Help me wrap my head around a social conundrum in my relationship

July 5, 2016 10:19 PM

I really like my girlfriends' two best friends and their toddler, but she would like me to like them more. Snowflakes inside.

We're both in our early 30s, I'm a man, if it matters. GF has a much smaller social circle than I do, and she tends more toward introversion than me. A major part of her social circle is a couple and their toddler. They're about as close as friends can be, and she's taking a very significant role in helping with the toddler's upbringing.

I see couple 1-3 times a month. I think they're great people and I think toddler is a great kid and I always enjoy spending time with them. However, I have a full professional life, a saturated social life, and honestly couple are not completely my kind of people. For these reasons, I have not become "inner circle" type friends with couple, and couple does not seem to want anything more from me. However, GF wants me to escalate my friendship with couple. She would like me to have more interest and investment in toddler's development (not that I have none, far from it!) and couple's happiness and general progress through life. Her reaction to my insufficient interest in them feels to me as if she's experiencing it as insufficient interest in her, and this produces a lot of conflict.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, I understand why she would like me to be a more integral part of her social circle, especially such a major part of it. On the other hand, any increase in my commitment to couple would necessarily be at the expense of other parts of my life. I wouldn't mind having them as closer friends if it wouldn't require some sacrifice, and I would also feel like I'd be "faking it," which doesn't seem right. But overall, I feel ready to commit to a partner, her family, and her pets - but honestly do not feel much obligation to her friends. Drawing such a line feels mean and cold though, so I haven't done it yet. Am I thinking of this the right way?

posted by anonymous to Human Relations (18 answers total)

If she's close enough to them that she's helping raise their kid, they sound like chosen family more than friends and I think a lack of interest in them will naturally read to her as a lack of interest in her.

I also think, as a practical matter, making "couple friends" where all four members like each other is hella hard and you should not pass up the opportunity if you think this is long term.

You may just have differing opinions on how close you need your partners to be to your friends, which is okay, there are plenty of fine ways to do it!, but it may be a deal breaker.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:34 PM on July 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

Is there any chance that this bumps up into her feelings about having a child of her/y'all's own? Is she taking your lack of elevated engagement in this family as a lack of engagement in family life in general? Gauging it as your overall "availability" for family/home life matters?

I mean, it may not be anything like that at all, but putting little kids in the mix can complicate things a bit for those people who are in that liminal space before they are really planning for kids but are starting to think about them.
posted by vunder at 11:13 PM on July 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

Am I thinking of this the right way?

Yes. And your partner is being unreasonable.

I think by indicating that she wants you more involved in this friendship with the couple, your girlfriend is telling you that she wants you to marry her.

Conventional wisdom in my country jokes that you know you're in trouble when your girlfriend starts 'forgetting' her things at your place. This in a country where a surprising high number of young women view marriage as the fulfilment of a lifetime and seem to think of little else once they reach the venerable age of 25.

All this to say that what your girlfriend is doing is similar. She's indicating that she wants to take this relationship to the next level.
posted by Kwadeng at 11:24 PM on July 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think you would be right to be hard-headed about this — whenever children are involved, a relationship can become serious. If you are going to bond with children, you really should be able to promise to the children that you will be there for them.

At the moment you seem to have engaged with the children at just the right level: friendly and engaged, but you're not a big part of their life. Coming and going out of their life will not be confusing.

If you were to become even more engaged with them, that would mean bonding with them, and, as an adult, you would have some responsibility for their emotional well-being. You can't just bond with them (in order to bond with this group) and then, if for some reason your relationship with your girlfriend ended, leave.

That would be confusing for the children. So, your girlfriend is really asking you to make a serious commitment to this group and to these children. Are you ready for that?

As adults we owe it to kids to act as good role models, showing them how to have healthy relationships (e.g., where you don't ghost someone) when they become adults.
posted by My Dad at 11:41 PM on July 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I think your g/f is being unreasonable. It is indeed difficult to find friends that are reciprocated by all four people in a 'couple friendship', but the idea that you should just grin and bear it seems unfair to me. If your girlfriend chooses to be so selective that she is friends with only one pair, then she surely can appreciate your wanting to be more selective about who your friends are.

I guess a bit of a concern, in another sense, might be that your g/f's best friends are not your kind of people. It might imply that in some way your g/f/her interests are not really your kind of thing, either. But faking an enthusiasm for the couple friends is not going to alter any of that.

