This post is the 3rd in a series of essays on male perspectives on marriage and friendship.

Shortly after my wife and I were married, we started hanging out with some other newly married couples that lived by us.  Imagine our surprise when we found out that they fought about the same things that we fought about.  Imagine our relief.  We were so happy to know that we weren’t the only ones that disagreed over toilet paper, tooth paste, or sex.

Spending time with other couples helped my marriage, but it was finding guy friends to hang out with that made the biggest impact.

I got some advice from guys that have been married longer.  It took a while for me to learn the “don’t fix, just listen” thing.  An older friend of mine was listening to me talk about a particular argument that my wife and I had, and he stopped me and said, “I know this is going to sound strange, but you messed up,” he said.  “All you had to do there was be quiet, listen, and give her a hug when she was done.  Then maybe build her up a little.”  Apparently sometimes women just need a man to listen to them.  Weird. 

I had a place to blow off some steam when something really frustrating happened, whether it was in my marriage, at work, or in class.  It’s pretty easy to bring your work home with you, so to speak.  Have a frustrating day at work and the irritation can stay with you all the rest of the day unless you find a place to get rid of it.  Luckily, one of my good friends is a coworker, and never the cause of said stress, so sometimes after work I can give him a call and we’ll go blow stuff up playing Halo 3 for a little while he listens to me complain about work.  I return the favor.  After a couple hours of that, how can one possibly still be stressed out?

Time away grants a little perspective.  When you see someone every day one can begin to take them for granted.  Taking time to go on a trip or have a guy’s day is good for a person.  About once a month my guy friends and I like to get together to hang out for the day, playing video games, eating, and doing incredibly nerdy things like Dungeons and Dragons.  Sometimes we’ll go longer, like weekend camping trips or road trips.

Returning home after time away always makes for happy returns.  The things that may have bothered me before don’t seem so important now.  We miss each other a little bit, and plus, guys kinda smell.  It’s nice to return home to where things don’t smell quite as bad.  Sex after a long absence is good too. 

Just having fun makes you a little bit of a more interesting person.  Some guys are nothing but work and TV.  Even guys who are actively involved with their kids and their wives can get stuck in a rut.  Getting out of the normal daily routine is good for you and your spouse.  One, you laugh, which releases endorphins, making you a generally happier person to be around, and two, when you come back you have interesting stories to tell and things to discuss.

Now, these things have come over six years of being married.  I didn’t get all of these things right off the bat.  In fact, it took some work to build a group of friends who could provide these sorts of benefits.

Why Men Need to Maintain Their Social Support Networks

A friend of mine recently relayed a story to me about someone she knew who went through a tough divorce. He was complaining to my friend that women have so many resources available to them. There are magazines, talk shows, and strong social networks. What do men have?

When this guy’s friends heard how upset he was about his divorce, they told him, “Don’t worry man, I’ll get you laid.”

What a response.

Why Do Married Men Suck at Making Friends?

Socializing, like most activities, is a goal oriented task for most men.

A big part of a single man’s motivation for making friends is dating. Single guys are often looking for a girl to impress, to provide companionship. If it’s not a girl, then it’s to kill time when they’re not working or dating. Friendships fill the time.

After marriage, the focus tends to go on the spouse and on work.  Men are rather single minded, for the most part, and we don’t multitask well.  It tends to be true that good men will often focus on their marriages to the detriment of their other friendships.  This is all part of cleaving to your spouse, but if a man becomes too focused on one thing, then he can find that when things get hard and he needs a little outside help, he has no network to rely upon.

Women seem to have an inherent need to be social.  It’s part of who they are.  Men have the need too, it just seems that we aren’t aware of it sometimes.

What’s the Solution?

It needs to become a priority, guys.  For so many years, women have worked to create this social network, and guys have worked to build stuff, build careers, and build families.  The time of the loner in his cave has got to come to an end.  Whether you build your network via fishing with your buddies, road trips, or online, you need friends. 

Most of you out there who have successful careers are constantly monitoring your professional network.  What’s going on at this or that company, how is so and so’s career, etc.  This is what the ladies do.  They check in with each other, find out how their friends are doing, how the kids are doing, what difficulties they’re having.  We can do this too, without even seeming effeminate.  It just takes a little effort.

Want to read more?
How Marriage Hurt my Social Life
How Marriage Changed my Social Life.

After I got married, my social life suffered.  It took a while, but I got things rolling again with a (mostly) new group of friends.


Perhaps not unsurprisingly, most of these new friends were married.  Sure, I had a few single friends, but most of them were out doing things that I had little interest in doing - like dating and finding girls to date.  Single guys just seem to have a different mind set.  It’s not bad, I understand it.  It’s just different.

The weird thing is that it seemed like my married friends were more interesting.  Instead of talking about that hot something-or-other, we were talking about politics, religion, kids, and literature.  Different priorities, I suppose.  It’s not that I didn’t talk about those things before, but it mostly happened in classrooms, not in living rooms.

The biggest thing that changed about my social life after getting married was the structure of my socializing.  Before I got married, I had friends that I could just call up and hang out with, or I could even just show up at their house.  We could just sit and shoot the breeze or go grab a drink (a non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated, usually carbonated drink).

After marriage, everything became even more task oriented than it was before.  Instead of just calling up a friend, I began finding excuses to socialize.  There would be a new movie that my wife didn’t want to see, so I’d find some other married guys to go see it with.  A few of us started a regular RPG gaming group (If you don’t understand RPG, that’s okay - you’d just make fun of me).

