Your man's friends

By Christine chacha

His friends were the most important people when you were dating, you worked so hard to win their approval as you know the power of friends In influencing the decisions of  your significant other. After lots of smile, hanging out with them and lots of pretence, you book yourself a slot in their good books, he gets the go ahead and soon you are married.

The honey moon phase over and now reality checks in, the two of you have to get back to your lives which is defined by family, work, friends and other obligations. Somehow some of his friends begin to get on your nerves, suddenly they are the people that you want to take your man away from.

Take Cindy’s case for example, her husband Peter is a perfect guy and their new marriage is almost perfect save for one thing; his friends. “I hate his friends especially John, they are just bad influence on him” she always complains. “I never get to see Peter over the weekends, he does everything they tell him to do, it just annoys me: she says .Apparently John picks up her husband every weekend and return him in the morning drunk as a fish, and she has information that he tries to hook up her husband at the bar.The stroke the broke the camels back however was when Peter, and his pals-read John- decided to travel to Zanzibar, In the name of just having fun just when the two were having a financial crunch.

So Cindy had given him an ultimatum to choose between their marriage or his good for nothing friend.I thought it was too harsh but after serious considerations I thing she had a point. She says that there are some friends that one has to loose after marriage no matter how far back your friendship goes. I always wondered why most people tend to drop their friends and form new friendships with other married couples after they marry but now I do understand. Married and singles are like oil and water; they can never mix because both groups are after different things, while one is after commitments, they other is after dating.

In a previous article I wrote about dealing with your mans friend, I said you need to understand all their character.If you know that your man has a friend who is a drunk or a womanizer then it is very likely that he is bad influence on you man when they go out and away from you eyes.

Mob psychology dictates that a man will behave like his friends when in their company. Someone once told me that men are like kids well in this case they really are, observe any man in the company of his friends, no matter how respectable he may be, he will act a fool. The trick is to single out friends that have powerful influence on him and drop them somehow, after all they have already served their purpose in his life.

Interestingly I realized that In most cases, your single friends feel betrayed after you trade your single status for the glorious ‘coupledom’. With all good intentions they try to get you back to the game or lure you to singleville. Such are the times that you find the likes of John who even try to hook up their married friends despite being aware of their commitments. Such are the friends that have to go after you marry, its an automatic adjustment.

The tendency to turn our friends into marriage counselors, is inevitable, but I assumed that only women talk about their issues until I learnt that men too also do share with their pals. There are some friends who can sustain your marriage and are a great sounding board when issues come up but there are others who are toxic, and can cause someone to over-focus on a problem and make a proverbial mountain out of a mole hill creating dents in a good relationship. These are the ones that offer absurd idea, I remember the movie ‘three can play the game’ this one dude was having issues with his girl he consulted with his bestfriend ,followed his who apparently had no clue of how to maintain relationships and therefore lost his girlfriend.

There are single friends that have cannot be relied for relationship advice or to hang out with because they too have relationship issues of their own. Either divorced,  with failed relationships or a relationship junkee.  If so, your friend might not know what it takes to work through a long-term committed relationship and clearly you do not need them. Am just saying.......

chaxtine@yahoo.com