worth it). There’s never an ideal situation. If you accept that, you can have a blast with the new friends.

The problem really arises when you get older. You not only need a guy that you’re ok with, you need a wife that your wife is ok with, and ideally they will have approximately the same number and ages of kids as you, and hopefully similar gender distributions. There probably are 17 families like that in the world, but only 3 of them speak English. So someone’s gonna get screwed, and there’s really nothing you can do about it. Just make sure that kid gets an extra Christmas present: preferably a Nintendo DS so they have something to play with when you go over to that family’s house and the rest of you have fun.