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Originally Posted By: artista
anyway--i was there in NC for 16 months before i finally came back to California for good... during that time, life went on in both of our lives... my father-in-law passed away... my father had a major surgery... H and i were in touch, but it was mainly business-like... i moved back in with my parents... and it was another 7 months before I approached my husband regarding reconciliation… and he needed time to think on it… about a month…


I came here to ask about your post above and what happened to make you approach your H, then I read your last post above about feeling your M was authentic, which I think answers the big reason.

But I'd still like to know if you saw yourself wanting to approach your H as part of the reason for moving back to Cali, or if the move was to be closer to your kids. At what point in that 7 months did you realize you wanted to reconcile, and what was the interaction between you and H during that 7 month So?


M - 9 1/2 years
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Originally Posted By: artista
on the one hand, i too am a girly, girl... i love pretty things, the color pale pink, painted toes, blush lip gloss... on the other hand, i can hang with the guys... my best friend is male, and i tend to get along with males... my female friends are my sisters... i am a sports fanatic, whisky and tequila shooter, Scotch sipper... no fruity mixed drinks for me... i taught my sons how to throw a spiral with a football, how to bat, and how to catch fly balls, how to play pool... i speak proper English but can take on the vocabulary of a drunken sailor in a split second... on my son's 21st birthday last year, he and i smoked cigars and drank bourbon (something i had promised him since he was about 10)...



artista,

The paragraph above is an excerpt of a message that you posted on hoosjim's thread (the boldface is mine). It struck a chord with me because my XW had a guy best friend (her BFF) during the latter years of our marriage. My XW assured me that a husband ranks above a BFF and that I shouldn't be worried. That didn't turn out well.

Given your history, I was surprised to see that you have a best friend that's a guy. It seems to me that you, being married, having a guy best friend would be similar to a "reformed" alcoholic hanging out in a liquor store. The end result seems inevitable.

Am I wrong? Is your husband okay with you having a guy as a best friend?

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Originally Posted By: doodler
Originally Posted By: artista
on the one hand, i too am a girly, girl... i love pretty things, the color pale pink, painted toes, blush lip gloss... on the other hand, i can hang with the guys... my best friend is male, and i tend to get along with males... my female friends are my sisters... i am a sports fanatic, whisky and tequila shooter, Scotch sipper... no fruity mixed drinks for me... i taught my sons how to throw a spiral with a football, how to bat, and how to catch fly balls, how to play pool... i speak proper English but can take on the vocabulary of a drunken sailor in a split second... on my son's 21st birthday last year, he and i smoked cigars and drank bourbon (something i had promised him since he was about 10)...



artista,

The paragraph above is an excerpt of a message that you posted on hoosjim's thread (the boldface is mine). It struck a chord with me because my XW had a guy best friend (her BFF) during the latter years of our marriage. My XW assured me that a husband ranks above a BFF and that I shouldn't be worried. That didn't turn out well.

Given your history, I was surprised to see that you have a best friend that's a guy. It seems to me that you, being married, having a guy best friend would be similar to a "reformed" alcoholic hanging out in a liquor store. The end result seems inevitable.

Am I wrong? Is your husband okay with you having a guy as a best friend?


good point, doodler... my best friend has been my friend since 1971... i was 6 and he was 8 when my brother married his sister... so he is my brother's brother-in-law and his sister is my sister-in-law... he is family, really... we went to the same high school and told everybody we were cousins... he knows the history of my family since he has been around and involved in our lives all these decades... he knows all the ins and outs as if he were a sibling... he is friends with my H, and they have conversations between themselves--that i am not a part of... my sons know him as Uncle... if it were anybody else, any other male, it would not fly... i would say that our relationship is akin to that of Will and Grace (the sitcom)...

--artista

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artista,

Thank you for the explanation! I feel better now.

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I just saw this and wanted to say I have a male best friend too. It's a mixed blessing! It never seemed to affect my marriage except for one isolated incident.