Have you explained to your g/f that you are very open to doing shared things with her family, other potential pairs of friends, but that this particular pair are not really your jam? And (diplomatically, sensitively) why? This might help her to understand that it's not a consolidation of your relationship that you're rejecting (and this can be an important symbolic stage for a lot of people)-- it's just that particular permutation of it.
posted by jojobobo at 2:23 AM on July 6, 2016

Caveat: could you clarify what this escalation of the friendship looks like? Cause some level of that would be within the bounds of compromise, to me, though geniune intimacy wouldn't be.
posted by jojobobo at 2:24 AM on July 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

Her reaction to my insufficient interest in them feels to me as if she's experiencing it as insufficient interest in her, and this produces a lot of conflict

Have you confirmed this is actually the case or is it still in the realm of feeling and imagined on your part?

If you haven't confirmed that your gut feeling is true then may I suggest simply asking her if this is the case?

And if you have already confirmed she truly feels this way, i.e, she feels that that you are injuring her in the relationship by not being at the same level of closeness with these people, then I suggest either having some compassion for those feelings and deciding you will try to get closer and grow with her in that way, or decide that the price you have to pay to be in this relationship will cost more of your professional and social life than you are willing to pay and start planning an exit strategy.
posted by Annika Cicada at 3:14 AM on July 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

This feels like a puzzle where there are missing pieces. You are right to be confused. If she really cared for the child then she would put the child's needs first, and not introduce him or her to someone that she is not married to. This just seems weird. Are you sure that she isn't secretly the birth mom?

She's asking you to go from point A to point G without hitting any of the other letters. Something seems not right. Either you have misunderstood something or she is leaving something out. Be wary.
posted by myselfasme at 3:20 AM on July 6, 2016 [12 favorites]

any increase in my commitment to couple would necessarily be at the expense of other parts of my life.

Relationships require compromise, but if your relationship is developing into something integrated and permanent-ish, then it has to balance both of your needs and include both of your networks and activities, not just hers.

Your girlfriend's introversion may be something of a red herring here - I am a hardcore introvert and I would never expect my more extroverted partner to feel/behave the same as I feel/behave about the people I feel strongly about. He's not me, just as you're not your girlfriend. It sounds a little bit like you are a supporting character in your girlfriend's story as opposed to an equal partner with a story of his own.
posted by headnsouth at 3:31 AM on July 6, 2016 [10 favorites]

You're dating her, not her friends. It sounds like you are warm and making an effort, which is as much as any sane person could expect. But she's asking you to basically form overnight what sounds like a lifelong bond with strangers that probably took her years to develop, herself. Ask her how she would feel if you dragged in one of your childhood friends and told her that you now expected her life to be intertwined with theirs?

I mean, it's great if you click with these people, but given that you don't, she needs to drop it. Most people don't develop relationships like that with their actual in laws that they're related to by marriage, much less anyone else that their partner associates with. I think this is her hamfisted way of trying to integrate you into her life, but you can't force these things, and if she's not careful, she will drive you away. Also consider that she may want you to show an interest in the baby because she's assessing your fatherhood potential...
posted by Jubey at 4:31 AM on July 6, 2016 [16 favorites]

I feel like I'm missing some information. What does insufficient interest look like--did you skip the toddler's preschool graduation, or her friend's milestone birthday blowout? Do you change the subject when she talks about them, or not ask "enough" questions? It does sound like these are people she considers family, so if you're skipping events that matter to them, I can see her getting frustrated (as I would if my partner blew off a lot of my family's big events and thought it didn't matter).

Again, this just feels like missing information; if the answer is "I don't ask enough questions when she tells me about her conversations with them," I agree that's weird, and that it's probably an awkward attempt to integrate you into her social life. But if she just wants you to make more room for her and her circle, well, whether she's communicating that well or not, it might be a valid expectation in a long-term partnership.
posted by gideonfrog at 4:52 AM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Can you be more specific about what your girlfriend considers the ideal level of interest and investment she wants you to have in these folks? You say you already see them 1-3 times/month - if you tried to stick closer to 3 rather than 1x/month, would that be enough? That's nearly once/week - personally I think asking for much more than that seems excessive (you can't "force" friendships, and being pressured into doing so isn't likely to work - but maybe that isn't what she wants).

At any rate, hopefully asking for specific behaviors and frequencies that would look like "enough" to her would give you both a place to work from - if all she really wants is that you ask her about her friends more often that's one thing; if what she'd like is more than you are comfortable with, hopefully the two of you can come to a compromise that shows her you care about her wants even if you need to balance them with your own.
posted by DingoMutt at 4:58 AM on July 6, 2016 [6 favorites]

Depending how much time your girlfriend spends with them, she may be experiencing your lack of engagement with them as forcing her to decide between spending time with them and sharing time with you, similar to how you feel pulled between them and your own social and professional engagements.

