It’s a sad fact that marriage can alter friendships, but it’s important to recognize that your circle of friends are as important after you get married as they were before. When couples get married, the first few months, nigh on years can be time spent focusing intently on each other – to the exclusion of previous friendships. While most of us don’t do it deliberately, there is a line of exclusion that seems to divide us from our single and married friends.
Subtle Changes
The losses always begin subtly. You don’t call your friends as often. You beg off from lunch dates and you forgo plans to head out to dinner and the movies. Your topics of conversation may seem a great deal more limited than they did before. When a married couple begins expecting a baby – the divide may fracture even wider between themselves and their single friends.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Yes – some change is to be expected, but it takes efforts on all sides of the friendship to help maintain them. When you become Mister and Missus, it should not be at the expense of whom the two of you were before you were married.
The Struggle
While your single friends may not be taking pre-natal vitamins or looking at window treatments, they are still available for support, amusement and conversation as long as you are available to provide it and seek it out as well. You may not be going bar-hopping every Friday night, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy each others company over coffee in the morning before work or at lunch during the day.
Many people struggle to maintain their friendships that span across the marriage fence. It’s not unusual for people to change when they get married, but they can resist the urge to let that change so dominate their life that they can’t talk about anything else.
It’s important to remember that if your single friends want to talk about dating or what they did last weekend, that it’s important for you to listen. You might not be able to relate to the lifestyle anymore, but it’s not like you weren’t single once upon a time yourself. Sometimes, listening is more important than understanding.
There is this odd feeling in our society that once we are married, our single friends go away. I know I had several friends who pulled away after I got married. They felt like all I ever wanted to do was stuff with my husband. They weren’t wrong, but I didn’t want them to vanish either. Once we got pregnant, that feeling got worse. We actually had one friend who said and I quote:
Well, our friendship was great while it lasted.
When I asked him what he meant by that – he said that he knew once a married couple had children, they changed and real friendship was impossible. That hurt – that hurt a great deal and without so much as a by your leave, they extracted themselves from our lives. They didn’t trust us enough to make the effort, so why should they bother?
The truth is, our marriages can be wonderful, but they cannot meet every single need we have. Our lives are built on the structure of multiple relationships. The relationships we have with our families, our spouses, our children and yes, our friends. We need different support groups for different reasons. We are not just wives, we are also women. Our husbands are not just husbands, they are also men. Support and understanding is vital in all aspects.
Just because you do things differently, doesn’t mean you don’t still have a place in your life for your single friends – who knows – they may get married themselves someday and they’ll treasure that friendship with you even more – because you’ve been there. Getting married doesn’t mean your friendships and prior relationships end – it just means those relationships like yourself, are going to evolve.
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