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Originally Posted By: NicoleR
I just saw this and wanted to say I have a male best friend too. It's a mixed blessing! It never seemed to affect my marriage except for one isolated incident.


NicoleR,

When I met my wife (now XW), she had a guy friend; she may have referred to him as a "best friend," but I don't remember. I didn't have any problem with that because he was never a threat to our marriage and I knew I was my wife's number one guy.

After a decade of marriage, my wife met a guy that had childhood experiences similar to my wife's childhood experiences (they'd both been sexually abused and had difficult parents). I actually liked the guy and I was appreciative that he was someone that could really understand the trauma my wife went through as a child. Unfortunately, that didn't work out so well.

Artista's best friend had been a friend since childhood, and I think that makes a big difference. Regardless, I always felt like I was my wife's best friend until the new guy came along.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Below is and clipping from a Psychology Today article:

Many married women (and married men) insist that having a best friend of the opposite sex is perfectly healthy. In fact, they say that opposite sex friends make better friends because they bring very different perspectives to the relationship. But let's look at a few things here.

First, healthy friendship involves emotional intimacy, as well it should. Deep friendship leads to a level of sharing that is selective and usually confidential. That means, others are excluded from the conversations. When a woman shares intimate feelings with a man who isn't her husband, a wedge forms between her and her husband. He is excluded from the privacy she shares with her male best friend. And when this starts to happen- beware. Husband is on the outside looking inward.

Second, let's be adults. Physical intimacy is the sequel of emotional intimacy in most healthy relationships. That's the way we are wired as humans. Give emotionally intimate heterosexual couples enough time and physical intimacy follows. Or, at least the temptation to be physical emerges. In same sex friendships between heterosexuals, natural boundaries exist preventing sexual intimacy from occurring.

There's another thing. Kids. How would your fifteen year old feel if he walked into a restaurant and saw you, his mother, having dinner with your best friend Sam while dad was at home. Pretty weird. And kids' feelings count. I've listened to too much heartache from kids over the years whose parents have fallen "out of love" with their spouses and "into love" with other people. This really messes up kids' lives.

So the simple answer to the above question is an unabashed "No." Married mothers shouldn't have men as their best friends and vice versa. If not for their kids' sake, do it for the health of their marriages. At a time when the divorce rate is through the roof, families are fractured and ex-wives, ex-husbands and kids are filled with pain, let's begin to put some healthy boundaries around relationships and really care for them. This means, moms, that your best friends should be women.

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Doodler, I'll have to find and read your thread to learn more about what happened. In Artista's case it sounds ok. In my case my friend has been my best friend for 20 years and I'm like part of his family. When we both got married I asked him to call my husband if he wants to speak with me and I would call his wife. All four of us became friends until my husband left. Now it's the three of us. It's become a somewhat unprecedented situation more recently because he and his wife have problems and they both call me and I've needed their help with my husband leaving. I agree that male best friends for married women don't make sense aside from my male best friend being a better role model for my daughter than my husband at this time. It's hard to undo the friendship, especially during this crisis in my life, but I won't seek any new male friends in the future except a future spouse.

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I would not be ok with my wife having a male best-friend no matter how long she'd known him. In fact, it would have been a deal-breaker while we were dating.


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Artista's best friend had been a friend since childhood, and I think that makes a big difference. Regardless, I always felt like I was my wife's best friend until the new guy came along.

doodler, i have to say that my H is truly my best friend... he and i can actually finish each other's sentences... have the same exact thoughts at the same exact moment... we know each other so well... have so many inside jokes between the two of us... many times, "out of the blue," we had the same exact thought--very weird... we are kindred spirits... this history would often come to my mind while we were separated... H said he would think on this too while we were apart... deep down, neither of us wanted to lose that... neither of us wanted to cut all those thousands of strands of thread that connected us... our relationship is deeper than the relationship between me and my male bf...

--artista

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I would not be ok with my wife having a male best-friend no matter how long she'd known him. In fact, it would have been a deal-breaker while we were dating.

and if i were dating someone who could not accept my best friend that i had since 1971, that would have been a deal-breaker for me...

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