Chosen family is a real thing, whether or not she is using that vocabulary to express it. In your shoes I would try to gauge whether that's how she feels about these people, account that up with her other family ties she is asking you to invest in and your own level of commitment to this relationship, and proceed accordingly. I agree that her asking this if you it's a sign that she is taking your relationship seriously and it would be fair to her to consider whether you're on the same page (unless she is kind of a flighty person with consistently shifting social bonds, in which case it's probably still just as important a question for you to consider).

If she does relate to these people as her family and you are unwilling to, it's fair to have that conversation with her. It might signal a difference of values that would be important to her to discover/consider sooner rather than later.
posted by Salamandrous at 5:06 AM on July 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

She would like me to have more interest and investment in toddler's development (not that I have none, far from it!) and couple's happiness and general progress through life.

This is a vague amorphous abstract concept. How would your girlfriend know you are having more interest and investment? How would an outside observer know? What concrete actions (not feelings!) would you be undertaking that you're not doing now that would indicate you have more interest and investment in this couple and their child?

Until you have that information, you can't even actually judge whether this is a reasonable request, because you don't know how much time or energy it would require. She may have already given you that concrete information, in which case your abstraction of it makes it seem like you object on principle (which is fine, you're allowed), which is a different conversation and would actually most likely be about your keeping your girlfriend, not her friends, at arm's length. If she has not yet given you any concrete information, then that's the first step, because then you can assess whether you can do what she's asking and negotiate around the parts of it you can't/don't want to do.

But right now it sounds perfectly valid to wonder if she's thinking, "Anon always changes the subject when I bring up Toddler, and it's annoying, and I wish they'd stop doing that," while you're hearing, "Girlfriend wants me to give up every single weeknight to spend three hours playing board games with Family." There's no way for us to know what she's actually asking, there's no way for you to know if she's asking for too much, and there's no way for you to know if there's any room for compromise. Find out what behaviors you would need to change or add, and then go from there.
posted by lazuli at 5:53 AM on July 6, 2016 [9 favorites]

Is it possible her request for you to have more involvement in toddlers development is actually her way of gauging how you might be or act as a parent type, within the dynamic of your relationship... and essentially your interest in kids i.e. with her? Just a thought
posted by Under the Sea at 6:14 AM on July 6, 2016

Speaking as a rando on the internet: when my wife voiced some similarly weird concerns years ago, it was because she was reallyreallyreallyreallyreally ready to have kids rigthnowgodammit, and she was frustrated that I wasn't (yet) on the same page. My interest/lack of interest in other people's kids was the gauge she was using to measure my own interest in potentially having kids with her. Now, it would have been a lot easier on both of us if she had voiced those concerns before they reached the point of boiling over, but to her credit once they did boil over she finally explained what she had been feeling for the previous two years. Once my eyes were opened to the reality of the situation, I was able to move forward myself. Until that point, though, she was reading my reactions to my friends' kids as if I were reacting to the idea of having kids with her, and this lead to a lot of needlessly confused and hurt feelings for both of us.

Obviously, I can't speak for your GF or her relationship with her friends, but if there is an unspoken assumption between you and your GF that you two are likely to be together for the long term, her internal dialog may be screaming that she needs a more formal commitment from you now, and she needs to see some movement on your part towards her goals very soon, and she perceives your interactions with her friends is as a proxy for your interactions with her in these matters. Again, I am basing this on my own experiences years ago, but those experiences taught me that my wife was playing a much longer game than I realized, and although I didn't realize it, anything less than total commitment and steady forward progress towards having kids with her was perceived as an unnecessary and hurtful delay.
posted by mosk at 11:13 AM on July 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

I think it's respectful of you to want to build authentic relationships and be honest with your girlfriend about where you stand.

Is it possible she's making assumptions about your capacity and desire to connect with new people? As an introvert, she might look at you and think that you connect with people quickly; that you're ready and happy to make new friends at the drop of a hat; that you wouldn't mind bumping friendships up a notch because "extroverts love that kind of thing." She may not realize that you, also, have a limited supply of energy and attention and you want to prioritize where you spend it (something that introverts tend to do).
posted by ramenopres at 12:56 PM on July 6, 2016

Different people have different levels of community with their friends. Some people view the world as "nuclear family | everyone else," while some others have really entwined their lives with some other friends as well. If she has keys to their house, walks in without knocking, drops by without advance planning, calls them for random favors ("I forgot to water my plants; are you near my place?"), occasionally sleeps over there, celebrates the major holidays with them -- anything approaching any of that -- then her life is really intertwined with theirs and she's probably looking for a partner who can fit into that social world. If instead, you're standoffish, if you like her but want to hang out with her apart from them, then you don't fit in that world, and getting together with you might pull her away from them. For example, if she wants to drop by randomly to see Little One's new haircut, and you don't feel like it, then the two of you might not be a great match.
posted by salvia at 3:18 PM on July 6, 2016