Some of My Best Friends Are Women, and My Wife Is Cool with That
Description
As a work-at-home dad, I require a certain amount of socialization to keep myself from going stir crazy in the house. Tonight, for instance, I’m meeting a friend for drinks at a Brooklyn bar. I haven’t seen her in a while and we have a lot of catching up to do. Tomorrow I’m off to an art opening at a Lower East Side gallery with another friend. Later, I’ll have dinner with her. And on Sunday I may see a movie with one of my closest friends, who is — do you see the pattern here? — a woman.
Ever since high school, I’ve had more women friends than men. As I’ve written before, I never comfortably fit the image of a stereotypical male. I neither watch nor play sports. I would rather cook and clean than do anything involving a hammer. And I have no trouble talking at great length about books, music, television shows, or my feelings. Some of the most important friendships in my life have been with women, a few of whom I’ve known longer than my wife.
That’s never struck me as strange, or a problem. Especially here in New York, you often see mixed-gender couples hanging out, and it’s never safe to assume that they are romantically linked, or even that they’re both heterosexual. So I was surprised to see Babble blogger Chaunie Brusie’s piece “I Agree with Mary J. Blige: No Friends of the Opposite Sex if You’re Married.” In it, Brusie says that she believes “that at best, having a friend of the opposite sex is disrespectful, and at worst, it’s a terrible idea that is just begging for trouble.”
The disrespect would come from her husband wanting to spend time with another woman other than her. And yet, I imagine she wouldn’t feel slighted if her husband grabbed a beer with a guy buddy. The implication is that, at heart, every relationship between a man and woman has a romantic or sexual component. I don’t agree with that. I have worked and studied with women whom I respect and admire and in no ways did those components factor in. Similarly, I have dear friends who I love simply and unambiguously as friends.
I also take issue with the idea that friendships between opposite genders can lead to affairs. Sure, that’s possible. Chemistry factors into some friendships, and I’ve been out with friends and had waiters or bartenders assume we were dating because of our warm rapport. But I’m a responsible adult who loves my wife, and my friends are honorable, good people, and that’s the end of it. We all find stories about adultery titillating, but it seems to me that affairs happen much less in real life than they do in the movies. Who knows, maybe I’m naïve. Or maybe I just hang around a morally upstanding group of people whom I trust, and who trust me, and so boundaries have never been crossed.
What’s more, I’ve never been out with a woman and had her suggest we visit a strip club, or point out an attractive stranger at the bar looking my way and then dare me to introduce myself. Both of those things have happened while with male friends. Nor have I ever had a conversation with a woman friend take a nasty turn toward sexual objectification, and that sometimes happens in an all-male environment too. In a way, a same-sex environment can be more loaded, and likely to lead to nasty behavior, than a mixed one.
Cutting yourself off from having friends of the opposite gender would be like refusing to have friends of a different race, economic background, or sexual orientation: it would limit your ability to fully experience and understand the world. My female friends have provided me solid advice on parenting and marriage. In particular, they’ve helped me better understand and communicate with my wife. They’ve made my thinking about politics and culture more complex and sophisticated (I hope), and strengthened my compassion muscles. I’ve discussed miscarriages, troubles conceiving, postpartum emotional problems, one-night stands, harassment on the street and in the workplace, relationship insecurities, all sorts of important, fundamentally human issues from a woman’s perspective.
These relationships have made it impossible for me to, as my dad used to do when I was a kid, throw up my hands in frustration and exclaim “Women!” That’s because when I think of women, I don’t think of some generic group. I think of my wonderful, amazing friends. (In fact, I worry now that some of them might read this piece as one of those “look at me, I’m an enlightened male” pieces in which the author seems to be patting himself on the back for being such a forward-thinking guy. Really, that’s not my intention.) I consider it important that my son sees me having equal friendships with both women and men. I teach him to treat girls with the same kindness and respect he would boys, and he sees me modeling that firsthand.
My wife doesn’t have a problem with these relationships, in part because she knows that she’s welcome to join us whenever she wants. With working full-time then coming home to give her all as a mother, she needs the opposite of what I do in the evenings: time to be quiet, recharge, and fall asleep early. She encourages me to go out and enjoy myself (and leave her out of it!). When there’s an event I’m headed to that she doesn’t want to attend, she prefers I take someone other than her as my “plus one.” I don’t think I could be married to a woman who didn’t like my female friends, and who felt uncomfortable when I said, “I’m going out with this nice woman I met at a reading last week, it turns out we have a lot in common.”
I love hanging out with men. I love hanging out with women. I love making friends. People are people. If we click as friends, then we click. That’s what’s important.