I’ve been married for almost six years and I still do it.  Perhaps I feel like I have to justify the time away from my wife.  I’m getting together with a good friend this weekend to watch the UFC fight (btw, if anyone actually thinks that Forrest Griffin can beat Rampage Jackson, I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona…)  If there wasn’t a UFC fight, we wouldn’t be getting together.

Then there was the time issue.  Initially, when I started hanging out with guys again after marriage, I would go out at 5 PM, for two to three hours, and I felt like I had to go home, or at least check in.  I was that guy - the one that all of my friends rolled their eyes at, and, I’m just now realizing, this was probably the biggest reasons my single friends thought I was so awkward to hang out with.  If you can follow that last sentence, you are very good at imagining what my tortured punctuation means.

After a little while, I went too far the other direction.  I’d go out with friends and stay out until one or two in the morning without calling my wife at all.  That didn’t go over too well either.  I’m happy to say that now my wife and I have struck a pretty good balance.

Now, all that said, what good did this do my marriage?  Find out in the next post…

Enjoy this article?  Check out these posts:
How My New Social Life Saved My Marriage
How Marriage Hurt my Social Life

Yesterday I read SavvyDaddy’s rather profound exploration of what I consider to be one of the strangest phenomena of marriage and fatherhood: the crumbling of male social networks.

SavvyDaddy talks about how becoming a Dad was rough on his social life, not because he became too busy, but because everyone else around him thought he was too busy.

Before I got married, I was a bit of a socialite. I had lots of friends, went to lots of parties, and pretty much never wanted for company. I had a group for sports, a group for video gaming, a group for church activities, and there were a fair number of friends who crossed over between those groups.

When I was first married I didn’t care about my social group for a little while, which is perfectly normal, I think. I focused on my wife because our marriage was so new and it made me so happy. After a few months however, I began to want to spend some time doing things that I had been doing before, like playing basketball, gaming, or what have you. Of course I wasn’t looking to invest the same amount of time as I did previously.

The difficulty I had was that now that I wanted to go back to those previous activities, I found I had no one to do them with. Friends that were formerly people that I spent enormous amounts of time with suddenly couldn’t find time in their schedules. I even had one friend tell me that he didn’t want to hang out with me. When I asked him why, he told me it was because I was married!

I was devastated. I know that the traditional stereotype is for men to be loners and not need anyone. That’s what the man cave is for, right?

Wrong. Every guy needs a buddy or two, and I need a social life!

It took some time to readjust. After a while, I began venturing out with people from my new church congregation. I tried joining a club or two during college. I even tried to hang out with some classmates. It was strange to me how long it took, since it wasn’t like I moved to a new state. I was in the same area that I had lived for 8 years.

After about 18 months of marriage, I had finally found a couple of guys that I felt comfortable around, that had similar interests to mine, that I was really good friends with. About six months after that one of my best friends from high school got married and we started hanging out again. Another friend moved back to my part of the state and we got together again.

Finally, after about two and a half years of marriage, I had a group of friends that felt somewhat similar to the group that I had before - guys that I could call up to go see a movie, grab a bite, or just hang with for a little while.

It’s amazing what that did for my marriage.  In the next post, I’ll talk a little more about that.

Welcome to the second edition of the Manival. The Manival is a blog carnival that brings together the best posts by man bloggers written with men in mind. I’m really excited about the response we got for the first edition. We received 21 great submissions for the second Manival.

If you’re ready to man up, here ya go:

Do your male emotions get in the way of a successful marriage?What do you fear in your marriage or about your marriage?

I have always feared that somehow my wife would wake up and realize that she can do better than me. I’m not the smartest guy, nor the best looking. I grew up in a family situation that was less than ideal, and as such I feel like I often make mistakes that are just unbelievable in retrospect.

I think many men are amazed that their wives put up with them on a day to day basis. What with all of the feminists out there telling women they can go it their own and they don’t need a man to be secure.

It’s amazing, sometimes, how that fear drives me. I can honestly say that sometimes (not all the time, but sometimes) it’s not so much love that motivates me to do all the little things in my marriage that make it work, but fear. I fear that if I don’t spend an evening with her when I really just want to be left alone that her feelings will be hurt and our marriage damaged.

This has been a difficult post for me to write. It’s taken me several attempts over several days, and liberal use of the backspace key. Why is it so difficult for men to admit what they are afraid of?

When I was in drama school I went through some seriously challenging exercises in acting classes where we had to reveal some of our deepest fears and be able to deal with them. When in that kind of situation it’s amazing how supportive my fellow students and actors were. We all cried together and helped each other out. We gave each other suggestions and took advice that was given.

In this online community, however, it is a little more difficult to open up, and if it’s difficult for me, then I have to understand that it may be even more difficult for all of the other men out there who are walking around with tremendous burdens on their shoulders. We all know that a burden shared is a burden halved, but it’s still a scary thing to share our fear.

I fear to share because I fear being humiliated or being seen as less than a man.

If what we want is for our fear to be assuaged and our burdens to be made lighter, then we must risk that humiliation. It takes risk to achieve our goals. Men are taught to risk in business, in play, but not emotionally. That’s too dangerous for most of us.

It would be ideal if AGoodHusband.net were a place where men were able to open up and ask questions about their relationships that they don’t dare talk about in other places. I hope that can happen, but if not I understand. I put the time into writing posts like these because I hope that it will inspire other men to participate in the discussion.

So, men, what do you think? What are your biggest fears in your relationships?